The Sinking City 2 PC Performance Analysis & Tuning Guide – How To Get Best Experience On PC - Wccftech

Maxing out every graphics setting is rarely the best way to play a demanding Unreal Engine 5 game, and The Sinking City 2 is a particularly clear example. Frogwares' return to its Lovecraftian world uses several of the engine's marquee rendering features, but its Ultra preset is quite heavy on the GPU relative to the visuals it delivers. More frustratingly, most of the individual quality settings do very little to either the image or performance.

That does not mean the PC version is a technical disaster. In fact, The Sinking City 2 handles one of Unreal Engine 5's most persistent problems, shader compilation stutter, surprisingly well. Traversal is also generally smooth, while CPU-limited performance is more mixed and the game's GPU requirements are undeniably steep.

In this guide, we will first provide a gameplay and technical overview, examine the official PC system requirements, and assess CPU performance during a demanding boat trip through Arkham. We will then compare every relevant graphics setting and identify the few options that are genuinely worth lowering.

Finally, we will present ready-to-use optimized graphics settings. In our GPU-limited test, these improved performance with only a modest reduction in visual quality.

Released on August 18, 2026 for PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, The Sinking City 2 is a third-person survival horror game developed and published by Frogwares. Unlike its investigation-heavy predecessor, the sequel leans much more decisively into survival horror, with tighter resources, dangerous enemies, inventory management, puzzles, weapon upgrades, and optional investigations.

The game takes place in a flooded interpretation of 1920s Arkham and follows Calvin Rafferty, an occult adventurer trying to save his girlfriend, Faye, after a ritual leaves her trapped in a mysterious sleep. Players explore the ruined city on foot and by boat, fight creatures warped by supernatural forces, gather supplies, and revisit previously explored areas as new routes and shortcuts become available.

For more on The Sinking City 2, please check out our review of the game from this link.

From a technical standpoint, The Sinking City 2 uses Unreal Engine 5.8 and features hardware Lumen ray-traced global illumination and reflections, Nanite, MegaLights, and Virtual Shadow Maps. Medium and higher settings engage hardware Lumen for both global illumination and reflections, which also helps explain why their respective Low modes can look visibly broken.

The game can look quite good in the right conditions. Its flooded streets, decaying interiors, dense atmosphere, and period architecture are all well suited to Unreal Engine 5's ray-traced lighting and virtualized geometry systems. Even so, it falls short of the engine's finest visual showcases and is rather GPU-heavy for the image quality it achieves, despite using the latest engine version available at launch.

The good news is that shader compilation is handled unusually well. There is no dedicated PSO compilation screen, but the game compiles shaders during the initial boot sequence whenever its shader cache is cold or empty. If the player interrupts that process by loading a save, compilation continues during the loading screen, and the save is not opened until all required shaders have been processed.

It is a slightly unusual approach, but it was effective in our testing. We encountered barely any obvious shader compilation stutters. Traversal hitches were also rare, with only occasional spikes into the 20-30 millisecond range, most commonly while moving quickly through Arkham by boat. Those brief excursions should not seriously disrupt the experience on a capable PC with a Variable-Refresh Rate (VRR) display, although weaker CPU, system memory, or storage performance could make them more apparent.

There are a few notable omissions. HDR is not supported, and the graphics menu lacks a field-of-view slider even though the default camera can feel uncomfortably narrow. We would like to see both limitations addressed, especially the missing FoV control.

Upscaling support is also surprisingly uneven. The Sinking City 2 includes DLSS Super Resolution and Unreal Engine 5's TSR, but there is no DLAA option. The menu claims to support AMD FSR upscaling, yet we could not enable it, while Intel XeSS Super Resolution is absent altogether. Frogwares has confirmed that AMD FSR (both upscaling and frame generation presumably) was unavailable at launch because AMD had not yet released the required plugin or patch for Unreal Engine 5.8. The studio plans to add FSR once that support becomes available. Intel XeSS is also absent, although its UE5.8-compatible Super Resolution plugin was released before the game launched, and Frogwares has not explained why it was omitted.

