FPS Optimization Guides for PC
Technical guides with real FPS impact, backed by public benchmarks. Find out which settings to enable, which to lower — and exactly how much you'll gain with your GPU.
Choose your game
The Last of Us Part I
The Last of Us Part I's PC port launched with serious optimization issues: shader compilation stuttering, brutal VRAM consumption, and inconsistent performance. After several patches, the game is playable on modest hardware if you configure the right settings. This guide covers the recommendations that appear in at least 3 technical sources and connects each setting to the estimated FPS gain on your hardware.
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 remains, after several years of patches and the Phantom Liberty expansion, one of the most demanding and graphically rich PC games on the market. The good news: thanks to its full support for DLSS, FSR 3, and XeSS, it's perfectly playable even on mid-range hardware if configured correctly. This guide covers the settings that give the best FPS/visual quality ratio based on data from Digital Foundry, Hardware Unboxed, and community consensus.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Red Dead Redemption 2 is generally well optimized for PC after the initial patches — but it offers over 40 individual graphics settings and the difference between the right and wrong configuration is enormous: from 45 to 75 FPS on the same GPU. This guide covers the settings with the best FPS/visual quality ratio and the most important decision in the game: Vulkan vs DirectX 12.
Escape from Tarkov
Tarkov is famous for its poor performance. It's not an optimized AAA — it's an early access game since 2016 with a heavily modified Unity engine that stresses the CPU like no other shooter on the market. The good news: with the right settings you can go from 30 to 60+ FPS without changing hardware. The bad news: in Streets of Tarkov and Lighthouse, no setting will save you from CPU bottleneck if your processor is old.
Monster Hunter Wilds
Monster Hunter Wilds had a troubled launch in February 2025: brutal stuttering in towns and drastic drops during sandstorms. After patches 1.1 and 1.2 (May 2025) performance improved significantly, but it remains a demanding game. This guide covers the settings that give the best FPS/visual quality ratio with real benchmark data from post-patch results.
Black Myth: Wukong
Black Myth: Wukong is one of the most demanding games ever released on PC, built on Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite and Lumen running at full tilt. At its August 2024 launch, even an RTX 4090 struggled to maintain 60 FPS at 4K on maximum settings. The key to enjoying it on mid-range hardware is disabling Lumen and leaning on upscaling — those two changes can literally double your FPS.
Hogwarts Legacy
Hogwarts Legacy arrived in February 2023 as one of the worst PC ports of that year — a stunning Unreal Engine 4 game capable of pushing even an RTX 4090 to its limits in certain areas. The core problem is twofold: heavy CPU load in Hogsmeade from NPC simulation, and Ray Tracing with an absolutely brutal performance cost. With the right settings, however, it runs perfectly well on mid-range hardware.
Alan Wake 2
Remedy's Alan Wake 2 is the first AAA game designed around Path Tracing as its primary rendering mode, making it the most demanding title in history for mid-range hardware. Without DLSS or FSR active, it's practically unplayable on any GPU below an RTX 4080. The good news: with the right configuration and upscaling enabled, even an RTX 4060 Ti can deliver a smooth and visually impressive 1080p experience.
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl
STALKER 2 launched in November 2024 as one of the most problematic PC releases in recent years, built on Unreal Engine 5. A combination of Lumen, Nanite, and an extremely CPU-heavy NPC AI system created a perfect storm of stuttering, frame rate drops, and crashes. Multiple patches have improved the situation, but it still requires careful configuration to run well.
Starfield
Starfield is actually reasonably well optimized compared to its reputation — Bethesda's Creation Engine 2 maintains stable frame rates in space and on planets. The real problem is in cities: New Atlantis, Neon, and Akila are designed so densely that they saturate any CPU in their central areas. With the right settings, the difference between 40 and 70 FPS is very real.
Fortnite
Fortnite (Chapter 5) runs on Unreal Engine 5 and offers two radically different rendering modes: DirectX 12 with Nanite and Lumen for visual quality, and Performance Mode (DX11) for maximum frames. For competitive play at 144+ FPS, Performance Mode is practically mandatory. This guide covers the most impactful settings to maximize your framecount without sacrificing competitive viability.
Valorant
Valorant is, by far, the best-optimized competitive shooter on the market. Riot Games designed the game explicitly to run on low-end hardware: a GTX 1050 Ti can hit 60+ FPS stably. 95% of optimizations are CPU-side, not GPU. This guide focuses on the settings that actually matter for high framerate play (144-240+ FPS) in competitive.
Counter-Strike 2
Counter-Strike 2 migrated to Source 2 in 2023 and while the game looks better, performance regressed compared to CS:GO on the same hardware. CS2 is notoriously CPU-intensive, especially on maps with dense foliage and during volumetric smoke grenades. With the right settings you can recover much of those lost FPS and reach the high framerates needed for competitive play.
