The Best Settings for Kena: Bridge of Spirits – A PC Optimisation Guide

Conclusion

Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a great looking game on PC, even at its lowest settings. While the game’s Ultra preset is demanding, a few clever settings changes will deliver you much stronger performance within this game’s PC version. 

As detailed elsewhere within this article, lowering Kena’s shadow detail is the easiest way to achieve higher framerates. After that, reducing volumetric fog settings and ambient occlusion settings will achieve significant framerate boosts. After that, resolution scaling will deliver you the most significant performance benefits. 

DirectX 11 VS DirectX 12. For us, DirectX 12 was a clear winner. Kena: Bridge of Spirits stutters a lot under DirectX 11, making the game feel jerky and less smooth than the game’s DirectX 12 version. While Kena’s PC version can stutter at times on PC, it performs much smoother under DirectX 12 and DirectX 11, even if DirectX 11 delivers higher average framerates using certain GPUs at high resolutions. 

Visually, Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an Unreal Engine 4 masterpiece, and it clearly showcases that PC gamers don’t need “Ultra settings” to have a great visual experience. As we have shown with our optimised settings on page 7, near-identical visuals can be achieved with over 50% more performance at 4K on our RTX 3070. If you are calling this game “unoptimised”, you are failing to optimise the game’s available graphics options. 
  

  
While Kena: Bridge of Spirit’s graphical options menu contains a “benchmark” tool, this tool isn’t a traditional benchmarking tool. It will not run players through a sequence of gameplay or other representative workloads. It will conduct a synthetic test and use results from that to select automatic graphics options. For most PC gamers, this tool is entirely useless. Players should treat this option like it does not exist. 

If you follow our advice, you should be able to achieve high-performance levels in Kena: Bridge of Spirits if you have a compatible PC that meets the game’s system requirements. As we mentioned before, even Kena’s lowest settings look great on PC, which is good news for users of older PC hardware configurations. 

So far, we have enjoyed our time with Kena: Bridge of Spirits, and we are looking forward to playing the game more. Ember Lab did a great job with the game’s PC version, and we are looking forward to seeing what comes next from the studio. 
 
On PC, Kena: Bridge of Spirits is available for £31.99 on the Epic Games Store. 

You can join the discussion on Kena: Bridge of Spirits’ PC Performance on the OC3D Forums.