vermintide 2 performance guide

system: i5 2500k @ 4.5GHz, 8GB of RAM and a 3GB GTX1060
60 fps with no drops unless there is a horde, in which case fps will drop to around 50 at worst even on the lowest possible settings

vermintide 2 is very CPU intensive as the CPU needs to handle a large amount of enemies, GPU optimization seems to be rather good

album with some screenshots using the settings below
https://imgur.com/a/c3MJg

textures: high/high (GPU, minimal impact)
- you need at least 3GB of VRAM to use high quality textures, less than that and you should use low quality textures

particles: medium/high/100%/100 (GPU, high to minimal impact)
- particle quality must be at least "medium" to see blood splatters, higher settings add more particles to effects, high GPU performance impact
- transparency resolution significantly changes the quality of particles, highly recommended to set this on high
- scatter density controls the amount of grass/rubble on the level, very noticeable on the wheat fields of against the grain, recommended setting is 100%
- blood decal amount controls the amount of blood splatters on walls/floor/character models, very minimal impact on performance so just test it out, extreme preset has it at 100

lighting: off/off/1/low/low/off (CPU and GPU, very high to minimal impact)
- local light shadow quality controls the quality of dynamic shadows cast by local lights such as lamps and torches, unfortunately these shadows have a VERY short draw distance so unless you want to deal with constant pop-in of shadows, I recommend having this off for a nice performance boost
- sun shadows controls the quality of dynamic shadows cast by the sun and moon, low/medium have low quality shadows at a short distance, high/extreme have high quality shadows at a medium distance, like with local light shadows these have a noticeably low draw distance which can be jarring to look at but it's not as bad, recommend setting this off or on high depending on how good your CPU is
- max shadow casting lights controls the amount of shadows one object can have(?) if your local light shadows are off this setting probably doesn't do anything
- volumetric fog quality adds nice depth to the image with volumetric fog, no noticeable difference between low and extreme other than a massive difference in GPU usage, recommend setting this to low for a small performance hit for a nice effect
- ambient light quality controls static lighting and doesn't seem to have much of an impact on performance, but a big impact on image quality, I've tested this and for best results it's best to set this on low if your sun shadows are off, and high if your sun shadows are anything other than off, if you have sun shadows off and ambient light on high, indoor areas will look really ugly
- high quality fur, anything to do with high quality hair is usually a performance killer so set this thing off

post-processing: TAA/on/extreme/on/off/on/off/on/off/off/off (GPU, very high to minimal impact)
- most of these effects are up to personal preference as they have such a negligible performance impact
- anti-aliasing, off looks very sharp but then your edges will be jaggy, fxaa does a poor job of blurring them out for basically no performance impact, TAA does a good job of blurring them out along with the whole screen for a rather large GPU performance impact
- sharpness filter, makes the image look less blurry, recommended to have this on if you use TAA
- SSAO, or screen space ambient occlusion, you know what just google this it's hard to explain, either have this on extreme or not at all as the lower settings look really bad, very high GPU performance impact
- bloom, you know what this is
- skin shading, honestly I have no clue what this actually does, haven't seen any difference between on and off
- depth of field, makes objects and scenery in the far distance look out of focus, nice effect that should have a pretty high GPU performance impact but I haven't noticed it
- screen space reflections enable reflections of world objects (not characters) on things like water puddles, generally speaking reflections are always very demanding so having this off is recommended
- light shafts AKA god rays
- lens flare, no thanks
- color and lens distortions, haven't figured out what this really does but the tooltip mentions chromatic aberration so definitely no thank you
- motion blur, makes things look blurry in motion, small GPU performance impact

other: off/0
- as far as I can tell these settings do nothing