While Mark’s off doing the actual review and/or agonising over watch straps, I’ve spent my time with 007 First Light slowly moving a laser beam up between its legs, demanding it reveal its PC performance secrets. Which it did immediately and without protest, to be fair. But you know the saying: when you’re holding a laser, everything looks like James Bond’s crotch.
How First Light runs on PCs is also a matter I’ve been genuinely curious about for months; you may remember how its big in-game footage reveal coughed and spluttered with framerate dips during the heavier action bits, a remarkably candid admission of technical work-in-progress for what essentially a very long trailer. Not encouraging in itself, and not something you’d want in the finished game, and yet as the opposite of a bullshot… kind of endearing? Maybe?
Either way, I’m tentatively declaring the release build to be much more stutter-resistant, following five hours of male Bonding that includes the same car chase/airfield shootout/daft plane stunt as the reveal. I’ve not played or tested enough to give it the full performance/settings works, but I’ve been reasonably satisfied so far, despite a remaining performance gap between the shooty and sneaky bits, as well as an implementation of DLSS 4.5’s Dynamic MFG tool that shows it needs some configuring of its own.
DLSS upscaling, however, looks and runs well, providing meaty framerate gains on Quality mode whether it’s helping out an RTX 5080 at 4K or a humble RTX 5050 at 1080p. At the latter resolution, it’s markedly sharper-looking than AMD FSR, though this rival upscaler can at least aid non-RTX graphics cards if needed. The closest on-hand GPU I had to the mininum spec GTX 1660, a GTX 1070, couldn’t even stay above 30fps when rendering crowded scenes with Low settings at native 1080p – but Quality FSR got it up to the 45-50fps range. Well played, 007. F…First Light.
Newer, more muscular setups can still expect some ups and downs. The RTX 5050, for instance, averaged around 60fps (on High settings with Quality DLSS) during those NPC-heavy infiltration segments, but transitioning into a mountainside Aston Martin pursuit – and the following airfield violence – had it drop, sustainedly, to around 45fps. The sudden bursts of stutter, however, were nowhere to be seen. Performance may have dropped lower, but it was consistently lower, and that’s far easier on the eyes than the unpredictable staccato drops of the early footage.
RTX wielders – it doesn’t appear as an option on AMD or GeForce GTX GPUs – can also buff up the visual smoothness with frame generation. Regarding which, I must give at least a little settings advice, because the only version of DLSS frame gen I’d use myself here is the classic 2x multiplier. In practice, this didn’t come anywhere near doubling my framerates, but 60fps-ish on the RTX 5050 became 72-80fps with it enabled, and with only a minimal adverse effect on input lag.
4x and above, though, should be avoided like Sean Connery avoided his taxes. First Light is one of the earliest adopters of DLSS 4.5’s 5x, 6x, and Dynamic MFG modes, and as much as these are objectively faster – 4x getting the RTX 5050 up to 120fps, and Dynamic mode breaking 140fps – they’re also tangibly laggier, and much more prone to ugly artifacting. Not the kind you’d need zoomed-in comparison screenshots for, either. Here’s James growing a second face in Dynamic mode, which my frame counter suggests is running at the equivalent of either 5x or 6x:
I still think Dynamic MFG can serve someone, somewhere, without corrupting anyone’s flesh. Its ability to tone down its frame generation when there’s ‘enough’ real frames coming through suggests an understanding of MFG’s drawbacks, in a way that much of Nvidia’s push for more and more generated frames rarely has. Really, the issue is with the higher multipliers that Dynamic mode flits between by default: being able to auto-adjust between varying degrees of generation errors isn’t a terribly enticing prospect, even if it does make Numbers Go Up. It’s best deployed, then, by first entering the Nvidia App’s DLSS Overrides section and limiting Dynamic mode’s multiplier to 3x. Setting a target FPS here feels essential too, in terms of blocking MFG overreach.
Otherwise, First Light appears technically fine. It benefits from, but doesn’t need, high-end PC gear. Its optional ray tracing looks nice. It kindly refrains from stopping its own heart whenever a barrel explodes. It’d be even better if performance never dipped at all, but then I wonder, but I have been so acutely aware of this if I’d never paid so much attention to that reveal footage? Maybe I should have asked about that before eBaying off the laser.
