The fastest route to max FPS on a good PC is not setting everything to Low. Keep textures high, reduce volumetric effects, disable ray tracing unless your GPU has headroom, and use DLSS, FSR, or XeSS at the right quality mode. The best all-purpose target is a stable frame rate with consistent frame times: 60 FPS for cinematic single-player games, 90–120 FPS for smooth action, and 144 FPS or higher for competitive shooters.
This approach works across demanding PC releases, from Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield to Call of Duty: Warzone. It also avoids the classic trap of chasing a huge average FPS number while hitching every time a new area loads. Before changing anything, update your GPU driver, close browser tabs and launchers, and check whether your system is CPU-limited or GPU-limited. Steamoz has also covered game-specific fixes in our guides to ELEX crashes and FPS problems and EscapeVR: The Basement performance issues.
Use This Baseline Before Chasing Extra Frames
First, choose a sensible resolution. At 1080p, a mid-range card such as an RTX 4060 or Radeon RX 7600 can deliver excellent results without aggressive upscaling. At 1440p, an RTX 4070 Super, RX 7800 XT, or faster GPU gives you more room for high textures and effects. Native 4K is still brutally expensive in modern games, especially with ray tracing enabled, so upscaling is not a compromise anymore; it is part of the normal PC graphics pipeline.
Set your monitor to its maximum refresh rate in Windows under System > Display > Advanced display. A 165Hz monitor running at 60Hz wastes the hardware you paid for. Then cap FPS slightly below refresh rate when using G-Sync or FreeSync. A 141 FPS cap for a 144Hz display, or 162 FPS for 165Hz, usually keeps adaptive sync active and reduces unnecessary GPU spikes.
| Target | Recommended Resolution | FPS Goal | Best Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry-level gaming PC | 1080p | 60–100 FPS | Esports and older AAA games |
| Good mainstream PC | 1080p or 1440p | 90–144 FPS | Most modern games |
| High-end gaming PC | 1440p or 4K | 120–165 FPS | High-refresh gaming |
| Ray-tracing-focused PC | 1440p with upscaling | 60–120 FPS | Visual-heavy single-player games |
Use the built-in benchmark when a game provides one. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Cyberpunk 2077, and many Forza titles include useful repeatable scenes. If there is no benchmark, test a busy location, a combat encounter, and a quiet interior. The lowest result matters more than the best result.
🎮 FORM
Looking to experience this game? Grab your digital key directly on our store for $14.99.
View on Steammoz Store →Settings That Give Away FPS for Almost Nothing
Texture quality is usually the wrong place to start. Textures mostly consume VRAM, not shader horsepower. If your graphics card has 8GB or more, High textures are often safe at 1080p and 1440p. Dropping from Ultra to High can prevent stutter, but dropping all the way to Low makes walls, weapons, and character models look visibly muddy for a modest performance gain.
Shadows, volumetric fog, screen-space reflections, ambient occlusion, and crowd density are far more expensive. Shadows force the GPU to render additional depth information, while volumetrics calculate light through fog, smoke, and dust. Crowd density can become a CPU problem in busy games such as Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield, where extra pedestrians and background activity increase simulation work.
| Setting | Recommended Value | Typical FPS Impact | Visual Trade-Off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Texture Quality | High | 0–8% | Uses more VRAM but preserves detail |
| Shadow Quality | Medium or High | 5–15% | Less contact detail and softer shadows |
| Volumetric Effects | Low or Medium | 8–20% | Fog and light beams look simpler |
| Screen-Space Reflections | Medium | 3–10% | Reflections lose clarity during movement |
| Ambient Occlusion | SSAO or Medium | 2–7% | Corners and object contact look flatter |
| Crowd Density | Medium | CPU-dependent | Fewer NPCs and less world activity |
| Motion Blur | Off | 0–3% | Sharper camera movement and aiming |
| Ray Tracing | Off initially | 20–50% | Less accurate reflections, shadows, and lighting |
Start by lowering volumetric effects and shadows one step at a time. Those changes usually produce a better performance-to-quality ratio than reducing geometry or textures. Turn off motion blur, film grain, chromatic aberration, and depth of field if you prefer a clean image; these are mostly presentation effects, not meaningful performance tools.
DLSS, FSR, and XeSS Explained Without the Marketing
Upscaling renders the game internally below your selected output resolution, then reconstructs the image. At 1440p, Quality mode commonly uses a 67 percent internal scale, while Balanced is around 58 percent and Performance is about 50 percent. The exact implementation varies, but the rule is consistent: Quality is the best starting point, Balanced is the emergency performance setting, and Performance is mainly for 4K or very demanding ray-traced games.
Nvidia DLSS requires an RTX card and usually produces the cleanest motion reconstruction in supported games. AMD FSR works across a much wider range of hardware, including Nvidia and Intel GPUs, while Intel XeSS can look particularly strong on Arc cards and is also available on other hardware. Do not select an upscaler purely because of the brand on your graphics card. Compare moving foliage, thin wires, HUD text, and distant fences. Static screenshots hide the artifacts that become obvious during motion.
| Upscaler Mode | Approximate Internal Scale | Performance | Recommended Scenario |
|---|---|---|---|
| Native or DLAA | 100% | Lowest | Powerful GPU and no reconstruction artifacts |
| Quality | About 67% | High | Best default for 1440p |
| Balanced | About 58% | Very high | GPU-limited scenes at 1440p |
| Performance | About 50% | Maximum | 4K, ray tracing, or weak GPU |
| Ultra Performance | About 33% | Extreme | Only when 8K output is relevant |
Frame generation is separate from upscaling. DLSS Frame Generation and AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation insert generated frames between traditionally rendered frames. They can make a single-player game feel much smoother, but they do not reduce the input latency of the underlying rendered frames. Use them when your base rate is already roughly 60 FPS or higher. At 35 FPS, frame generation can make the counter look impressive while controls still feel sluggish.