DLSS SR is comfortably the best option for GeForce RTX owners. The game's native-resolution TSR implementation looked noticeably worse than DLSS Super Resolution in Quality mode in our comparisons, while also performing worse. We verified DLSS SR's input resolutions and found nothing abnormal, so TSR itself may not be working as intended.

Frame generation support is similarly one-sided. DLSS Frame Generation/Multi Frame Generation is the only native option, and NVIDIA confirms that the game supports DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation, with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation available through the NVIDIA app on compatible hardware. AMD and Intel GPU owners currently have no native frame generation alternative.

We would like to see Frogwares add functional FSR upscaling and frame generation, XeSS Super Resolution and frame generation, DLAA, HDR, and a field-of-view slider in future updates. For now, GeForce RTX users receive a considerably more complete feature set than everyone else.

Let us now examine the official PC system requirements, courtesy of the game’s Steam store page:

These requirements immediately establish The Sinking City 2 as a demanding PC release. An RTX 4070 Ti or RX 7900 XT for 1440p at 60 FPS using the Medium preset is a high bar, particularly when the target already relies on TSR or a comparable temporal reconstruction technology. The recommended Core i5-14600K and Ryzen 5 7600X are also relatively modern CPUs, while the jump from 16 GB to 32 GB of system memory is substantial.

The performance notes could be more transparent. Frogwares does not specify the internal resolution or TSR quality mode used for either tier, so the real rendering resolution behind those 1080p and 1440p targets is unclear. The RTX 4070 Ti and RX 7900 XT are not especially close equivalents in conventional rasterized performance either, although the game's heavy reliance on hardware Lumen complicates direct comparisons between GPU vendors.

Our testing broadly supports the idea that this is a GPU-heavy title. The good news is that the official requirements do not use frame generation to define the 30 and 60 FPS targets. Still, players close to the minimum specification should expect to rely aggressively on temporal upscaling, as the graphics settings provide very little room to scale below the Ultra preset.

Before examining the graphics settings, we also tested CPU performance in The Sinking City 2. Arkham does not feature the huge crowds or elaborate physics simulations seen in some open-world games, so a stationary scene would not have told us very much. Instead, we focused on asset streaming and traversal.

For this test, we drove Calvin's boat as quickly as possible through the canals in the heart of the flood-ravaged city. Rapid boat traversal forces the game to stream geometry, textures, lighting information, and world data continuously, making it a useful CPU and memory-system stress test. Performance was captured with CapFrameX under CPU-limited conditions.

The CPU benchmark in this section and the graphics settings comparisons in the next section were performed on a desktop system with the following relevant specifications:

CPU performance was mixed. The average frame rate was high, but the 1% lows and especially the 0.1% lows sat much farther behind than we would have liked. A closer look at the frame time graph revealed a small number of spikes into the 15-25 millisecond range, which pulled down those percentile figures.

Outside those isolated excursions, the benchmark run was reasonably smooth. Even the most severe spikes were barely noticeable on a decent VRR display, so the low 0.1% figure looks more alarming on a chart than the test felt in motion. Systems with weaker CPUs, slower memory, or less capable storage may expose these traversal hitches more clearly.

We also noticed occasional periods of unexpectedly high CPU utilization with no obvious visual or gameplay trigger. This behavior could occur repeatedly in the same area without new effects appearing, making background asynchronous shader compilation an unlikely explanation. It did not severely affect our Core i7-14700K, but it could have a larger impact on lower-end CPUs and deserves further attention from Frogwares.

The game also appears to use many CPU cores, but like most modern titles, the bottleneck at very high frame rates will likely be the CPU memory subsystem — AKA the latency and bandwidth of CPU caches and system memory — rather than just raw core count, performance per clock cycle (PPC), or clock speed past a certain point. This is why AMD Ryzen X3D CPUs and well-tuned Intel Core 12th-gen and newer systems with high-speed DDR5 system memory may end up performing particularly well in CPU-limited scenarios.

In this section, we will examine the visual and performance characteristics of every relevant graphics setting in The Sinking City 2. Each graphics option was compared under GPU-limited conditions against the Ultra preset at 2560x1440, with TSR running at native resolution. Motion blur was disabled to keep the image clear during comparisons.

