Best Atomfall settings for PC and Steam Deck

• Anti-Aliasing: Ultra
• Shadow Detail: Ultra
• Reflection Detail: Ultra
• Draw Distance: Ultra
• Texture Detail: Ultra
• Water Detail: Ultra
• Ambient Occlusion: On
• Screen Space Shadows: On
• Motion Blur: On
• Tessellation: On
• Obscurance Fields: On

Using the above graphical settings on my RTX 4070 test rig, Atomfall ran at 126fps with a 1% low of 95fps. Turning the settings all the way down to low improves the frame rate to 185fps with a 1% low of 115fps. This is a 47% difference between the lowest and highest preset.

Given the huge difference in visual quality between the low and ultra graphical presets, it’s well worth opting for the lower frame rate but higher graphical fidelity. Atomfall is a game that uses its environments to great effect, and you’ll be spending a lot of time taking in the sights, so having the most detailed settings will make for a more enjoyable experience if your gaming PC can handle it.

Atomfall is also a single-player game, rather than a competitive FPS, so you can quite easily get away with going as low as 60fps as a compromise, and make sure you have the most detailed world and characters.

Basic graphical settings can be a curse for poorly optimized games, but in the case of Atomfall, each graphical preset is visually distinct, as seen in the above image. This means running the game on a variety of gaming PCs, from budget to high-end, as well as gaming handhelds, won’t require too much tinkering with individual settings.

• Anti-Aliasing: Medium
• Shadow Detail: Medium
• Reflection Detail: Medium
• Draw Distance: Medium
• Texture Detail: Medium
• Water Detail: Medium
• Ambient Occlusion: On
• Screen Space Shadows: On
• Motion Blur: Off
• Tessellation: Off
• Obscurance Fields: Off

Atomfall is Steam Deck Verified, which should indicate great performance, but the lack of AMD FSR support left me initially worried. Thankfully, running Atomfall on an altered version of the Medium graphical profile returns a stable 50-60fps frame rate even without the need for upscaling. If you find your game struggling, there is default resolution scaling that you can use as an alternative.

The frame rate can drop into the lower end of this scale when you’re engaging in combat, but the game maintains a steady 60fps, and sometimes even higher, when just exploring the world of Atomfall.

At PCGamesN, we use dedicated gaming rigs to test the best settings for performance and gameplay in the latest releases. The test rig used to play Atomfall includes the following components; Intel Core i7 11700F, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 12GB, 32GB of DDR4 3,200MHz RAM in a dual-channel configuration, MSI B560 motherboard. We also test using Windows 11 64-bit.

If you want to keep an eye on performance in Atomfall, we have an easy method that works whether you’re using an Nvidia or AMD graphics card.

For Nvidia cards, ensure you have the Nvidia App installed and the in-game overlay enabled, and then hit ALT + R in-game to bring up your performance monitor. With AMD cards, you can enable performance monitoring via the Radeon overlay using the shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + O.

Alternatively, you can download free software such as CapFrameX or Nvidia FrameView, to get a cleaner, more simplified benchmarking tool that works with any graphics card.

With handheld gaming PCs, most will have a dedicated button to access a quick menu from which performance monitoring, sometimes called real-time monitoring, can be accessed.