Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 - the best PC settings for an optimal experience

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 has arrived on PC, with players facing huge waves of Tyranid foes in levels that stress even high-end CPU and GPU hardware to their limits. This title is often CPU-limited, especially in levels where you're engulfing ripper swarms with flamers, but judicious settings choices can still claw back some extra performance.

One of the most impactful settings is SSR quality, which can be set to off, default or high. Our testing shows around a 10 percent performance advantage from using the default setting rather than high, as measured on an RTX 4060 using DLSS native. This does produce noticeably lower-res reflections, but the extra performance is hard to pass up.

More of a free win is the volumetrics setting, which can be set to medium rather than high for a one percent performance advantage with little visible difference. It's a similar story with the detail setting, which can be set to medium rather than ultra for another one percent performance uplift. Default SSAO is also worth considering versus the high setting, which does result in lighter screen-space ambient occlusion and some extra aliasing, but frame-rates climb by around three percent.

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 PC Best Settings - Digital Foundry Optimised

Otherwise, you can keep the remaining settings at their default levels. Shadows can be set to high without a noticeable frame-rate penalty, and it's fine to use the ultra texture resolution setting even on graphics cards with 8GB of VRAM. There's perhaps an argument that the game ought to include higher-quality textures to improve visuals with greater VRAM allocations, such as 12GB or 16GB, but that's not the case at present.

Opting for all of the optimised settings in the table below nets an extra 19 percent more performance on the RTX 4060, moving from 48fps to 57fps in our test scene.

Alternatively, you can keep all settings at their highest settings, and instead use the game's built-in dynamic resolution system. Simply set your desired frame-rate in the settings menu, eg 60fps, and the game automatically scales its internal resolution to ensure you stay above this frame-rate target. Combined with v-sync, this results in a smooth experience with regular frame delivery, though some dropped frames are possible when GPU load suddenly spikes.

Interestingly, the PS5 (and Xbox Series X) version of the game appears to use some different settings that aren't available in the PC version. For example, a custom implementation of FSR 2 is used, SSR quality comes between the default and high presets on PC, grass appears a little more sparse on PS5 and detail is a hybrid between PC's medium and low settings. These sorts of console optimisations are common, but it does mean we can't get an exact one-to-one match for PS5 settings on PC.

With that proviso in mind, matching PS5's speed mode settings still produces quite interesting results. Testing on a Ryzen 5 3600, a CPU that resembles that of the PS5, we get nearly identical 55fps frame-rate readouts in the same scene at our console-equivalent settings. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, the best gaming CPU at present, turns in a result almost exactly double: 110fps.

This doesn't quite explain the performance advantage enjoyed by the Xbox Series X over the PS5, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Finally, given that CPU limitations can be profound in this game and settings tweaks don't tend to reduce the CPU burden as much as the GPU burden, upgrading to a faster CPU or faster RAM may be the only way to see significantly better performance in these CPU-heavy scenes.

If you're on an early Ryzen model, such as the popular 2600 or 3600, then upgrading to a faster gaming CPU such as the Ryzen 7 5700X3D (the best value option on AM4) or Ryzen 7 7800X3D (the best value option on AM5) could make a big difference. Of course, this change will also provide a noticeable boost in other CPU-limited gaming scenarios too.