Marvel Rivals FPS Drops: The Settings That Matter

Marvel Rivals FPS drops usually trace back to one of two causes, and telling them apart saves you a lot of pointless setting changes.

Cause one: Lumen

Marvel Rivals runs on Unreal Engine 5, and Lumen — the engine's real-time global illumination — is by far the most expensive thing in the graphics menu. On a mid-range card it can cost 30 to 60 FPS on its own.

Turning it off is the single biggest lever available:

• Set Global Illumination to SSGI Low Quality
• Set Reflection Quality to Screen Space Reflections

That one change usually does more than dropping every other setting to Low.

Cause two: shader compilation

If the stutter happens at the start of a match or when a new hero's ultimate goes off, that is not your settings. It is UE5 compiling a shader the first time it renders a new effect, and it will keep happening until the cache is built.

What helps:

• Let shader precompilation finish on launch instead of skipping into a match
• Keep GPU drivers current
• Make sure the shader cache is enabled and generously sized in your driver control panel

The order to change things

1. Upscaling — DLSS, FSR or XeSS. Biggest gain for the smallest visual cost.
2. Lumen off, as above.
3. Shadow quality down.
4. Ray tracing off, if it is on at all.
5. Then start from Low or Medium overall and raise textures and effects back up selectively until it looks acceptable and still runs.

The unglamorous causes

Before blaming the game: background applications competing for the GPU, an outdated driver, and thermal or power limits throttling a laptop will each produce frame drops that no in-game setting can fix. If your frame rate is fine for ten minutes and then collapses, that is a heat problem, not a Lumen problem.