All tests used the default gameplay and camera field of view because the game provides no FoV slider. We also returned to the same test area wherever possible and monitored GPU utilization, real-time frame rate, frame time, and dedicated GPU memory usage through a CapFrameX/RTSS-based overlay.

The graphics menu is serviceable but fairly basic. It provides descriptions for its main quality settings, yet it has no live comparison preview and shows no real-time frame rate, CPU/GPU frame time, system information, or VRAM and system RAM estimates. Those tools would have made tuning easier, particularly in such a GPU-demanding game.

Unfortunately, most graphics settings produced little to no measurable change in either visual quality or GPU performance. This leaves The Sinking City 2 with poor scalability in both directions. Higher-end hardware cannot push the graphics substantially beyond the default presentation, while lower-end GPUs cannot recover much performance by reducing conventional quality settings.

The main route to a higher frame rate is therefore temporal upscaling. Frame generation can further improve perceived smoothness on supported GeForce RTX GPUs, provided the baseline frame rate is already high enough to preserve acceptable latency and image stability.

The Sinking City 2 supports DLSS Super Resolution and Unreal Engine 5's TSR. AMD FSR appears in the menu but could not be enabled in our testing, while Intel XeSS is not offered at all.

For GeForce RTX users, DLSS Super Resolution is the obvious choice. It delivered both better image quality and better performance than TSR in our testing. DLSS SR Quality should be the starting point at 1440p and 4K, with Balanced or Performance modes reserved for situations where more performance is genuinely required.

AMD Radeon and Intel Arc owners currently have to rely on TSR unless they resort to a third-party solution such as OptiScaler.

Recommendation: DLSS Super Resolution for GeForce RTX GPUs; TSR for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc GPUs

View Distance controls how far into the scene objects are rendered. This should be especially relevant when moving through Arkham's open areas or travelling quickly by boat, where distant geometry and objects are continuously entering the frame.

In practice, we could not identify a meaningful performance difference between the available levels, nor did lowering the setting produce a worthwhile visual trade-off. With no measurable benefit to reducing it, Ultra is the sensible choice.

The Anti-Aliasing setting controls the quality of Unreal Engine 5's TSR. It affects temporal reconstruction quality rather than selecting the anti-aliasing or upscaling method itself.

Medium offered the best overall balance in our testing. Low can reduce image stability, while High and Ultra do not improve the already underwhelming TSR presentation enough to justify their additional GPU cost. This setting is not relevant when DLSS Super Resolution is selected.

Post-Processing controls the quality of effects such as bloom, vignette, motion blur, depth of field, and other such effects. Some of those effects are subjective, particularly motion blur, which we disabled for all comparisons.

Changing the overall setting produced no meaningful difference in performance or image quality in our test scenes. We therefore recommend leaving it at Ultra and adjusting any separately exposed post-process effects according to personal preference.

Textures should control texture detail and streaming quality, but we found no clear difference in texture fidelity or dedicated VRAM consumption between its available levels. It is possible that the differences only appear on specific assets or after longer traversal, but the setting behaved almost like a no-op throughout our comparisons.

An 8 GB graphics card should be sufficient for 1440p with Ultra textures based on our measurements. From there, 6 GB for 1080p and 10 GB or more for 4K appear to be reasonable estimates. Those figures are not hard guarantees, as output resolution, upscaling mode, background applications, and future updates can all affect VRAM pressure.

There is currently little reason to reduce Textures pre-emptively. Only lower the setting if a lower-capacity GPU shows clear VRAM-related symptoms such as persistent hitching or delayed texture loading.

Effects determines the quality of the game's visual effects. In a survival horror title filled with supernatural enemies, weather, particles, and combat effects, lowering it too aggressively could diminish the presentation during busier encounters.

Medium was the best compromise in our testing. It contributes useful performance savings without visibly stripping away the effects that define combat and Arkham's atmosphere during ordinary play.

Foliage adjusts the quality of vegetation. Arkham is primarily a dense urban environment, so this setting is less prominent than it would be in a foliage-heavy open-world game.

We found no worthwhile visual or performance difference between the available levels. Since lowering Foliage provided no practical gain, it can safely remain at Ultra.

Reflections controls reflection quality and resolution. Medium and higher settings use hardware Lumen ray-traced reflections, making this more than a simple resolution slider.