Elden Ring
Elden Ring is generally a decent PC port from FromSoftware, but it has one well-known issue: the game's physics are tied to framerate and the engine has a native 60 FPS cap. Unlocking higher framerates or fixing frame pacing requires third-party tools. Beyond that, the game responds well to standard graphics adjustments and an RTX 3060 can maintain stable 60 FPS at Ultra.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3's 2022 Next-Gen update added ray tracing and new visual effects — but also introduced performance issues that many users didn't have with the original version. This guide covers both scenarios: how to get the most out of the Next-Gen version with DLSS/FSR, and why many players prefer the classic pre-NG version for better performance on mid-range hardware.
Grand Theft Auto V
GTA V has been on the market since 2013 but remains one of the most customizable PC ports ever made. The PC version has dozens of individual settings, allowing very fine-grained performance control. The game uses DirectX 11 with no native DLSS support, though mods add FSR 2. The biggest catch: two settings (MSAA and Extended Distance Scaling/Grass Quality) can consume over 50% of your GPU budget on their own.
Minecraft
Minecraft Java Edition is one of the most-played games in the world and also one of the worst-optimized by default. It's an entirely CPU-bound game: the GPU barely works, but the chunk system and world logic saturate the CPU at medium-to-high render distances. The good news: with the right mods (Sodium, Iris, Lithium) the game can run 5-10x faster than vanilla. This guide covers both vanilla optimization and the mod route.
Apex Legends
Apex Legends runs on a modified version of Valve's Source engine, giving it a very optimizable base. With the right settings, mid-range hardware can reach stable 144 FPS. The game supports DLSS and FSR natively. The main performance challenge occurs during hot-drops, where high player density creates a CPU bottleneck. This guide covers the settings for maximum competitive FPS.
Call of Duty: Warzone
Call of Duty: Warzone uses the IW8 engine from Infinity Ward with DirectX 12 rendering. The game supports DLSS, FSR, and XeSS natively and has dozens of separate quality settings. The most well-known issue is massive RAM consumption (16 GB real minimum) and VRAM problems with On-Demand Texture Streaming. Shadow Map Resolution and the texture system are the critical performance points.
League of Legends
League of Legends is one of the most-played games in the world and one of the best-optimized that exists. Hardware requirements are extremely low: even integrated graphics can run it. The bottleneck is almost always the CPU, especially during 5v5 teamfights with many simultaneous visual effects. This guide focuses on how to reach and maintain stable 144-240+ FPS in competitive play.
Baldur's Gate 3
Baldur's Gate 3 uses Larian Studios' Divinity Engine 4, with a very high level of visual detail for an RPG. The game supports DLSS and FSR (added in post-launch patches) and has granular settings. The most well-known problem is Act 3 (the city of Baldur's Gate), which has a severe CPU bottleneck due to NPC, dialogue, and urban geometry density. Acts 1 and 2 outdoor areas are more GPU-demanding.
Rust
Rust runs on Unity Engine and has a well-earned reputation as one of the worst-optimized games on the market relative to its visual quality. Populated servers generate a significant CPU bottleneck. The good news is that settings have enormous impact: Object Quality is the most important setting and can radically change FPS. With the right configuration, mid-range hardware can achieve a playable experience.
Rainbow Six Siege
Rainbow Six Siege uses Ubisoft's AnvilNext engine and is one of the most popular tactical shooters on the market. The game is extraordinarily well-optimized for competitive play — it's possible to reach 300+ FPS on mid-range hardware with the right configuration. The most important and unique setting in Siege is Render Scaling: Ubisoft recommends 85-90% as the optimal performance-to-image-quality balance. LOD Quality and Shadow Quality complete the main optimizations.
Helldivers 2
Helldivers 2 is a visually impressive game with volumetric lighting, explosion effects, and highly detailed environments. It's one of the most GPU-demanding games of its generation. DLSS and FSR are practically mandatory to achieve stable 60 FPS on mid-to-high-range hardware. The biggest performance enemies are Shadow Quality, Bloom, and Volumetric Fog, which have disproportionate GPU costs. Large battles with many enemies also cause notable FPS drops.
ARK: Survival Ascended
ARK: Survival Ascended is the ARK remake in Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen, Nanite, and Ray Tracing. It's one of the most GPU-demanding games on the market alongside Cyberpunk 2077 with RT. An RTX 4090 can drop below 60 FPS at Epic settings. The key is two critical changes: disabling Lumen (real-time global illumination) and using DLSS+FrameGen. With these changes, the game is perfectly playable on high-mid-range hardware.
