How to Reduce Blur in The First Descendant on PC

The First Descendant is off to a strong start on PC, with nearly 250,000 concurrent users on Steam. It’s built using Unreal Engine 5, and like many modern releases uses temporal anti-aliasing (TAA). This generally looks great at high resolutions and is a cost-effective solution to aliasing, but lower resolutions like 1080p can reduce image clarity and cause blurriness. Here’s how to reduce blurriness in The First Descendant.

Reducing blur in First Descendants

To reduce blur in The First Descendant, you’ll 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 to improve image quality, or downsample from a higher resolution and use DLSS or XeSS.

Especially at 1080p, The First Descendant looks quite blurry even with motion blur disabled. This is due to the lower pixel samples used in the TAA solution.

First Descendants 1080p TAA 0 resolution

To solve this problem, you can use the following suggestions.

Increase sharpness

The first thing you can do to reduce the blurriness of The First Descendant is to increase the sharpness value. This can be found in the display settings and is the last option. Here is a comparison of the opening area with the default sharpness value of 0, we found a sharpness value of 4 to be the best.

First Descendant resolution comparison at 1080p

We’ve also uploaded a comparison image on imgsli so you can get a better idea. Simply increasing the clarity can have a huge impact on the game’s visuals, we’re surprised they don’t set it as the default.

Clarity settings in The First Descendant

Use DLAA or DLSS

Combined with sharpening, you can also use DLAA, which looks much better than the native implementation of TAA. We think it also looks better than DLSS at 1080p, as DLSS’s internal resolution is quite low even when using the quality preset.

First Descendant DLAA vs DLSS at 1080p

Keep in mind that DLAA is more demanding than TAA and DLSS, so you’ll definitely see a drop in average frame rates.

Using DSR or VSR

Finally, you can use DSR or VSR to play games at a higher resolution and render on a lower resolution monitor for better image quality. You can combine this with 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 the resolution to something like 4K with DLSS performance can significantly improve image clarity compared to using DLSS at the 1080p performance preset.

If you’re just getting started, here’s how to get the crowd-favorite bunny offspring and fix DirectX 12 errors. For more on the first offspring, be sure to check out our dedicated section.

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