Best Marathon graphics settings for no lag and max FPS

Marathon is now live on PC and consoles, and you can change a fair amount of settings on the former platform to get the best out of your hardware.

Things are looking pretty well-optimized on the first day of launch. However, you still make a few more tweaks to get the smoothest gameplay, minus any lag or stutter.

Best Marathon graphics settings

Before I deep dive into the best settings, here’s my current system.

• AMD Ryzen 5600G
• NVIDIA RTX 3060 12 GB
• 16 GB of DDR5 RAM

Here are my current settings that I am using for the game.

• Resolution: 1920×1080 (Depends on your personal setup)
• Vsync: Off
• Frame Rate Cap Enabled: On
• Frame Rate Cap: 60
• Field of View: 90
• Graphics Quality: Custom
• Anti-Aliasing: NVIDIA DLSS/AMD FSR
• Resolution Scaling: Performance
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion: Highest
• Anisotropic Filtering: 4x
• Texture Quality: Medium
• Shadow Quality: Low
• Environment Detail Distance: High
• Character Detail Distance: High
• Foliage Detail Distance: Medium
• Light Shafts: Medium
• Motion Blur: Off
• Chromatic Aberration: Off
• NVIDIA Reflex: On
• UI Refresh Rate: Medium

A few pointers to note about the settings.

• Playing Marathon with uncapped FPS is definitely the way to go, but it seems to cause stutters on my end when an enemy explodes. Keeping the FPS capped to 60 has removed that problem for me and allows me to keep things smoother. A lag in a gunfight can be absolutely terrible, and more so if it’s against an enemy player.
• I have turned off the Vsync since it offers very little, but eases the hardware load. This should be a must (turning it off) if you have relatively older hardware.

That’s about the best video settings you can use in Marathon right now. Things could change once Bungie collects the feedback and drops some post-launch patches for PC.

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Marathon is finally out. The game, which saw huge activity during its free-to-play server slam, replicated its previous success by opening to over 86,000 players, this time at a $40 price tag. Of course, this is being described as a “flop” by some, because we simply cannot have nice things in 2026.

Negative narratives around basically anything nowadays tend to form rather quickly, often propagated by people (and of course bots) who never actually experienced the thing they’re hating. It seems that nowadays, following the “Fall of Concord” back in 2024, games have to blow it out of the park every single time lest they be considered complete failures.

Highguard was a recent example, and even if that game doesn’t really scream quality at the top of its lungs, it certainly didn’t deserve the hate train coming its way, boarded almost exclusively by those without any hours clocked in the title.

And now Marathon is on the chopping block.

During its development, Marathon was marred by problems and hitches. It had several directors swapped out, had a few playtests that weren’t so well-received by those who participated in them, and so on. It crossed out every prerequisite for “development hell,” indicating the actual release would be a terrible experience for Bungie and perhaps the final nail in its coffin.

But that turned out not to be true, even during the server slam. It had over 130,000 concurrent players at that point and has over 86,000 now that the game costs $40 U.S. dollars. Nothing about Marathon tells us that it’s a flop or a failure or even underperforming for that matter.

And those are just the Steam numbers, which I imagine represent about half of its total player base, if not less.

The hate train keeps chugging along, however, no matter what.

While browsing X, I spotted one user arguing that, since Marathon is performing worse than Destiny and the recently released Slay the Spire 2 (which costs about 50 percent less than Marathon), it must be considered a “complete flop of a game” and, of course, as “Concord 3.0″ (the other one being Highguard).

“Marathon is dead on arrival,” another user wrote. Dexerto, a video game outlet, also compared Slay the Spire 2‘s performance to Marathon, saying the former “beats out” Bungie’s shooter, as if the two were ever comparable, both in price and genre.

The narrative is forming and slowly being propagated by so many people and even news outlets, who use superficial arguments to frame a game as a failure despite the fact that it had probably earned over three and a half million USD if we go by Steam’s concurrent numbers alone, which are in fact much larger, especially when consoles are taken into account.

And what’s worse, it’s people who either didn’t play the game or haven’t even seen what it has to offer. Those who did say it’s a good title, with it having 81 percent positive reviews on Steam at the time of writing, which improved as the launch day progressed, and are set to grow as time goes by.

Compare that to Highguard‘s 45 percent and its myriad of regions that have it at mostly negative or even worse. Highguard was also a free game that ended up flopping, whereas Marathon is already raking in a lot of cash that should see it sustained for the foreseeable future.

Online arguments and narratives have become so toxic and tiresome, to the point where I’m almost willing to give up on trying to reason with people and to pragmatically view every single game on a case-by-case basis. Why do we have to go out of our way to frame things negatively before they’re even out or without trying them for ourselves, at least for a little while?

I have every hope that Marathon will succeed and grow into a great game, because as I noted in one of my recent features, its art direction deserves all the praise it can get, as that’d prove to developers that giving a damn about looks (not just in terms of graphics) is crucial for a successful title.

The post Marathon opens to great numbers on Steam—but a hateful narrative is already forming because this is the internet in 2026 appeared first on Destructoid.