Forza Horizon 6
Forza Horizon 6 launches in great shape on PC with full DLSS 4, FSR 4 and XeSS 2.1 support, plus Ray-Traced Global Illumination (RTGI) and RT reflections. Its built-in benchmark lets you tune settings precisely, and most options scale very well. This guide compiles recommendations from Wccftech, TechSpot, DSOGaming and the official Forza support docs, mapping every setting to the FPS gain you'll see on your hardware.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
Space Marine 2 runs on Saber Interactive's Swarm Engine, built to push hundreds of Tyranids on screen at once. That's both its party trick and its curse: the game is far more CPU-bound than GPU-bound, even on flagship graphics cards. Here are the settings that actually move the needle, whether you're in Campaign, Operations, or Eternal War PvP.
Marvel Rivals
Marvel Rivals is a 6v6 hero shooter built on Unreal Engine 5, with Lumen global illumination, destructible environments, and more than 40 heroes with very flashy abilities. That technical ambition comes at a cost: in competitive mode what matters is keeping FPS high and stable so you don't lose reaction duels against Spider-Man, Iron Fist, or Psylocke, so this guide prioritizes smoothness and visual clarity over graphical spectacle.
Battlefield 6
Battlefield 6 runs on a new iteration of the Frostbite engine built for matches of up to 64 players with environmental destruction and very open maps. Unlike a corridor shooter, the CPU here genuinely suffers in large fights with vehicles, smoke, and structures collapsing simultaneously, so tweaking graphics alone isn't enough: you also need to watch texture streaming and 1% low stability, which is what you actually feel in a mid-range firefight.
Diablo IV
Diablo IV runs on Blizzard's proprietary engine, heavily dependent on raw GPU power and, above all, on available VRAM. In cities like Kyovashad or during a Helltide with 20-30 players on screen, the game can generate CPU spikes from asset streaming and networking, but the usual bottleneck remains the graphics card and its video memory. With the right settings you can gain between 15% and 30% FPS without sacrificing much visual fidelity.
EA Sports FC 26
EA Sports FC 26 runs on Frostbite and, unlike a shooter or open-world game, doesn't need a powerful GPU to hit high FPS: the real challenge is frametime stability throughout a 90-minute match, especially during replays, goal celebrations, and full stadiums in Ultimate Team and Career. With these settings you'll lock in a rock-solid 60, 120, or even 144 FPS with no micro-stutter, which is what you actually feel playing online.
Gothic 1 Remake
Gothic 1 Remake rebuilds the Khorinis penal colony on Unreal Engine 5, with Lumen for global illumination, Nanite for the mining valley's dense vegetation, and virtual shadows across the entire open world. Being a recent 2026 release, there's no broad independent benchmark database or mature community consensus on optimal settings yet: this guide is based on the official requirements published by Alkimia Interactive/THQ Nordic and on the typical behavior of other open-world UE5 titles (shader compilation stutter, Lumen's high cost, Virtual Shadow Maps). We'll refine the FPS percentages as more community data and our own benchmarks become available.
Pragmata
Pragmata is Capcom's new sci-fi action-adventure title built on RE Engine, the same engine behind Resident Evil 4 Remake and Dragon's Dogma 2. Being a recent 2026 release, there aren't yet mass benchmarks or a broad community consensus on its PC performance. This guide is based on the official Steam requirements and on the typical behavior of RE Engine in previous Capcom titles (aggressive VRAM management with high textures, good upscaling support, possible CPU bottlenecks in dense scenes). We'll refine the percentages and recommendations as more real community data becomes available.
Subnautica 2
Subnautica 2 is an Early Access title (May 2026), so this guide relies on the official Steam requirements, the documented behavior of Unreal Engine 5 (the game switched from Unity to UE5 compared to the first entry), and early community impressions. There isn't yet a consolidated benchmark database like games with years of history have, so treat the percentages in this guide as reasonable estimates, not lab-measured figures. We'll keep updating the guide as more data emerges during Early Access.
007 First Light
007 First Light is IO Interactive's reimagining of James Bond's origin story, built on an evolution of the Glacier engine already familiar from the Hitman trilogy. The result is a stealth-action game with dense urban environments, heavily worked dynamic lighting, and espionage set-pieces packed with reactive-AI NPCs. Technically it inherits Glacier's strengths — solid DLSS, FSR, and XeSS support from day one — but also its usual Achilles' heel: shader compilation and asset streaming in open urban scenes. This guide covers the settings with the biggest performance impact without sacrificing the visual readability of stealth sequences.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach arrives on PC nine months after its PS5 launch, with the port handled by Nixxes, the studio behind Spider-Man, Tomb Raider, and Deus Ex ports. It runs on an updated version of the Decima engine (the same one behind Horizon Forbidden West) and inherits its reputation for scaling well on modest hardware. Sam Porter Bridges' open world is denser than in the first game, with dynamic weather (rain, snow, wind that erodes terrain), day/night cycles, and cargo-hauling zones that demand constant smoothness over uneven ground. The good news: there's no shader compilation stutter during gameplay and load times are just a few seconds.
