Performance
Marvel Rivals Graphic Pack Settings: Six Layers, Four Presets
The top of the Graphic Packs tab is a strip of six selects: Foliage Style, Foliage Res, Visual Effects, Characters, Decals and Shadows. They decide how much work Marvel Rivals has to do to draw a frame, and they are the most direct control over that the app has. This is what each one changes, what the four presets set them to, and how they relate to the graphic pack sitting underneath.
If you came looking for config paks, the render-scale trick they used to pull is retired and this strip is what replaced it. That story is in what happened to config paks.
The pack is the base, the layers sit on top
A graphic pack replaces the map and environment textures wholesale. The app's own description of one is plain about the trade: simpler, faster map and environment textures, an FPS boost that replaces what the game draws. One pack is active at a time.
A layer is narrower. It targets one group of textures and rebuilds just that group at the size and style you pick. Layers stack, and they stack on any pack or on none, which is why the strip sits above the library rather than inside the active pack's card. For the textures a layer covers, the layer is what you see and the pack underneath is not. For everything else the pack is still the pack.
The six Marvel Rivals graphic pack settings
Every one of them has a value that means "leave the game alone", and at that value nothing is mounted for that group at all. Read the list as six independent decisions, because that is how the app treats them.
Foliage Style
Bushes and grass. Default leaves the game's own plants alone, Colored rebuilds them tinted to the graphic pack underneath, and Transparent removes them from the world outright. Colored needs one of the color packs as a base, so it is greyed out on a bare game or under a Quake pack.
Foliage Res
Texture size for the foliage layer. Lower is simpler and lighter, and Flat is the flattest rung of all: a solid fill with no detail, tinted to your pack under the Colored style and left natural under Default. Transparent has nothing to size, so this select reads N/A.
Visual Effects
Ability and impact effects. This is the one that decides how much of the screen a teamfight fills. Default is the game as it ships, 16x is the plainest, and the rungs in between trade clarity back for detail.
Characters
Hero and skin textures. Turning this down is the most visible change on the list, because it is what you look at all match. It is also the one people leave at Default most often, which is a perfectly reasonable choice.
Decals
Bullet holes, scorch marks and the posters stuck on the world. Hidden is the layer, Shown is the untouched game. Very little of the look is lost and a busy wall stops competing with whatever is standing in front of it.
Shadows
A solid FPS gain when off, though the game can look darker. The app has withdrawn this one: no preset applies it and the select is inactive, so shadows are left as the game renders them. It stays live for anyone who already applied the layer, because that is the only way back.
The numbered rungs are texture sizes, and they are single-mip: whatever size you pick is what stays in memory once a hero or a map has loaded, with no smaller version to fall back to. At 16x or 32x that is a fraction of what the game shipped, which is the whole point. At 128x it is close to the original, so treat the top rung as a look rather than as a saving. Anyone who wants sharper than 128x should leave the group at Default, which is the game's own full-resolution texture.
The four presets
The select at the left of the strip fills the other six in one move. Change any value afterwards and it reads Custom, which is the honest label for a set that matches no preset.
| Preset | Foliage | Decals | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default | Default | Shown | The vanilla game, no layers applied. Picking it clears the whole stack. |
| Competitive | Transparent | Hidden | Max FPS and clarity. The foliage is gone rather than simplified. |
| Balanced | Colored 64x | Hidden | A solid FPS gain, tinted to your color pack when you have one and the same 64x rung untinted when you do not. |
| Pretty | Colored 128x | Shown | Sharpest look. High-detail foliage and decals left alone. |
Two things the table does not show, because no preset moves them. Visual Effects and Characters sit at Default in all four, so a preset never quietly overwrites a choice you made on those two. And none of them touches Shadows, which is deliberate: turning someone's shadows off is not something a preset should decide.
Picks stage as a draft, Apply commits them
Choosing a value does not build anything. It stages into a draft, the strip repaints to show what you have picked, and the Apply button beside it wakes up. Apply then builds and mounts the whole set in one go.
