The First Descendant is off to a great start on PC with nearly 250K concurrent users on Steam. It’s developed on Unreal Engine 5 and uses temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) like many modern releases. This usually looks great on higher resolutions, and it’s a cost-effective solution for aliasing, but lower resolutions like 1080p can suffer from reduced image clarity and introduce blur. Here is how you can reduce the blur from the presentation in The First Descendant.
Reduce Blur in The First Descendant
To reduce blur in The First Descendant, you need to turn up the sharpness value in the display settings by a few notches. Additionally, you can use DLAA instead of the default TAA solution for improved image quality, or downsample from a higher resolution and use DLSS or XeSS.
At 1080p especially, The First Descendant can look quite blurry even if you disable motion blur. This is because of the lower pixel sample being used in the TAA solution.
To get around this, you can use the following suggestions.
Increase Sharpness
The first thing you can do to reduce the blurry presentation in The First Descendant is to increase the value of Sharpness. This is found in the Display settings and is the last option. Here is a comparison shot of the opening area with the default 0 sharpness value and 4, which we found to be the best one.
We have also uploaded the comparison on imgsli so you can get a better idea. Simply turning up sharpness can have a dramatic impact on the game’s visuals, and we’re surprised they haven’t set it to some value by default.
Use DLAA or DLSS
In combination with sharpening, you can also use DLAA, which looks far better than the native implementation of TAA. In our opinion, it also looks better than DLSS at 1080p, because the internal resolution is quite low with DLSS, even when using the Quality preset.
Keep in mind, that DLAA is more demanding than TAA and DLSS, so you’ll definitely see a drop in the average framerate.
Use DSR or VSR
Finally, you can use DSR or VSR to play the game at a higher resolution and render it on your lower resolution monitor for much better image quality. You can use this with a combination of DLSS, or XeSS to account for the performance cost of downsampling, but overall, this is the best way to reduce blur and improve quality. Setting your resolution to something like 4K with DLSS performance can drastically improve image clarity compared to using DLSS with the performance preset at 1080p.
If you’re just starting out, here is how you can get the crowd-favorite Bunny descendant, and fix the DirectX 12 error. For more on The First Descendant, make sure to check out our dedicated section.