Crimson Desert
Crimson Desert is Pearl Abyss's (creators of Black Desert) open-world action RPG, and it demands a lot from the GPU: ray-traced lighting enabled by default, dense vegetation in every region, and cities with dozens of simultaneous NPCs during mass combat scenes. The studio's proprietary engine prioritizes melee combat smoothness above all else, so the key to good performance isn't drastically lowering graphics quality — it's touching the right settings: NPC density, lighting, and the right upscaler.
Assassin's Creed Shadows
Assassin's Creed Shadows takes you to feudal Japan during the Sengoku period, alternating between Naoe's nimble stealth and Yasuke's forceful combat across castles, temples, and fields that change with the seasons. The Anvil engine renders extremely dense vegetation (especially autumn leaves and grass fields with real physics), global illumination with partially mandatory ray tracing in the player's hideout, and cities like Kyoto with high NPC density. It's demanding even for high-end GPUs if everything is set to Ultra, but it responds very well to selective tuning of shadows, vegetation, and upscaling.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
Black Ops 6 runs on an evolved version of the IW engine that shares its technical base with Warzone, but here the goal is different: in competitive multiplayer what matters is a high, stable framerate with minimal input latency, not maximizing visual detail. The campaign and Zombies are more graphically demanding and tolerate a more balanced setup better. This guide prioritizes the 144+ stable FPS competitive players are after, with specific notes for when things apply differently to the campaign.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II recreates 1403 medieval Bohemia on a very demanding CryEngine build: dense forests, endless farmland, and towns like Kuttenberg packed with NPCs running real-time simulated routines and schedules. Unlike many modern open worlds, load here doesn't depend only on the GPU — the social simulation engine and procedural vegetation weigh heavily on the processor. This guide helps you find the balance between visual fidelity and frame stability, both out in the open countryside and in the busiest urban areas.
Dune: Awakening
Dune: Awakening brings open-world survival to Arrakis, with dynamic sandstorms, worms crossing the desert, and buildable bases that persist on the map. Built on Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen for global illumination, the game splits load between GPU (desert rendering, reflections and lighting) and CPU (storm simulation, sand physics, asset streaming, and player syncing in busy PvP zones). This guide covers the settings with the biggest performance impact without sacrificing terrain readability, key to surviving both worms and other players in the Deep Desert.
Destiny 2
Destiny 2 runs on the Tiger Engine, Bungie's proprietary engine with more than a decade of evolution that still relies heavily on the CPU for physics, enemy AI, and networking rather than offloading that work to the GPU. It's a very well-optimized and lightweight game for its age, so almost any current rig runs it comfortably: the real challenge isn't "getting it playable," but squeezing out high, stable FPS (144+) for Crucible and Trials of Osiris, where input lag and frametime consistency matter more than average FPS. In raids and activities with many players and simultaneous effects (Gambit, raids, seasonal events), the CPU can become the bottleneck even with a powerful GPU to spare.
Warframe
Warframe runs on the Evolution Engine, a motor with more than a decade of accumulated optimizations that moves the game smoothly on virtually any PC. The real challenge isn't hitting playable FPS, it's holding high, stable rates when the screen fills with particles: chained Warframe abilities, enemy swarms in exterminate or defense missions, and the open worlds (Plains of Eidolon, Orb Vallis, Cambion Drift) with their volumetric fog and dense vegetation. This guide tunes the graphics settings that weigh most on the GPU without sacrificing the visual readability parkour and fast combat need.
Path of Exile 2
Path of Exile 2 combines a proprietary graphics engine with a dynamic global illumination system and an ability/physics simulator that scales poorly with enemy density. In town or transit zones the game flies, but in endgame maps with monster hordes, summoner builds running several active minions, or chained ability combos with explosions, framerate can tank even with GPU headroom to spare. The key to optimizing PoE2 isn't just lowering resolution: it's understanding which settings hit the CPU bottleneck and which relieve the GPU.
Monster Hunter: World
Monster Hunter: World is a 2018 port carrying Capcom's proprietary console-inherited engine, and it shows: with modern hardware you can easily clear 60 FPS in hunting zones like the Ancient Forest or the Rotten Vale, but a handful of poorly scaled options (Volume Rendering above all) can tank your framerate if you leave them on High without a second thought. This guide focuses on those specific options to maximize FPS without sacrificing the visual readability the hunt needs.
God of War
The PC port of God of War (2018) arrived in January 2022 with a reputation as one of the best PlayStation exclusive adaptations, in no small part thanks to the involvement of ex-Nixxes developers. Santa Monica Studio's proprietary engine drives melee combat with the Leviathan Axe, the dynamic fog and snow of Midgard's regions, and the seamless transitions into the Realm Between Realms with remarkably flexible graphics scaling. This guide covers which settings actually move the needle and how to squeeze the most performance without giving up the game's visual fidelity.
