007 First Light: Best PC Settings and Controls After Patch 1.2.2

007 First Light's PC version has changed twice since launch, and if you last touched the settings menu back in May you are leaving performance on the table. IO Interactive added a free Path Tracing mode with NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction on September 15, then followed it with Patch 1.2.2 on September 25 to fix the worst of the frame-rate crashes that mode caused. Here is what to actually set, tier by tier, and how to fix the control scheme most players struggle to find.

01What Patch 1.2.2 Changed for PC

Patch 1.2.2 is squarely a Path Tracing patch. IO Interactive's official notes list more than 40 visual fixes across every chapter (flickering rain, over-bright reflections, light bleeding through walls, shadow artifacts) plus targeted performance fixes: the opening drive, the hotel section and the car chase in Chapter 03 all run better on high-end GPUs now, a 5-10 FPS drop in the Chapter 06 Gala area on RTX 5070 is fixed, and a stutter during the Chapter 08 "Smoking Gun" cutscene is resolved. Online Escalations also no longer stutter heavily with Path Tracing on.

The more useful addition for most players is a new Recommended Default Settings toggle, which auto-configures your graphics options based on your GPU, and a Path Tracing tier picker that maps to hardware: Medium for RTX 5070 and 5080 owners, High for RTX 5090. Dynamic Multi Frame Generation now adjusts its multiplier on the fly to hold a target frame rate instead of applying a fixed 2x or 4x boost. If you enabled Path Tracing before September 25 and it felt unstable, turn it off, update, and turn it back on with the new toggle rather than reusing your old custom settings.

007 First Light runs on Glacier Next, IO Interactive's redesigned evolution of the Glacier engine behind the Hitman World of Assassination trilogy, and its rendering pipeline was reworked alongside NVIDIA over several months specifically to fit path tracing into a stealth game's varied lighting: dim hotel corridors, bright galas, and headlight-lit driving sections all stress the renderer differently, which is part of why the September 15 launch of the mode needed a follow-up patch just ten days later.

02Best Path Tracing Settings by GPU Tier

Path Tracing replaces the game's baked and ray-traced-shadow lighting with a fully path-traced solution, and it is expensive. IO Interactive's official specs for the mode break down like this:

Those are official targets for Path Tracing specifically, not the base game. If your card is not on that list, leave Path Tracing off; the standard renderer already uses ray-traced shadows and reflections, and you will get a cleaner result from the settings in the next section than from forcing Path Tracing at unplayable frame rates. Below that GPU floor, expect the mode to run somewhere around a third to a half of your normal frame rate even before you touch resolution.

03DLSS 4.5, Frame Generation and Upscaling

007 First Light was the first game to ship with DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, alongside DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Dynamic Multi Frame Generation. If you are on an RTX 40 or 50 series card, turn on DLSS Super Resolution at Quality mode before you touch anything else; it is close to free image quality at 1440p and above, and it is the setting that makes Path Tracing viable on a 5070 or 5080 at all. Dynamic Multi Frame Generation is worth leaving on with Patch 1.2.2 applied, since it now targets a frame rate instead of a fixed multiplier and is far less prone to the ghosting spikes players saw at launch.

Non-NVIDIA hardware is worse off here than in most recent releases. There is no FSR Frame Generation and no XeSS Frame Generation option in the settings menu at all, and Intel Arc owners do not get XeSS Super Resolution either, so upscaling on Arc cards is currently unsupported. AMD RDNA4 owners have no in-game way to force FSR 4 or FSR 4.1; some players run the third-party OptiScaler tool to substitute newer FSR versions for the bundled one, but that is a community workaround IO Interactive has not endorsed, so treat it as unconfirmed and use it at your own risk.

Remedy's own PC exclusive, Control Resonant, added a similar ray-traced mode this month, and this look at getting the equivalent toggle running there is worth a bookmark if you are deciding whether the frame-rate hit is worth it on that engine too.

