What are the optimized settings for this game?

[Shampoo]

I have already conditioned myself to play all games on DLSS Ultra Performance on my RTX 4080 so I am not afraid to lower the bar if needed.

Which setting gives the most performance gain with the least visual drawback?

The target is locked 144 FPS.

[Tk.天.G]

There's only a 25 to 30% perf delta between all minimum settings and all maximum settings (which is pretty much the whole issue with this game's performances: extremely poor scaling).
Most of those 30% are between medium and low (~20%). There's less than 5% perf delta between max and high and less than 10% between max and medium. The difference between low and lowest is barely 1% (for a huge visual degradation).

Upscaling doesn't scale too well either with less than 10% perf delta between DLSS quality and performance, but there's ~25% between DLAA and DLSS quality.

So the baseline would be low settings and DLSS quality.
Shadow quality seems to be the heaviest single setting at first glance, but beware the textures resolution setting as they are decompressed on the fly on the GPU with a very measurable impact on performance when moving the camera (as they are loaded/unloaded constantly from disk).

note: tested on a 5090 at 4k with a 9800X3D.

Now regarding a locked 144fps, it's not possible without framegen as you're barely hitting that as average on a 9800X3D, with 1% lows around 100fps, fully CPU bound. There's no better CPU for this game at this point in time also (the best Intel CPU is ~20% slower).

Hopefully that'll help you get somewhere with your goal even though I didn't give you a real answer to your question and more of a guide with useful data. Have fun!

[warmy bear]

if it had transformer model support you can have Performance DLSS with good IQ still but probably anything GPU heavy. Idk if there's some magic juice for it though because performance issues persist regardless of settings.

[ReaperKing]

You could try this out as well:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2246340/discussions/0/596268332586444944/

[Kappamerc]

My 3090/14900k settings for the clearest picture (least blurry) I could personally get.
FSR + Frame Gen + Native AA (Upscaling Sharpness = 0).
Ray Tracing Off (play with this, it wasn't great for me).
Nvidia Control Panel: Image Scaling: On + 5% sharpen
Change all the other settings as you see fit. I have most stuff fairly high. I turned of the other basic blurring/smearing offenders like dof, motion blur, ambient oc, and I kept highest for mesh quality.

I found I got vertex explosions no matter what setting I used (frame gen on/off, mesh medium high or highest, etc...). Seems to have gotten better where the explosion goes away, not sure if they fixed something or I've just gotten lucky.

There was some post about updating the direct3d files from microsofts nuget repo. I did that but no idea if that did anything for me. It was supposed to fix stuttering for people which I didn't have.

Also the third page/setting for brightness can wash things out, lower it if you feel things are bit a washed out :).