That is worth knowing because it changes how you use the strip. Pick a preset, change the one line you disagree with, then press Apply once. The alternative, where each select applied itself, would mean waiting through a build for every change of mind. Apply stays greyed out while nothing is staged, and it is held while a build is already running.
Nothing downloads
Every layer is compiled on your PC, out of your own game files, by the builder inside the app. So are the graphic packs and so are the custom packs you make yourself. There is no catalog to fetch, no server to wait on and no mirror to be slow.
What the builder produces lands in the game's ~mods folder alongside
your pack, and it shows up in the Mod Manager under Installed Mods by RIVALSFPS.GG,
with no on/off switch of its own because the Graphic Packs tab owns it. The
signature bypass has to be on for the game to load any of it, which is one
click in the app.
Lowering the render load: what to actually pick
In rough order of what you get back for what you give up.
Foliage first
Bushes and grass are drawn in enormous numbers and they sit between you and the people you are trying to shoot. Transparent removes them, which is the largest single change on this page and also the most obvious one. Colored 64x keeps them and still costs a fraction of the originals.
Then decals
Hidden costs almost nothing in how the game reads. Bullet holes and scorch marks accumulate through a fight, which is exactly when you have the least attention to spare for them.
Then visual effects
Dropping ability and impact effects to a lower rung thins out what a teamfight puts on screen. It is a clarity change as much as a performance one, so try 32x before 16x.
Characters last
It is the most visible surface in the game and the one you spend the match looking at. Plenty of people who run everything else low leave this at Default, and that is a sensible place to stop.
This is more precise than a render-scale drop ever was. Lowering resolution softened the entire image at once, including the parts you need to read. Here you choose which parts of the picture get simplified, and the parts that matter for aiming can be left alone.
What this will not do
It will not help a machine whose problem is stuttering rather than throughput, and it will not fix a monitor sitting at 60Hz. Neither of those is a texture problem. The 14 reversible tweaks in Windows Optimizations cover the second, and how to increase FPS in Marvel Rivals covers the in-game settings that sit alongside all of this.
Common questions
What do the Marvel Rivals graphic pack settings change?
They are six texture layers: foliage style, foliage resolution, visual effects, characters, decals and shadows. Each one replaces a group of the game's textures with a simpler version, so the game draws less. They sit above the Graphic Pack library and stack on any pack, or on none.
How do I lower the render load in Marvel Rivals?
Activate a graphic pack for the map and environment textures, then pick the Competitive layer preset, which removes the foliage and hides decals. Add the 14 Windows optimizations if you want more without changing the picture further. There is no config pak any more and no render-scale slider hidden below the in-game floor.
What is the best Marvel Rivals foliage setting?
Transparent, if you only care about frames and sightlines, because the bushes and grass stop being drawn at all. Colored 64x is the compromise most people settle on: the plants are still there, they are tinted to your graphic pack, and they cost a fraction of what the originals do.
Do the layers have to be downloaded?
No. Every layer is compiled on your own PC out of your own game files by the builder inside the app, the same way the graphic packs are. There is no catalog to fetch from and nothing to wait on a server for.
Do layers replace my graphic pack?
No, they stack on top of it. The pack is the base and the layers are targeted overrides, so for the textures a layer covers, the layer is what you see. Everything the layers do not cover is still the pack.
Why is nothing happening when I change a setting?
A pick stages as a draft and nothing is built until you press Apply, which is what keeps a preset plus a tweak to one line down to a single operation. If Apply ran and the game still looks the same, check that the signature bypass is on, because Marvel Rivals ignores every unsigned pak until it is.
Why is the Shadows setting greyed out?
Because the app no longer turns your shadows off for you. No preset applies that layer and the control is inactive, so shadows are left as the game renders them. The one exception is a player who already has the layer applied, whose control stays live so they can put the shadows back.