Destiny 2 Best Settings for FPS on PC

The trap: players chase FPS by dropping render resolution and texture quality. Those two cost you clarity and buy back almost nothing.

Destiny 2 spends its frame budget somewhere else entirely.

Where your frames actually go

Foliage detail distance, foliage shadows, depth of field, ambient occlusion, and light shafts are the expensive ones.

They render atmosphere you never look at during a fight. Drop those five first.

You get most of the frame rate back and the screen stays readable, which is the part that matters in a raid.

Setting	Change it to	Why
Depth of field	Off	Blurs your sights and costs frames
Foliage detail and shadow distance	Low	Purely decorative
Screen space ambient occlusion	Off	One of the heavier draws, hard to notice
Light shafts and environment detail	Low	Volumetric fog is expensive
Motion blur and film grain	Off	Costs frames and hides targets
Texture quality	Keep high unless VRAM is tight	Cheap on frames, big on clarity
Render resolution	Keep at 100%	Costs more clarity than it returns

The other trap is the config file. CVARS.xml sits under your user folder in AppData, inside Bungie’s DestinyPC folder.

Deleting it is Bungie’s own suggested fix for launch and configuration problems. It is not a performance tweak.

Delete it and every custom setting goes back to default. You lose keybinds and sensitivity along with the problem.

Back the folder up first, or write your settings down. If nothing is broken, leave the file alone.

Run fullscreen rather than borderless. It cuts input delay on most setups.

Turn V-Sync off. Cap your frame rate a little under your monitor’s refresh instead. That keeps frame times even without the latency.

Keep field of view around 95 to 105. A wider view shows more, but very wide values distort the edges and cost frames.

Destiny 2 supports DLSS, FSR, and XeSS. Start on Quality, and drop to Balanced only if Quality is not enough.

Skip frame generation for PvP. It looks smooth and adds input lag, which is the wrong trade in the Crucible.

The Crucible guide is where that extra latency actually costs you fights.

Install the game on an SSD. It streams a lot of world data, and a hard drive shows up as hitching in busy zones.

Close overlays, browsers, and capture software. Each one takes CPU and VRAM you need.

On a laptop, confirm the game is running on the discrete GPU. That one check fixes more “my FPS is bad” complaints than any setting does.

Let shaders finish compiling on your first launch of a session. The first minute of stutter is not a settings problem.

Orbit is quiet and tells you nothing. Load a busy patrol zone or a six-player activity and read the counter there.

The raids guide lists the activities that stress a machine hardest, if you want a repeatable test.

Change one setting at a time, then re-test. Guessing in batches means you never learn which one did the work.

New to the game’s menus? The beginners guide walks through where these options live.