How to improve FPS in Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PC)
The PC port of Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales arrived in November 2023 with the seal of Nixxes Software, the same studio that had already polished Spider-Man Remastered a year earlier. It shows: the game launches with fewer shader-compilation hangs, more reliable resolution scaling, and a more stable ray tracing implementation than its predecessor. It runs on the same Insomniac Engine adapted to DirectX 12, but here the technical challenge is different: Miles moves through a snowy Harlem and New York on Christmas Eve, with dynamic snow accumulation on cars, streetlights, rooftops, and sidewalks calculated in real time. On top of that, Miles's own bioelectric powers — Venom Blast and Venom Punch — generate very dense full-screen electric particle effects during combat, one of the biggest frame consumers in the whole game.
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Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +64% free FPS.
Reflections Ray Tracing
Reflection ray tracing looks spectacular on the glass and wet/snowy surfaces of New York, but the cost rises a lot during swinging through dense building zones. Rasterized rendering with High-quality SSR already gives a very solid result to play with.
Particle Density
Directly affects the electric effects from Venom Blast and Venom Punch, plus moving snow and urban dust. On Medium, combat with multiple enemies and active powers stops being the session's bottleneck.
Shadow Quality
Very High shadows recalculate very frequently in scenes with falling snow and holiday streetlights, which generate many light sources. One notch down is barely noticeable outside of direct comparisons.
Screen Space Reflections (SSR)
With the city covered in snow and ice there are many more reflective surfaces than in the original Spider-Man, so SSR cost is higher here. Lowering it one step doesn't compromise the readability of puddles or glass.
Level of Detail (LOD)
Swinging and wall-running through Harlem load snowy building geometry at high speed; lowering LOD reduces streaming work with no noticeable pop-in except when staring at something in the distance.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Volumetric Fog Quality
Fog and ambient snowfall use heavy volumetrics to sell New York's holiday atmosphere. Lowering it to Medium keeps the snowy mood without the rendering cost of layered Very High.
World Shadow Resolution
Different from the general shadow slider; it specifically controls the sharpness of shadows cast by buildings and holiday streetlights at medium-to-long distances during swinging.
Hair and Fabric Quality
Miles's winter suit and NPC clothing use cloth simulation with more layers than the original due to the winter setting. Medium keeps movement believable at a lower simulation cost.
Ambient Occlusion
With snow covering surfaces and generating more microscopic geometric variation, AO works harder than in the original Spider-Man. Medium is the point where the loss of depth stops being noticeable indoors.
Traffic and Pedestrian Density
New York at Christmas has streets more populated with decorated, active NPCs than the base game. Reducing density especially helps the CPU during swinging through Manhattan and Harlem.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
DLSS 3 (with Frame Generation)
+55% FPSFull DLSS 3 support with Frame Generation on RTX 40-series GPUs. On Quality it already matches or exceeds native sharpness thanks to Nixxes's reconstruction model, and with Frame Generation enabled the game feels extremely smooth even with RT enabled at 1440p/4K.
AMD FSR 2
+40% FPSFSR 2 implementation available for any GPU, including NVIDIA and Intel. On Quality it offers good image stability, though it shows somewhat more ghosting than DLSS on Venom Blast's electric particle effects during fast combat.
Intel XeSS
+38% FPSPresent since the port's launch. Performs better on Arc GPUs thanks to the XMX path, but also works on NVIDIA/AMD via DP4a with quality between DLSS and FSR2.
NVIDIA DLAA
+0% FPSAntialiasing based on DLSS's neural network with no rescaling, aimed at those with performance to spare who prioritize maximum sharpness in the snowy city's ray-traced reflections.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Reflex from the game's options to reduce input latency during combat with Venom Blast/Punch, where on-screen effects can generate frametime spikes.
- •On RTX 40 series, prioritize DLSS Frame Generation over manually raising shadow or fog sliders: the impact on perceived smoothness is greater.
- •If you have 6GB of VRAM or less, avoid combining Very High textures with reflection RT enabled at 1440p: the game starts aggressively streaming snowy textures.
AMD
- •RDNA2/RDNA3 GPUs especially benefit from lowering volumetric fog and particle density, since the cost of those effects falls more on shaders than on RT units.
- •Enable Anti-Lag in the Adrenalin panel during intense combat sections with many enemies and electric effects.
- •Without powerful dedicated RT cores, leave reflection RT fully disabled and compensate with SSR on High.
Sistema
- •Install the game on SSD (preferably NVMe): real-time dynamic snow and high-resolution texture streaming hits hard on HDD.
- •Let shader compilation finish on the first launch without interrupting it; Nixxes improved it compared to the original Spider-Man but it's still key to avoiding stuttering.
- •If you use a dual monitor setup, close background capture/recording overlays: the game is sensitive to CPU thread overload during holiday crowd sections.
5. Known game issues
Microstuttering when enabling Ray Tracing for the first time in a session
Some users report an occasional frame drop and brief stutter when enabling or changing the RT level mid-game, related to partial recompilation of reflection shaders. It's fixed by restarting the RT level from the menu before starting to play.
Framerate drop in zones with heavy snowfall and crowds
In sections like Harlem's holiday market, the combination of accumulating dynamic snow, high NPC density, and decorative lights can cause drops below the target framerate even on high-end hardware, especially with volumetric fog on High or above.
Estado: January 2024 patch (partial improvement, doesn't fully resolve it on Very High)
Occasional DLSS Frame Generation incompatibility with third-party overlays
Some capture overlays can generate flickering or visual artifacts when Frame Generation is active. Updating those tools to their latest versions or disabling the overlay while playing resolves the problem in most cases.
6. Frequently asked questions
Is Miles Morales on PC lighter than Spider-Man Remastered?▾
Is it worth enabling Ray Tracing in this game?▾
Why does my framerate specifically drop in combat with Venom Blast?▾
Which scaling option gives the best image quality in this game?▾
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Calculate FPS for Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →