
"Medium" shadow quality (~25% performance boost)

"Tile AO" (SSAO is one of the most demanding effects in any game) My recommended "sane" high-end settings:- "FXAA" (MSAA is often ineffective in XCOM 2 and has a severe performance cost) Because XCOM 2 is a relatively slow-paced game, a lower framerate may not be quite as egregious.

Some people prefer 30 FPS with higher visual quality to 60 FPS with lesser visual quality others insist anything lower than 144 FPS is an attack on their human rights. What framerate is "acceptable" is a matter of user preference and often varies depending on the type of game being played. When asked to auto-detect appropriate settings for your hardware, XCOM 2 targets a 40 FPS minimum instead of the 60 FPS minimum most of us normally expect. This is what I'll address in the next section.

It can be hard at first to tell which ones are important and which ones aren't. XCOM 2 is a PC-exclusive game though, and developers targeting PC often include optional "ultra high" settings which offer very small visual improvements at a high performance cost. Virtually all "AAA" games we get on PC are underpowered console ports and this has led to people growing accustomed to perfect performance at the highest settings.
