Introduction
Despite competitors entering the market and having their own fans, Blizzard’s decade-old hero shooter is still by far one of the most popular games in its genre. And the best news is that it’s now free to play. Whether you’re someone new who is entering the world of OW2 for the first time or you’re a seasoned veteran who wants their game to run better, our Overwatch 2 settings guide will help you get the most out of your game.
Video Settings
Below are our recommended Overwatch 2 video settings for an optimal blend of performance and visuals. Overwatch 2 is an incredibly well-optimized game, so there are a lot of settings that we can leave somewhat high without major performance hits.
| Setting Name | Setting Value | Explanation |
|---|
| Graphics API | DirectX 11 | DirectX 12 is still in beta, and DirectX 11 works perfectly fine for us. |
| Display Mode | Fullscreen or Borderless Fullscreen | Both modes work fine and don’t introduce any input lag. |
| Display | Best Match | Or manually choose your main gaming monitor. |
| Resolution | Your monitor’s native resolution | Don’t forget to choose the correct refresh rate |
| Aspect Ratio | Your monitor’s aspect ratio | N/A |
| Field of View | 103 | This is the max setting, which isn’t too wide. If you really want a more focused perspective, turn this down, but we don’t recommend that. |
| Dynamic Render Scale | Off | This lets the game render at different resolutions depending on the game’s load. This can cause confusion and makes the game look erratic. |
| Render Scale | Custom (100) | Set this to 100. Anything lower can make the game look awfully pixelated really quickly. |
| Frame Rate | Custom (preference) | We set this to our monitor’s refresh rate, but you can easily set it higher than that, too. If you have a lot of frame rate variability and it causes tearing or other issues, it’s best to cap this value. |
| V-Sync | Off | Meant to combat screen tearing, but this causes input lag. Leave it off. |
| Triple Buffering | Off | Adds input lag. |
| Reduce Buffering | On | Reduces input lag. |
| NVIDIA Reflex | On + Boost | Reduces your system lag. If On + Boost gives you issues, you can use lower settings though. |
| Gamma Correction | 2.10 (or preference) | We find the default of 2.20 to look too bright. For us, 2.10 looks better, but this depends on your display and preference. |
| Contrast | 1.00 | No need to change this. |
| Brightness | 1.00 | We prefer adjusting the brightness on our monitor, so we leave this at default. |
| High Quality Upsampling | Off | This renders your game at a lower resolution and then upscales it via AI. It can be useful in some games, but Overwatch runs so well we don’t find it necessary. If you have a low-spec PC, you can experiment with this, however. |
| Antialias Quality | Medium – SMAA Low | This makes edges still look decent without a huge performance hit. |
| Texture Quality | High | This doesn’t have a major effect on frames per second in our testing, so we leave it at high. |
| Texture Filtering Quality | High – 4X | This is a good middle ground between performance and visuals. |
| Local Fog Detail | Low | Fog and pretty smoke effects don’t have a gameplay influence. Performance impact is rather limited, but we set this to low since it’s eye candy. |
| Model Detail | Medium | Balance between visual fidelity and performance. |
| Shadow Detail | Medium | Shadows aren’t really needed in Overwatch 2, but the performance hit is minimal so we set this at medium. |
| Effect Detail | Medium | A happy medium between performance and visuals. |
| Lighting Quality | High | This provides a visual boost in darker areas in some maps, so we leave it at high. |
| Refraction Quality | Low | This has an effect on how light travels through semi-transparent objects such as shields. It’s not needed for gameplay reasons and it can be quite the performance hog, so we leave it at low. |
| Screenshot Quality | 1x | No effect on performance. |
| Ambient Occlusion | Low | This is an eye candy setting that influences how light falls on certain objects. We set it to low because it’s not needed for gameplay reasons. |
| Dynamic Reflections | Off | This is an eye-candy setting that can have a pretty big performance impact on some systems. We went for off, but you can also set this to low. |
| Local Reflections | Off | Doesn’t serve a gameplay purpose, so we left it off. |
| Damage FX | Default | This looks best to us, so we left it at default. |
Best Sensitivity for Overwatch 2
Quick note: out of the box, you aim can feel floaty in Overwatch 2. The first thing you should do when tweaking your game is go to the gameplay settings, navigate to miscellaneous, and enable ‘high precision mouse input’. This will make your aim feel a lot more responsive, especially if you’ve got a good gaming mouse and monitor.
Beyond that, the ‘perfect settings’ in regards to sensitivity are very subjective and personal but we can give you some directions based on our experiences with the pro scene.
In general, tank players use a substantially higher overall sensitivity, probably because their heroes generally don’t rely on having precise aim, and having a higher eDPI allows them to scan the battlefield faster and react to threats a bit quicker. In the early days of Overwatch 1, support players used to have a much higher average eDPI as well, but this isn’t true anymore as the best support heroes also rely on steady aim, so now the average support eDPI is even lower than that of DPS players, if only by a bit.
Overwatch 2 is a very frantic and fast-paced game so in general you’ll want your overall sensitivity to be higher than in tactical shooters or other, more methodical games. There’s also the fact that aiming in Overwatch is more forgiving than it is in tac shooters: hitboxes are bigger, bullets are bigger, and some heroes don’t even require pixel perfect aim but rather melee-style aiming. For comparison’s sake: the average VALORANT pro has to move their mouse ~50 centimeters to do a 360 degree turn, in Overwatch 2 that’s only 35 centimeters.
Reducing visual clutter in Overwatch 2
There’s tons of visual clutter in Overwatch 2. That’s partially due to how frantic and chaotic the game is, but you can also reduce some of that clutter by changing a few settings.
In order to reduce visual clutter, navigate to ‘accesibility’ and change the camera shake and HUD shake values. This will drastically reduce the feeling that everything’s shaking and bouncing on your screen, which will help with steadying your aim and being more consistent. HUD and viewmodel bounce might be more cinematic and can aid with immersion when playing games, but if you’re playing a competitive game you’ll want to make sure everything is as consistent as it can be, so we recommend making these changes so that you can perform at your best.
Another handy tip is to turn down waypoint opacity in the ‘gameplay’ settings (under ‘user interface’). Depending on your position, the waypoint marker can be very large, and there will be instances where it’ll block your view of enemies. Turning it down will help spot those enemies without removing the waypoint marker all the way.
Conclusion
Overwatch 2 is a very well optimized game, meaning that you can enjoy great framerates without having to downgrade your game so that it looks like a 90’s flash game. With that said: there are definitely a number of options and parameters that you will want to change up if you want to get the most out of your game, so it’s always a good idea to make sure that the game is perfectly optimized.
Good luck out there!
Former semi-pro gamer turned writer, product reviewer, and community manager.