Resident Evil 4 Remake
Resident Evil 4 Remake rebuilds Leon Kennedy's journey through the Ganado-infested Spanish village with the RE Engine, running through the village, Duke Salazar's castle, and the military island. Capcom's engine handles fog, rain, and forest lighting smoothly, but it's demanding on VRAM at high Texture Quality and adds optional Ray Tracing (reflections and shadows) that spikes GPU cost. With the right settings you can hold stable FPS in both the village assault and the castle's dark interiors.
Elden Ring Nightreign
Elden Ring Nightreign inherits Elden Ring's proprietary engine, so it carries the same technical quirks: FPS locked at 60 and shader-compilation micro-stutter. The difference is pacing: roughly 40-minute expeditions with up to 3 players, a storm constantly pushing you into new zones, and night bosses with very dense particle effects that are where the biggest frame-time drops show up. This guide covers the settings that actually change the experience, since the graphics menu barely moves performance compared to the CPU and the SSD.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III
Modern Warfare III runs on the same IW engine as Warzone and Black Ops 6, but its load distribution differs by mode. The campaign (Operation 627) and classic 6v6 multiplayer are reasonably light since the maps are closed and mid-sized, with predictable texture streaming. Zombies mode is a different beast entirely: it's played on Urzikstan, an open DMZ-style map shared by dozens of players, with constant AI, extractions, and dynamic weather, which spikes asset streaming requests and VRAM usage well above multiplayer. This guide separates both scenarios so you can tune shadows, textures, and streaming for whatever you're actually playing.
Overwatch 2
Overwatch 2 runs on its proprietary engine inherited from the original Overwatch, one of the lightest and best-optimized shooters on the market: any entry-level GPU clears 100 FPS at 1080p on low settings. Here the conversation isn't about "making it playable," it's about squeezing out every possible FPS to lower input lag in competitive mode, where the difference between 144 and 240+ FPS shows up in every headshot and every ability dodge. This guide prioritizes the settings that affect smoothness and visual clarity for spotting enemies among the flashy effects of heroes like Genji, Sombra, or Kiriko.
Horizon Forbidden West
Horizon Forbidden West arrives on PC with the Decima engine, the same technology behind Death Stranding 2 and God of War, and inherits its reputation for scaling beautifully across a huge range of hardware. Exploring the Forbidden West, facing robotic machines like the Tremortusk, or diving through submerged ruins demands plenty of GPU power thanks to dense vegetation and machine effects, but with the right tweaks you can hold high FPS even on mid-range cards. This guide covers the highest-impact settings, upscaling, and the port's known issues.
Palworld
Palworld runs on Unreal Engine 5 and combines open-world survival with base management, where dozens of Pals work, craft, and fight in real time. The result is a game that starts out smooth playing solo and drops in FPS as soon as your base grows or you connect to a dedicated server with more players. Here are the settings that actually move the needle, separated from the ones that only change how things look.
Satisfactory
Satisfactory is one of the games that ages worst in performance as you progress, and it's not your GPU's fault. Coffee Stain built the title on Unreal Engine 5, with Nanite on rocks, cliffs, and conveyor belt pieces, and Lumen as an unofficially supported global illumination option. The real bottleneck shows up once your factory grows: every machine, every conveyor belt segment, and every fluid pipe is simulated individually on a high-priority CPU thread, so a Tier 4-5 base with tens of thousands of active objects can tank your framerate even with an RTX 4080 underneath. This guide covers the graphics settings that actually return FPS and what to expect from the CPU ceiling once your factory gets massive.
Lies of P
Lies of P transplants the soulslike formula into the steampunk city of Krat, sunk in dark Victorian decay and populated by increasingly aggressive puppet enemies. It runs on Unreal Engine 4 and, unlike other exponents of the genre, arrives on PC with notably solid optimization from day one: shader compilation ahead of the first level, good scaling on mid-range hardware, and simultaneous support for DLSS and FSR 2. Even so, there's room to squeeze extra frames without sacrificing combat readability, where precise parries demand input lag stay in check.
Dragon's Dogma 2
Dragon's Dogma 2 runs on RE Engine, the same engine behind Resident Evil 4 Remake and Street Fighter 6, but here Capcom pushes it to simulate the AI of dozens of NPCs and Pawns in real time inside the city of Vernworth. The result is a game that flies in open exteriors with almost any modern GPU, but drops to its knees at the CPU the moment you enter dense urban areas. Before touching anything, understand that here the limit isn't your graphics card.
