What this guide is:
This guide uses some of the more hidden graphics settings that have been added to the game after launch (IE most won't know all of these are in the game) to get the game into an acceptable state.
Unless you have the latest GPU & CPU and can run this game at maxed settings with no frame issues, you WILL benefit from following this guide as even if you can get a good framerate in ideal circumstances, a lot of boss arenas have effects that will cause your frames to dip during the fight and therefor eat your controller inputs causing dodges, reloads ect. to fail to occur.

What this guide will do for you:
This preset will give you the smoothest frames possible, remove the ugly graphical errors, ghosting, glitches & detail loss that came baked into the game at launch, increased visual clarity of what's on-screen while having a very minimal impact on how the game feels to actually look at it.
IMPORTANT -- This preset may feature use of the "potato" setting in some places but this is *not* a "potato" preset, we are using other settings where it is important and makes a difference.

This game is VERY ugly. It isn't the world design, the enemy or armor design. It's the engine. UE5 is new, has some severe drawbacks, and the tech built into the engine to overcome some of those drawbacks has itself HUGE drawbacks that are not visible at convention demos, still scene screenshots, nor is it visible in Youtube's really bad compression. But IS visible when you are actually playing the game.
And even though the new techs makes the game look bad to look at, it ALSO makes the game run really poorly.

THE PROBLEM:

When the game came out, this is just what it looked like. But unbeknownst to most players, the devs have done a good job adding options to fix this stuff.
But... most players don't know they're there, nor what combination they should be using. That's where this guide comes in! Stop thinking, relax, let your worries go and follow the instructions below without question.

This has three sections.
Section 1: Display

Display Mode: If you have a second monitor or alt-tab a lot, set to Windows Fullscreen, otherwise set to Fullscreen.
Resolution: Same as your computer's baseline, though if you follow this guide and the frames are STILL bad, actually come back to this setting and lower it. It genuinely helps for truly old GPU's!
Motion Blur: OFF!!!
VSync: Off if you don't need it. If you don't know whether you need it, then you don't need it.
Framerate: Because of the bosses having a lot more visual effects on screen than the rest of the game, "unlimited" is a bad setting to use. 60 FPS if you can, if the game still has dips or eats your inputs then set it to 30. Sometimes it's better to live with a consistent 30 FPS than an inconsistent 60.
NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: Off. This makes your game run worse. If you're reading this guide you don't need it.

Section 2: Upscaler

Upscaler: Intel XESS. Every combination of these next 3 settings makes the game look ugly and run bad -- ghosting, checkering errors, grass textures being semi-transparent, loss of detail. "off" or "native" don't help us either because those modes don't let you have any anti-aliasing, and this game is aliased really badly. EXCEPT for exactly 1 setting that was snuck into the game recently with little fanfare. To use that setting we have to set this to Intel XeSS.
Upscaler Quality: Anti-Aliasing. Insofar as I can tell it turns off all of the annoying DLSS AI-generated detail-destroying nonsense and just lets you have a good old-fashioned AA like we've had in normal games for 2+ decades.
Frame Generation: Off. Creates input lag. You can't use this in any game with dodging.

Section 3: Graphics Quality
Most of these graphics quality options don't actually do much as most of the settings that would be in an old game such as "texture quality" are being controlled by the upscaler. But there are sub-settings inside of them that make the game run worse or look bad that we weren't able to adjust when the game released without "potato" mode. I've experimented with these settings for a long time and determined what matters.
Shadow Quality: Set to Low. Potato actually looks bad, higher than low makes the game run worse without much visual improvement.
Post Processing: YOU HAVE TO SET THIS TO POTATO. I know I have the rest on potato too but even if you get perfect FPS no matter what ACTUALLY turn this down!! The ghosting from the image above? That comes from this. We've already turned the upscaling off above, turn this off too. It genuinely makes the game look much better.
Foliage Quality: Doesn't matter, default it to Potato. Why default it to potato? Setting it to Ultra makes the game run bad so apparently it's affecting the FPS, but I can't tell the difference between Potato and Low so it gets set to Potato.
Effects Quality: Potato. There are more effects in boss arenas than anywhere else in the game, & that is where a *consistent* frame rate matters the most. So, Potato. It looks fine, you die less.
View Distance Quality: Fails the same value test as Foliage. Doesn't matter, default it to Potato.

Section 4: Advanced.
Didn't bother getting a screenshot of these 3 options. Detailed Shadows off, do what you want with the FOV, turn Optimize Performance in Menus on unless it gives you crashes.

The Results:

Errors?

See the little orange sparks to the right of the crystal? No ghost trails.

How's it look?



Looks fine. Not the hottest game in the world, but it no longer actively ugly to look at.

MOST IMPORTANT !
How's it play? (Not sure why, I had to lower the quality of this image to upload it, so please ignore its quality, that isn't the game that's a Steam upload limitation. Just look at the FPS counter)

Brotherman, it's smooth. It ain't a crisp 60 FPS, but that's kind of the point -- I'm playing this on the weakest GPU capable of running UE5, so if these settings can get me a 0% frames dropped, it can work for you too.