Introduction

007 First Light is the long-awaited James Bond game from IO Interactive, the studio behind the famous "Hitman" series. Originally scheduled for March 2026, the game was delayed by two months for additional polish. IO Interactive describes it as "our most ambitious project to date." It is a third-person, story-driven action-adventure game that tells a reimagined origin story of the world's most famous spy. The player follows a young James Bond as he joins MI6's newly revived Double-0 program, in modern times. Typical for a Bond experience, the game takes you across exotic locations—from Iceland and Malta to Mauritania, Vietnam, Slovakia, and Antarctica—as our favorite secret agent uncovers a conspiracy.

IO Interactive uses their proprietary Glacier engine, the same technology that powered the Hitman games. As expected, the only rendering API supported is DirectX 12. There is no hardware ray tracing at launch—IO Interactive and NVIDIA have announced that path tracing support along with DLSS Ray Reconstruction will arrive in a summer 2026 update. Upscaling is limited to NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 and AMD FSR 3.1.5—Intel XeSS is not available. Frame generation is supported via DLSS Dynamic Multi Frame Generation (up to 6x) only—there is no FSR frame generation, no love for Intel framegen either. The game also supports a native TAA mode when upscaling is disabled.

This review will evaluate the performance of 007 First Light across a wide range of contemporary graphics cards, compare image quality settings, and analyze the game's VRAM usage to provide insight into the hardware requirements needed for an optimal experience.