Ready or Not
Ready or Not tests your rig in an unusual way: it isn't a reflex shooter where only raw FPS matters, but a tactical SWAT assault game where suspect, hostage, and teammate AI makes constant decisions (taking cover, surrendering, firing, panicking) while you move through highly detailed interiors with realistic lighting. The Unreal Engine splits the load between a CPU that struggles with pathfinding and behavior simulation, and a GPU that drowns under Global Illumination, dynamic shadows, and reflections in enclosed spaces. This guide helps you find the balance between FPS stability and the visual clarity you need to tell a weapon from a phone in a split second.
The First Descendant
The First Descendant is a free-to-play looter shooter built on Unreal Engine 5, with Lumen lighting and Nanite geometry in its environments. It's a demanding engine even at mid-range: co-op missions with several Descendants firing off abilities at once and fights against giant bosses spike particle and post-processing load well above normal exploration. This guide covers the settings with the biggest FPS impact without sacrificing combat readability.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is MachineGames' action-stealth adventure built on idTech 7, the same engine that powers Doom Eternal. Between tomb exploration full of traps, improvised melee combat, and stealth across open 1930s-set areas, the game inherits id Software's engine's reputation for outstanding optimization, but with one non-negotiable condition: ray tracing is baked into the renderer and can't be turned off, which raises the hardware floor needed to play smoothly.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice runs on an evolution of FromSoftware's proprietary engine used across the Dark Souls series, making it a lightweight game that runs smoothly on virtually any PC from the last decade. The challenge isn't squeezing out extra FPS, it's not breaking anything: Sekiro's combat depends on a Posture system and millisecond-precise parries against the grappling hook and enemies like Genichiro Ashina or the mini-bosses of Sengoku-era Japan. Here the priority is minimizing input lag and keeping the framerate stable, not maximizing visual detail.
Dark Souls III
Dark Souls III runs on an evolution of FromSoftware's proprietary engine, the same lineage as Dark Souls II and, later, Bloodborne and Elden Ring. It's a lightweight game for current hardware: any mid-range GPU from the last few years runs it smoothly at a stable 60 FPS at 1080p and even 1440p. The real challenge isn't raw power, it's understanding the port's quirks: a hard framerate cap inherited from consoles, an undemanding fog and lighting system, and a peer-to-peer online mode that penalizes playing above that limit. This guide covers how to squeeze out Lothric, boss fights against the likes of the Lord of Cinder or the Dancer of the Boreal Valley, and PvP invasions without compromising stability or online compatibility.
DOOM Eternal
DOOM Eternal runs on idTech 7, id Software's engine optimized to the last drop to sustain frantic combat at 200+ FPS even on mid-range hardware. Its smart VRAM management (texture streaming) and the absence of shader-compilation waits make it a rarity: a visually demanding shooter that barely needs any tuning to fly. Here's the optimal setup for chaining glory kills, chainsaw kills, and demons without dropping a single frame.
No Man's Sky
No Man's Sky (Hello Games) is an open-world space exploration game with procedural generation: every planet, creature, plant, and star system is calculated on the fly from mathematical algorithms, not pre-built assets. After nearly ten years of free updates (Waypoint, Worlds Part I and II, Voyagers...) the proprietary engine has gained DLSS, FSR, and XeSS support, an optional VR mode, and multiplayer with persistent bases, but it still carries CPU spikes from generating terrain in real time.
Valheim
Valheim is an Iron Gate AB Viking survival game on Unity with a retro-pixelated visual style that's deceptive: although technically a lightweight game, it suffers very specific FPS drops in two common situations — bases with lots of accumulated building pieces and dense forests with heavy vegetation. On modest hardware, with the right settings, it's perfectly playable at a stable 60 FPS even at 1080p with an entry-level GPU.
Remnant II
Remnant II is a Gunfire Games cooperative souls-like shooter that combines frenetic ranged combat with procedurally generated worlds and enemy hordes that put any CPU and GPU to the test. Built on Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen and Nanite pushed to the limit, it was one of the first major releases to fully exploit these technologies, which translated into very demanding performance at its 2023 debut. Later patches have smoothed the curve out quite a bit, but it remains one of the heaviest shooters in the catalog if you want high framerate in boss fights with particles and enemies on screen.
Returnal
Returnal drops you on the alien planet Atropos in a roguelike shooting loop that demands both reflexes and a CPU capable of sustaining waves of projectiles without stutters. Housemarque's port arrived on PC in 2023 with optional RT, DLSS/FSR/XeSS, and a very complete graphics menu, but it carries a known traversal stutter issue and a minimum CPU requirement of 8 threads that leaves older processors out. This guide helps you squeeze out FPS without sacrificing the bullet-hell's readability.
