Marathon PC Performance Guide

• Enable either the in-game FPS counter or the Steam overlay that shows FPS, if it is not already enabled. 

  • The in-game counter is in Settings > Gameplay > In-game FPS counter. 

• Apply the recommended defaults as described above: 1080p, VSync off, frame cap off, medium quality. 

• Minimize the GPU workload: 

  • Starting from medium settings, disable anti-aliasing and set render resolution to 25%. 

  • Close the settings window and get a feel for what performance is like. 

    • This will result in poorer image quality. This is a temporary troubleshooting step to isolate CPU performance, and we will improve it after evaluating CPU performance in the steps below. 

  • This represents the maximum performance your PC can achieve if the GPU is not the limiting factor. 

• Minimize the CPU workload: 

  • Reduce Environment Detail Distance to Low. 

  • Reduce Character Detail Distance to Low. 

  • Reduce Foliage Detail Distance to Lowest. 

  • Reducing FOV can help with CPU performance, but we expect that players seeking high frame rate may prefer to keep their FOV at the maximum allowed value. 

  • If you find that these settings do not improve frame rate, we recommend leaving them at medium.

Following these steps should give you the maximum performance that your CPU is capable of, albeit with very poor image quality. This represents the performance ceiling of your hardware, and it will differ from map to map. (Our maps vary in density and complexity!)

Improving Image Quality

If you followed the instructions above, you are still running at 1080p with 25% render resolution and no anti-aliasing, but at the maximum performance your CPU can provide. Here are the settings we recommend for improving quality without additional impact on CPU performance:

• While keeping 1080p resolution, enable DLSS, FSR, or XeSS. Set resolution scaling to Custom and set Render Resolution to 33%.
• Check performance while increasing Resolution Scaling towards 100%. You may find that performance changes very little with Resolution Scaling. If this is the case, performance is CPU-limited.
• If you have a 1440p or 4K monitor, and performance is still CPU-limited when setting resolution scaling to 100%, we recommend increasing resolution to 1440p and reducing resolution scaling to 75%.
• If performance remains unaffected, consider increasing resolution scaling towards or all the way to 100% and/or increasing Screen Space Ambient Occlusion to Medium.
• For players with 8GB of GPU memory or more, we recommend setting texture quality to High or Highest.

We do not recommend putting settings higher than this for players looking for 120+ FPS performance.

For players with very high-end GPUs (such as an RTX 5090), try playing with anti-aliasing turned off, but Render Resolution set to 150% when at 1440p or as high as 200% when playing at 1080p. This provides the sharpest image clarity without any artifacts caused by TAA techniques. 

While some mid-range GPUs will be able to do this as well, we don't recommend it for players with mid-range GPUs who are also seeking a 120+ FPS frame rate.

Future Improvements

Marathon is the first DirectX 12 title that Bungie has shipped. We know that many of you have noticed how much Marathon has changed visually over the past year. Much of that change came through your feedback, and we want to take a similar approach to performance in Marathon.

While we aren't ready to provide specifics yet, we have already identified some smaller improvements that we can make soon, particularly to improve CPU performance. We also have longer-term changes planned that will further improve CPU performance. Our plan is to get improvements out as soon as we can, rather than wait to drop them all at the same time. (Even though this might make them less obvious!)

While we are very proud of what we have accomplished with the overall look and feel of the game since Alpha, we are in it for the long haul with Marathon. We look forward to many years of steady improvements to every aspect of the game. Thank you for taking this journey with us!

Technical Details

Optimizing for a specific PC is more complicated than just a single number. Marathon, like many other modern games, runs several high-level tasks on every frame. The game will only run as fast as the slowest of these tasks:

• Simulation (CPU): This task is where most of the game logic runs, such as physics and AI updates. 
• Render (CPU): This task prepares all the rendering work and sends it to the GPU.
• GPU: This task represents all the work the GPU will perform.

Marathon is a multi-threaded title and is the first game Bungie has shipped with support for DirectX 12. While this has greatly improved the scalability of the Tiger Engine and allowed us to spread work over more CPU cores, Marathon also has environments that are very dense, especially on Outpost and Cryo Archive.

While both the Simulation and Render CPU tasks spread much of their work across multiple cores, some of the work will still be limited by single-threaded performance. Even in a multi-threaded engine, whatever sub-task within a task finishes last will always be on a single thread!

We expect Marathon to hit higher frame rates on a new low- or mid-spec CPU compared to an older high-spec CPU, even when the older CPU has more cores. As an example, an AMD Ryzen 9 3950x has a single-thread PassMark score of ~2700 where a 9600x has a single-thread PassMark score of ~4570. We expect higher frame rates to be possible on the 9600x, even though this CPU has a lower multi-thread PassMark score and launched at about one-third of the MSRP of the 3950x.

FAQ

Q: Could you add more detail to the in-game frame rate counter?

A: This is something we are investigating!

Q: My CPU utilization % is low. Why isn't it closer to 100%? Does this mean the game is running inefficiently? Does it imply that my performance is CPU- or GPU-limited?

A: For users with many hardware threads, it is normal for CPU utilization % to appear low. Spreading work across too many cores can result in poor cache utilization and high latency between active cores.

• Many CPU cores support SMT. When multiple hardware threads are active in a core, the work may be slower than if only one hardware thread is active in a core.
• Newer CPUs may have cores that run at a lower clock speed relative to the others. As an example, an i9-14900k has 16 hardware threads that clock over 5GHz, but 16 hardware threads that clock closer to 4GHz.
• Other technologies such as AMD's 3D V-Cache and chiplet architecture encourage the use of fewer cores. On AMD in particular, limiting work to fewer threads so that they run on a single CCD can improve performance.

In all of these examples, it is normal for CPU utilization % to be lower than 50%.

Q: My GPU utilization % is low. Should it be closer to 100%?

A: For users with high-end GPUs, lower resolutions and medium quality settings are likely to leave the GPU less utilized. This is a common scenario for users with older CPUs, even if CPU utilization is well under 100%.

Q: Should I use processor affinity to force the game to only run on P-Cores or a CCD with 3D V-Cache?

A: For users with many cores (such as an i9-14900k or a 9950x3D), setting the processor affinity for Marathon to restrict it to only P-Cores or a CCD with 3D V-Cache may improve consistency in frame time. But this is an advanced setting and would be very specific to the processor, and could both help or harm performance. We do not recommend limiting the game to fewer than 16 hardware threads.

Q: Should I use Dynamic Resolution Scaling?

A: We currently only recommend using Dynamic Resolution Scaling when performance is GPU-limited. This is more likely to occur for players using high resolutions that prefer image quality over frame rate. This may also be helpful for players on laptops with fast CPUs but thermally constrained GPUs. We are investigating improvements to Dynamic Resolution Scaling so that it works better in CPU-limited scenarios.

Q: Will Marathon support frame generation in the future?

A: Marathon does not currently support frame generation. We are considering adding support for it, especially as the quality of frame generation implementations continues to improve. Some hardware vendors have driver-injected solutions for frame generation, such as AMD Fluid Motion Frames or NVIDIA Smooth Motion. We know that some people are using these solutions and having a positive experience with them.

We are keeping a close eye on developments in this space, but in the near term, we are prioritizing performance improvements that will increase frame rate without the use of frame generation.