the Monitor 2 the beta is launched, allowing players to jump in and relive the glory of the original’s early days Surveillance. To help you get the most out of the beta before it ends on May 17, I jumped in and tested the title to find the best settings for Overwatch 2.

The game is built on the bones of the original, so there’s nothing too surprising. Still, I’ve rounded up my optimized graphics settings, some game settings you need to tweak, and some benchmarks on the various presets to give you an idea of ​​performance. Here’s how to get the most out of your Monitor 2 beta experience.

The best settings for the Monitor 2 beta

Monitor 2 has a ton of settings. I have all the graphics settings and a few game settings that you need to change to get your game to run smoothly. First, let’s start with the best graphics settings for Overwatch 2:

• Texture quality: average
• Quality of texture filtering: 8x
• Local Fog Detail: Medium
• Dynamic Reflections: Low
• Shadow Detail: Ultra
• Model Detail: Bottom
• Effect Detail: High
• Lighting quality: High
• Anti-Aliasing Quality: Low – FXAA
• Refractive quality: high
• Screenshot quality 1x resolution (set as desired)
• Ambient Occlusion: Off
• Local Reflections: Enabled
• Damage Effects: Default

I have a combination of settings to optimize for gameplay and visuals above. From gameplay, Shadow Detail remains at Ultra to allow you to see enemy player shadows, while Model Detail is Low to remove some additional elements that appear at higher settings. Ambient occlusion is also disabled, which can make some scenes look a bit flatter for better visibility.

Otherwise, I optimized for visuals. I kept the anti-aliasing at FXAA because it’s much faster and looks as good as SMAA in Overwatch 2. I reduced the Texture Quality, Lighting Quality and Local Fog Detail to save some frames as well, but feel free to increase these settings if you are still hitting a high frame rate.

By default, Monitor 2 uses AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), which dynamically adjusts resolution to improve your frame rate. I recommend leaving it enabled unless you are using particularly powerful hardware. It’s not too bad on image quality, and it will allow you to focus your settings more on gameplay rather than graphics quality.

Beyond graphics, you need to change some display settings in the Monitor 2 beta:

• FPS limit: based on display
• Nvidia Reflex: Enabled + Boost (if available)
• Triple buffering: disabled
• Reduce Buffering: Enabled
• VSync: disabled
• Field of view: 103

The important settings here are Nvidia Reflex and the reduced buffering setting. Monitor 2 normally has a single frame buffer; this means you will always be on a one frame delay when playing. It’s not a big deal, but the reduced buffering setting suppresses the buffer for lower input lag. On the other hand, it is more demanding on your PC.

There is a tradeoff here based on the system you have. You should enable the buffer reduction setting, but if it reduces your frame rate below your screen’s refresh rate, leave it disabled.

Finally, I have a few gameplay settings to tweak if you’re on PC:

• Waypoint Opacity: 50%
• Respawn Icon Opacity: 75%
• Ability Timer Ring Opacity: 100%
• Enable high precision mouse input: Enabled

The opacity settings are great to adjust to give you better visibility, and the waypoint icon is usually the most distracting. Adjust these settings as desired, however. Otherwise, always enable the enable high-precision mouse input setting. With mice like the Corsair Saber RGB Pro Wireless, you can access polling rates of up to 8000Hz. This setting updates the game faster to give you more chances to fire between updates .

Monitor 2 Beta System Requirements

Monitor 2 does not have high system requirements, which is not surprising. The recommended requirements of Surveillance were basically hauled to minimum requirements, while the new recommended spec calls for a slightly more powerful platform.

Minimum

• Processor: Intel Core i3 or AMD Phenom X3 8650
• GPU: Nvidia GTX 600 series or AMD Radeon HD 7000 series
• RAM: 6 GB
• Storage: 50 GB

Recommended

• Processor: Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 5
• GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 or AMD R9 380
• RAM: 8 GB
• Storage: 50 GB

The game can get by on as little as 2GB of video memory and still meet the recommended specs. Basically, any PC from the last five years will meet (and likely exceed) Blizzard’s requirements, while PCs that are a decade old can still meet the minimum specs. If you run Surveillance no problem, you will have no problem with Overwatch 2.

The only odd requirements are for the processor. Blizzard loosely lists classes of a processor instead of particular generations. From what is listed, it looks like a dual-core meets the minimum specs, while a quad-core meets the recommended specs. Your CPU shouldn’t play a big role though. The minimum AMD Phenom X3 8650 is 14 years old, after all.

Overwatch 2 beta benchmarks

I didn’t have the chance to run Monitor 2 benchmarks on a range of the best graphics cards, so I jumped into the beta and tested some of the presets on my personal rig to see how they fared. You can see my results with an RTX 3090 and a Core i9-10900K at 1440p below.

While it’s no surprise that an RTX 3090 rips Monitor 2 (especially at 1440p) the upscaling is interesting. There are big jumps between the Epic, Ultra, and High presets, while everything else narrows around the Medium and Low presets. This is largely due to dynamic reflections, which drop to Low on the High preset.

If you don’t want to mess with all the settings above, I recommend sticking with the High preset. It offers the best balance between performance and image quality, although some settings, such as texture filtering, are unnecessarily disabled.

Monitor 2 beta preset image quality

Monitor 2 is misleading when it comes to image quality, because when you actually play the game, you’ll have a hard time noticing the differences. I took some screenshots with the Low, High and Epic presets in the practice area to show the differences (my tests above were done in real matches).

There are big differences, though they’re hard to spot without the side-by-side comparison above. With the Low preset, the bullet marks on the wall are missing, as are the lights that are preset in the High and Epic presents. The reduction in texture quality is noticeable around the edges of the metal plate in the center, as is the loss in quality of the shadows. You can see how much blurrier the large shadow on the right is with the Low preset compared to Ultra.

What’s interesting is that the Epic presets seem to turn on a bit more lighting, as evidenced by the top right piece. The biggest difference for Epic, however, is the reflections. The metal plate on the bottom is still reflective. But at the top of the stairs, only the dynamic highlights of the Epic preset show it.

There are differences, but the good news is that Blizzard has clearly taken care to lower the image quality in a smart way. The aliasing only appears on distant objects (see the poles in the background), and it’s not annoying at all. Likewise, the quality of the texture takes a hit, but it only really shows up in fine detail. You don’t look at low resolution textures with the Low preset.

Even after looking at the image quality, my recommendation is to stick with the high presets. It loses a few elements of the beautification compared to Epic, but it’s also about a 65% increase in performance. Low isn’t bad either, although it trades off a lot more image quality for a modest 13 per cent performance boost over the high preset.

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