Terraria
Terraria is a 2D sandbox built on the XNA/FNA engine, so the graphics bar is extremely low: practically any GPU from the last decade runs it at your monitor's max FPS without breaking a sweat. This guide isn't about "raising graphics" because there's barely anything to raise here — it's about avoiding the game's real frame hitches: punctual drops in heavily explored Large worlds, boss fights with dozens of projectiles on screen, and multiplayer desyncs. If your Terraria is stuttering, the problem is almost never the graphics card.
Dead by Daylight
Dead by Daylight runs on Unreal Engine 4, an engine that by now (with over 40 killers, dozens of maps, and layers of effects accumulated over eight years of updates) carries a fair amount of technical debt in the form of shader compilation and asset streaming. It's not a game that demands a powerful GPU to hit high FPS, but it is sensitive to stutters when loading maps, generators, and skill effects like Nemesis, Alien, or whichever new chapter just dropped. This guide focuses on eliminating those stutters, stabilizing 1% lows (crucial in a 1v4 game where a stutter can cost you a chase), and squeezing out extra FPS without losing the readability of auras, generators, and other survivors' health states.
Deep Rock Galactic
Deep Rock Galactic runs on Unreal Engine 4, but with a voxelized, destructible terrain engine custom-built by Ghost Ship Games, which makes it much more CPU-demanding than its "low poly" look suggests. Every cave is generated and destroyed in real time, so performance depends both on how many dwarves, bugs, and dynamic lighting are on screen and on how much terrain has been dug out. It's a game that scales reasonably well on modest GPUs, but suffers frametime spikes during big waves (swarms, Mactera, Molly events) and massive excavations like "gold rush" runs. This guide covers the settings that actually move the FPS needle without wrecking cave readability, plus the truth about (limited) upscaling support.
DayZ
DayZ runs on Enfusion/Real Virtuality, an engine inherited from the ArmA series that was never designed for the massive open-world multiplayer it supports today. The persistent simulation of zombies, animals, vehicles, loot, and physics forces the engine to constantly calculate server and client logic on a single main thread, which turns the CPU (and specifically per-core performance) into the game's real bottleneck, far more so than the GPU. This guide focuses on the settings that actually move the needle: object/zombie count, view distance, terrain grid, and network configuration, plus the pure graphics settings that do affect GPU load.
Phasmophobia
Phasmophobia is a cooperative ghost-hunting game developed by Kinetic Games on Unity with the built-in render pipeline (not URP or HDRP), placing it among the least graphically demanding multiplayer titles on the market today. The real bottleneck isn't polygon load or advanced lighting effects, but the 3D positional audio engine (essential for identifying the ghost by sound), ghost AI, and, if you play in VR, the extra cost of rendering two stereoscopic views. With the Ascension update (2024), large maps like Sunny Meadows Mental Institution and Camp Woodwind added a lot more geometry and interactive objects, which has made frame drops noticeable that didn't exist before on the classic map roster. This guide focuses on real settings: what reduces CPU load in audio and physics, which maps are heavier, and how to optimize the VR experience without sacrificing gameplay based on sound and visual detail (dust, footprints, temperature).
Rocket League
Rocket League runs on a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 3, a lightweight engine by today's standards that Psyonix has spent nearly a decade optimizing to prioritize smoothness over visual fidelity. At the competitive level, the game runs almost entirely on the CPU: ball physics, car-to-car collisions, and netcode depend on single-thread calculations that cap FPS long before the GPU becomes the bottleneck. This guide is aimed at those looking to push past the 240 FPS limit with maximum frametime stability, not at those wanting "more graphics": every setting here is evaluated for its impact on input lag and consistency, not aesthetics. We cover the settings that actually move the needle, the differences between Windowed/Fullscreen/Borderless mode, and why high-end graphics hardware barely matters in this game.
Halo Infinite
Halo Infinite runs on Slipspace, 343 Industries' proprietary engine built to combine Zeta Halo's semi-open-world campaign with a free-to-play competitive multiplayer that must sustain a stable 60 FPS even on modest hardware. The engine mainly demands memory bandwidth and VRAM due to its texture streaming system and the ring's dynamic geometry, while CPU load spikes in Big Team Battle from the number of players, vehicles, and simultaneous physics on screen. It's relatively lenient on GPU compared to other modern shooters, since the game was originally built to run on Xbox One. This guide covers the settings that actually move the needle in Arena and BTB, the real state of upscaling support (FSR 2.0 yes, DLSS not officially), and known technical issues with the PC port, like shader compilation stuttering.
Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered
Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered came to PC courtesy of Nixxes Software, the studio specializing in PlayStation ports, running on an adapted version of the Insomniac Engine. The game combines a dense open world (Manhattan rebuilt with extremely high building and NPC detail) with real-time ray tracing for reflections and shadows, which spikes GPU load in areas with lots of glass. High-speed swing traversal forces constant asset streaming, so performance depends both on graphics power and on a fast CPU and storage. This guide covers the settings that free up the most FPS without sacrificing the visual readability of combat and swinging, how to make the most of DLSS/FSR/XeSS, and known technical issues with the port.
