The First Berserker Khazan Best Graphics Settings on PC
All that performance for no visual cost.
The First Berserker: Khazan is one of my favorite releases of the year, and it’s not just because it’s an excellent soulslike. I’m happy to report that The First Berserker Khazan also looks and runs great on PC.
Safe from the unoptimized clutches of Unreal Engine 5, Khazan stuck to Unreal Engine 4, resulting in a far more polished and less demanding experience on PC. That said, if you want to improve your framerate with barely any quality loss, here are my recommendations for the best graphics settings for The First Berserker Khazan.
The First Berserker Khazan Best Graphics Settings
| Graphics Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Shadow Quality | Medium |
| Anti-Aliasing | Max |
| Render Distance | Long |
| Texture | High |
| Post-Processing | High |
| Effects | High |
| Vegetation | High |
| Shading | High |
| Mesh | High |
| Reflections | High |
| Volumetric | High |
| Ambient Occlusion | Medium |
| Environmental Interaction | High |
| Environmental Interaction | On |
| Motion Blur | Anisotropic Filtering |
With the settings above, I saw a nearly 30% increase in performance compared to the default “max” preset. This will vary depending on your hardware, but you should see a significant bump in performance by essentially turning down a few things and keeping everything else at the “high” value.
As usual with Unreal Engine, putting everything at the highest possible value, especially stuff like Shadows and Volumetrics, isn’t advised because the visual return is barely noticeable even though you lose a good chunk of performance. Here is a comparison between the optimized settings and the max preset. I doubt you’ll be able to tell much of a difference.
It doesn’t make much sense to look at each setting individually because you don’t need to turn things down all that much to get a decent experience. Even if you aim for a 60 FPS experience, most budget and mid-range GPUs should have no problem with Khazan. All the optimized settings above were derived without using any form of upscaling.
Should You Enable Upscaling?
Yes, if you’re playing at a higher resolution like 1440p or 4K, upscaling will provide a great visual experience. On my 4070 Super, I swapped to the latest DLSS dll and comfortably played the game at a locked 120 FPS with DLSS set to performance at 4K resolution. The image looked identical to the native resolution with no noticeable artifacts or issues.
When it comes to FSR vs XeSS, I think XeSS does a better overall job and I recommend messing around with that first. This is if you don’t have an RTX GPU, otherwise, you should stick to DLSS. At 1080p, I recommend turning down some settings before resorting to DLSS, FSR, or XeSS because the internal resolution becomes too small, resulting in a blurry reconstructed image.
Finally, DLSS Frame Generation is also present, but the game has an FPS limit of 120. I only recommend enabling this if you’re getting a base frame rate of 60 FPS, otherwise, you’ll see artifacts. Ideally, in an action game, you don’t want any form of added input lag, so I’d use this as a last resort.
Overall, it’s great to see a polished PC release in 2025 that runs greats and looks the part, too. The First Berserker: Khazan is optimized really well, and a shader compilation section at the start ensures that the experience is mostly stutter-free, as well.