For Nvidia owners, Reflex is worth enabling in supported games. AMD users should look for Radeon Anti-Lag 2 where available. These features reduce the queue of rendered frames and are especially useful in competitive games. For more game-specific tuning, compare these recommendations with our Far Cry 6 max-FPS settings guide.
Ray Tracing, CPU Limits, and the Settings You Should Keep
Ray tracing has an enormous performance price because it calculates lighting paths that traditional rasterization approximates. Reflections, global illumination, and ray-traced shadows can each hit performance differently. In Cyberpunk 2077, path tracing is so demanding that even powerful cards generally need DLSS and frame generation for a high-refresh experience.
If your GPU is at 95–99 percent usage, lower resolution, ray tracing, volumetrics, reflections, or shadows first. If GPU usage sits around 60–80 percent while one CPU core is maxed out, reducing resolution will barely help. Lower crowd density, view distance, simulation detail, and physics quality instead. This is common in open-world games and large multiplayer matches.
| Symptom | Likely Limit | First Setting to Change | What Not to Touch First |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU at 99%, low FPS | GPU-bound | Resolution, ray tracing, volumetrics | Textures if VRAM is sufficient |
| GPU below 80%, one CPU core maxed | CPU-bound | Crowd density, view distance | Upscaling resolution |
| FPS looks high but feels uneven | Frame-time spikes | FPS cap, shader cache, background apps | Only raising average FPS |
| Textures pop or flicker | VRAM or streaming issue | Texture quality and pool size | Anti-aliasing alone |
Keep anisotropic filtering at 16x whenever possible. It improves the clarity of roads and surfaces viewed at an angle and usually costs almost nothing on modern GPUs. Keep geometry at High unless testing proves it is expensive. Anti-aliasing deserves more care: TAA can soften the image, MSAA is expensive in some engines, and temporal upscalers often include their own reconstruction. Stacking multiple anti-aliasing methods can make the image blurrier without improving performance.
Three Ready-to-Use PC Graphics Profiles
Competitive 1080p profile
Use this for Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, Overwatch 2, and fast multiplayer shooters. Set textures to Medium or High, shadows to Low, effects to Low, ambient occlusion to Off or Low, motion blur to Off, and ray tracing to Off. Use native resolution if your GPU can maintain the monitor refresh rate. Nvidia Reflex or Radeon Anti-Lag 2 should be enabled when supported.
Balanced 1440p profile
This is the sweet spot for most good gaming PCs. Choose High textures, Medium shadows, Medium volumetrics, High anisotropic filtering, ambient occlusion on Medium, reflections on Medium, and DLSS or FSR Quality. Leave ray tracing off unless the benchmark shows at least 20 percent performance headroom. Cap the game at a stable value such as 90, 120, or 141 FPS rather than allowing constant swings.
Visual-first 4K profile
Use High textures, High geometry, High shadows, and ray tracing selectively. Set DLSS or FSR Quality first, then Balanced if the GPU cannot hold 60 FPS. Disable path tracing before disabling all ray tracing; standard reflections or shadows often deliver more visible value for a smaller cost. A stable 60 FPS with good frame pacing looks dramatically better than an unstable 80 FPS that collapses into the 40s.
| Profile | Textures | Upscaling | Ray Tracing | Frame Cap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Competitive 1080p | Medium/High | Native | Off | Refresh rate minus 3 FPS |
| Balanced 1440p | High | DLSS/FSR Quality | Off or selective | 90–141 FPS |
| Visual-first 4K | High | Quality/Balanced | Selective | 60–120 FPS |
How to Test Smooth Performance Properly
Do not judge a setting from the first five seconds after loading a save. Walk through a busy area for at least two minutes, trigger combat, rotate the camera quickly, and revisit the same route after changing one option. Watch the 1% low FPS and frame-time graph, not just the average. A game averaging 100 FPS with 1% lows of 42 feels worse than one averaging 85 FPS with lows of 70.
Use tools such as MSI Afterburner with RivaTuner Statistics Server, Nvidia FrameView, or AMD Adrenalin’s performance overlay. Monitor GPU utilization, CPU utilization, VRAM, system RAM, temperature, and frame time. If VRAM is full and textures stream late, lower textures one step. If the GPU reaches 83–88°C and clocks fluctuate, improve case airflow before cutting image quality. Shader compilation stutter may require a game restart or a completed shader cache; endlessly changing settings can make testing less reliable.
Finally, save a known-good profile before experimenting. The best graphics settings for max FPS are the ones that survive a crowded firefight, a new open-world district, and a long session without hitching. For older or poorly optimized games, our guides to Filament performance settings and Far Cry 2 PC requirements show why engine-specific tweaks can matter more than a single universal preset.
For official compatibility details, check the Steam store hardware requirements, Nvidia DLSS documentation, AMD Adrenalin software page, and Intel XeSS information. Start with Quality upscaling, High textures, Medium shadows and volumetrics, ray tracing off, and a sensible FPS cap. That profile delivers the smoothest result for the widest range of good gaming PCs.