04If You're Skipping Path Tracing, These Settings Matter Most

On a GPU below the RTX 5070 floor, or on AMD and Intel hardware, you are running the standard renderer, which already uses ray-traced shadows and reflections by default. Reflection Quality and Shadow Quality are the two settings that move performance the most, and they are not equal trades. Reflections carry a lot of the game's visual identity in its glossy hotel interiors, glass corridors and rain-slicked streets, so dropping it costs you more visually than it saves you in frame rate; keep it at High or Ultra if you can. Shadow Quality is the better place to save frames, since dropping it from Ultra to Medium is genuinely hard to notice during gameplay and gives back a meaningful chunk of GPU headroom.

Motion blur and camera shake are both worth turning off regardless of hardware. They do nothing for performance, but they hurt aim tracking during the game's ranged combat sections, and 007 First Light leans on quick, close-range gunfights more than a typical stealth title.

05Fixing Controls and Keybinds on PC

The single most common PC complaint about 007 First Light is that keybind remapping looks broken. It is not broken, but it is badly signposted: the option lives under Settings > M&K Options > Customize Inputs, and that menu entry is easy to miss because it displays like a section header rather than a clickable option. Steam's own community forums for the game are full of threads from players who assumed rebinding was locked before finding it there; a handful of players still report the option staying greyed out even after finding the right menu, which IO Interactive has not addressed in the 1.2.2 notes, so treat persistent lock-ups as an unconfirmed, unresolved bug rather than something you are doing wrong.

Steam lists 007 First Light with full controller support, and the melee-heavy combat and driving sections are noticeably smoother with a gamepad's analog sticks than with a mouse for aiming and WASD for movement. If you are committed to keyboard and mouse, raise your mouse sensitivity above the default before you start the first mission proper; the out-of-the-box curve is tuned for controller aim assist and feels sluggish for flick shots until you adjust it.

The accessibility menu is worth a look even if you do not need it. There is full button remapping with several presets, plus toggle options that replace long button holds for running, aiming and interacting, and an "automatic agility" option that has Bond jump, vault and climb automatically while sprinting so you do not need a dedicated button for it. Photosensitive players can turn down screen shake, disable several blur and distortion effects, and swap the flashbang effect for a dark screen instead of a bright flash. Menu narration is available with its own speed and volume sliders, and there is a QTE autocomplete option that hands off some of the game's quick-time prompts automatically. There is no colorblind mode as of Patch 1.2.2, which is a real gap if you rely on one.

06Quick Setup Checklist

Run through this once after installing Patch 1.2.2, whether or not you plan to use Path Tracing:

Quick Setup Checklist

1. 1Let 007 First Light update on Steam before touching any settings — 1.2.2 fixes the worst Path Tracing crashes and adds the Recommended Default Settings toggle.2 min
2. 2Open Options > Graphics and enable Recommended Default Settings first so the game builds a baseline for your specific GPU.1 min
3. 3RTX 5070 or 5080 owners can set Path Tracing to Medium; RTX 5090 owners can try High. Below that GPU floor, leave Path Tracing off.1 min
4. 4Set DLSS Super Resolution to Quality and leave Dynamic Multi Frame Generation on — it now targets a frame rate instead of a fixed multiplier.1 min
5. 5If you're skipping Path Tracing, keep Reflection Quality at High or Ultra and drop Shadow Quality to Medium for the best performance trade.2 min
6. 6Switch both off in Gameplay settings — neither affects performance, but both hurt aim tracking in the game's ranged combat.1 min
7. 7Go to Settings > M&K Options > Customize Inputs. It's easy to miss because the menu entry looks like a plain header, not a button.3 min
8. 8Set toggle-hold options, automatic agility and subtitle sizing before your first mission — some are on by default, some aren't.2 min

IO Interactive's May 2026 Official Launch Trailer, shown here for context — the settings and fixes below reflect September's Path Tracing update and Patch 1.2.2, not this trailer's build.