DLSS 4.5 in action: 007 First Light tech check with benchmarks

007 First Light comes from Danish developer IO Interactive, probably best known for the Hitman series and held in correspondingly high regard. 007 First Light largely confirms that reputation: its gameplay often recalls IO Interactive’s stealth series, but it also incorporates elements from other games, especially the Uncharted series. The title offers a well-balanced mix of action, driving, stealth, parkour, and pure exploration sections.

Overall, the missions are highly varied and stand out thanks to their clever design. The story is engaging and staged with a strong sense of cohesion, meaning that Bond fans are not the only ones likely to get their money’s worth. The characters are also well drawn and well written, with high-quality voice acting. The whole experience is accompanied by a successful, driving soundtrack that could have come straight from the films.

Graphically, the developers also deliver. 007 First Light scores points for the most part with very strong visuals, both in its characters and its environments, which are designed with great care and are often packed with detail. In our view, the lack of ray tracing barely matters. The technical foundation is IO Interactive’s in-house and proven Glacier engine, which has been substantially upgraded in some areas for 007 First Light. While the game’s initial launch is somewhat annoying, with shader compilation and several intro screens, subsequent loading times remain within reasonable limits.

The graphics menu leaves a mixed impression. On the one hand, the title offers a fairly large number of settings and modern features; on the other hand, practical presets are missing, and usability is also suboptimal. To change a setting, users first have to click the corresponding option, making other games significantly more convenient in this regard. At least changes are applied without requiring a restart. For upscaling, 007 First Light supports both FSR and DLSS; XeSS is not included. As expected from a current title, frame generation is also supported. 007 First Light is among the first games to support up to 6x frame generation, starting with the GeForce 5000 series.

The built-in VRAM display also earns the game some credit, although the title proves quite demanding in this respect - much like other games from 2025 and 2026. Depending on the resolution, full details require between 7 and 8 GB of VRAM. Visually, the title already cuts a fine figure even at minimum settings, as shown in the comparison images, although the frame rate improves only to a limited extent compared with the results at maximum settings.

For our benchmark sequence, we use the start of the chapter “The Needle’s Eye,” which, as shown in the video, features an automatically controlled car ride. As usual, we use CapFrameX for the performance measurements.

With at least a mid-range GPU, maximum settings at Full HD are not a major problem. For example, a GeForce RTX 5060 Laptop GPU achieves just under 60 fps here.

Upscaling often only becomes relevant on QHD monitors. With a combination of ultra settings and DLSS Balanced, a mobile RTX 5060 still manages almost 50 fps.

High-end chips are recommended for UHD resolutions. Without upscaling, 3,840 x 2,160 pixels at maximum settings only run decently in the notebook segment on a Geforce RTX 5090. With DLSS Balanced, however, a mobile RTX 5080 is enough for very smooth frame rates.

If needed, users can also fall back on frame generation, which we tested with the RTX 5080 Laptop GPU mentioned above. As usual, this allows for significantly higher average frame rates, although the minimum fps remained similar in our tests.

007 First Light shows itself from its best side not only in terms of gameplay, but also technically. The action thriller is already one of the best titles of 2026 and is likely to rank high on many year-end lists.

As gaming benchmarks are very time-consuming and are sometimes delayed due to activation restrictions, we can only present a limited number of results when the articles are published. More GPUs will follow.