The Low setting should be avoided because reflections can look visibly broken. High retains the intended Lumen reflection presentation while trimming the excess cost of Ultra, and the visual difference between the top two settings is difficult to notice during normal gameplay.

Global Illumination controls indirect lighting and ambient occlusion. As with Reflections, Medium and above use hardware Lumen ray tracing.

Low is visually broken and can severely compromise the lighting, so it should not be treated as a viable performance mode. Medium keeps hardware Lumen enabled and preserves the broad character of the scene without paying for the limited improvements offered by High and Ultra.

Shading controls the quality of shadows, lighting, and reflections. Its broad description suggests some overlap with the dedicated reflection and global illumination controls, which makes its precise visual scope harder to isolate.

High provided the best balance. It looks very close to Ultra in motion while contributing to the performance improvement of our optimized profile. Lower values did not offer an attractive enough visual compromise.

Hair controls the quality of hair rendering. Ultra enables real-time hair strands and is noticeably more demanding than High.

High is the better choice for actual gameplay. It avoids the heavier Ultra hair-strand implementation while keeping character hair convincing at normal camera distances.

Based on all the testing above, these are our optimized graphics settings for The Sinking City 2:

These settings preserve the game's intended presentation while reducing the handful of options that carry a worthwhile GPU cost. View Distance, Post-Processing, Textures, and Foliage remain at Ultra because lowering them provided no measurable benefit in our tests.

GeForce RTX owners should pair this profile with DLSS Super Resolution. DLSS Frame Generation or Multi Frame Generation can then be used to improve visual smoothness if the base frame rate is already comfortable and the display has enough refresh-rate headroom. AMD and Intel users currently have to rely on TSR and cannot enable a native frame generation solution.

To quantify the benefit of our optimized graphics settings, we compared them in the above video against the Ultra preset in a GPU-limited 1440p (with TSR enabled at native resolution) test scene. Both runs were captured with an altered CapFrameX/RTSS-powered overlay showing GPU utilization, average FPS, 1% lows, 0.1% lows, real-time frame rate, and frame time.

The averaged performance metrics from both runs are shown below:

Our optimized graphics settings increased the average frame rate from 102 to 120 FPS, an improvement of 18%. The 1% lows rose from 87 to 98 FPS, while the 0.1% lows improved from 76 to 86 FPS, representing a 13% gain in both metrics.

This is a useful uplift, though not a transformative one. The relatively modest result reflects the game's weak settings scalability rather than a failure of the optimized profile. Several settings simply do not change performance, leaving Anti-Aliasing, Effects, Reflections, Global Illumination, Shading, and Hair to provide nearly all of the available savings.

The visual downgrade is minor during normal gameplay, particularly because hardware Lumen remains enabled for reflections and global illumination. Players who need substantially more performance will have to reduce internal resolution through DLSS Super Resolution or TSR rather than continue lowering conventional quality settings.

The Sinking City 2 is an unusual Unreal Engine 5 release. It is demanding on the GPU and offers disappointingly little scalability across most of its graphics menu, yet its shader-compilation behavior is considerably better than that of many other games built on the engine. We barely encountered any obvious shader stutters, and traversal hitches were infrequent enough that a VRR display should smooth over most of them.

CPU performance is less consistent. The average frame rate can be high, but occasional frame time spikes during rapid boat traversal pull down the 1% and 0.1% lows. The unexplained bursts of heavy CPU activity also deserve investigation, particularly for players using lower-end processors.

The feature set needs work as well. A modern PC release this demanding should offer functional FSR/XeSS support, HDR, DLAA, and a field-of-view slider. TSR's poor image quality and performance make the lack of usable AMD and Intel alternatives especially frustrating. Even with those weaknesses, the optimized settings improve average performance by 18% and percentile lows by 13% without noticeably undermining the game's visual identity. Combine them with DLSS Super Resolution on a GeForce RTX GPU, or TSR where no alternative exists, and The Sinking City 2 can deliver a smoother and more balanced PC experience than the Ultra preset suggests.

About the author: Sebastian Castellanos is a data scientist by education and training. He's also deeply passionate about PC gaming hardware and software. He has recently started writing technical articles and guides on Wccftech about PC hardware, games and mods.

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