War Thunder
War Thunder is Gaijin Entertainment's free-to-play vehicular combat simulator, with thousands of operational planes, tanks, helicopters, and ships spread across battles of up to 32 players. It runs on the Dagor Engine, a proprietary engine Gaijin has been polishing since 2012, capable of scaling from old integrated graphics up to high-end rigs with ray tracing. The real demand isn't in static graphics, but in vehicle physics simulation, streaming of huge maps (some over 100 km² in Air Simulator mode), and massive ground battles where dozens of tanks, smoke, explosions, and destructible-physics impacts saturate the CPU. This guide covers the settings that actually move the needle for FPS and frametime stability, in Arcade as well as Realistic and Simulator modes.
Arma 3
Arma 3 runs on Real Virtuality 4, a 2013 engine designed for large-scale military simulation, not for squeezing modern GPUs. Its real bottleneck is the CPU: procedural terrain, AI, vehicle physics, and above all the SQF scripting of missions and mods run largely on a single thread. Community servers like Antistasi, King of the Hill, or Exile add layers of scripts that can tank the framerate even if you have an RTX 4090 underneath. This guide focuses on getting the most out of your single-thread CPU, tuning the graphics parameters that do depend on GPU/VRAM (shadows, vegetation, view distance), and understanding why "more GPU" is almost never the answer in Arma 3.
Portal
Portal (2007) runs on an early version of the Source Engine, the same engine as Half-Life 2, optimized almost two decades ago for very modest hardware. Today any modern CPU or integrated GPU runs it at hundreds of frames per second effortlessly, so this guide isn't about "making it run better" but about avoiding the problems that appear precisely when it runs too well. The classic Source engine has several routines tied to framerate instead of real time, which causes physics and audio bugs if not properly capped. We cover the correct FPS limit, multi-core rendering inherited from the Source era, and the settings that actually matter for stability and input latency, not "more graphics."
Team Fortress 2
Team Fortress 2 runs on Source Engine, a 2007 engine that prioritizes physics simulation and netcode over the graphics department, so its hardware demand is minimal even for entry-level GPUs. Its real ceiling isn't the raw FPS any modern card can deliver, but frametime stability during massive 24-player fights with particles, blood, and class effects (Pyro's flames, Spy's teleports, Soldier's rockets) saturating the screen. TF2's competitive community has spent over a decade optimizing the game far beyond the options menu, using console commands and dedicated configs to squeeze every millisecond of input lag. This guide covers both the standard graphics settings and the console configs that actually make a difference on this engine, plus a clarification of what you CANNOT do in a game with no modern upscaling support.
Left 4 Dead 2
Left 4 Dead 2 runs on a modified version of Valve's Source Engine, the same engine as Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source, optimized to render hundreds of simultaneous enemies with individual ragdoll physics. Despite being over 15 years old, the engine is still demanding in very specific scenarios: not in texture resolution or modern lighting effects, but in the number of active entities on screen and the load from Steam Workshop mods. Any GPU from the last decade runs the game at 200+ FPS under normal conditions, so the real bottleneck is almost always the CPU and, to a lesser extent, storage when loading custom campaigns with heavy assets. This guide focuses on the settings that really make a difference: AI Director horde management, the impact of Workshop mods, and the network/tickrate configuration that affects perceived performance in co-op and versus matches.
Euro Truck Simulator 2
Euro Truck Simulator 2 runs on SCS Software's proprietary engine, evolved over more than a decade to move a gigantic European map with dozens of regional DLCs. Unlike a modern shooter, its bottleneck usually isn't raw GPU power, but geometry management at long distances, AI-simulated traffic, and constant terrain streaming while driving at highway speed. The ProMods mod, which expands the base map with thousands of extra kilometers and objects, completely changes the game's performance profile. This guide covers the settings that really move the needle in ETS2, both in vanilla play and with mods, and what to expect in the community multiplayer TruckersMM.
PAYDAY 2
PAYDAY 2 runs on Diesel Engine, Starbreeze's own engine that was already not exactly cutting-edge back in 2011 and has never received a deep rewrite despite over a decade of expansions, heists, and accumulated assets. Graphically it's a modest game that any current GPU runs effortlessly, but its performance depends much more on the CPU and a single execution thread than on graphics hardware. Maps with massive enemy AI, especially on high difficulties like Death Wish or Death Sentence, generate CPU usage spikes that no graphics card can compensate for. This guide focuses on isolating those real engine bottlenecks, the graphics configuration that does matter, and the role (for better and worse) of unofficial mods like SuperBLT.
Sid Meier's Civilization VI
Civilization VI runs on a Firaxis proprietary engine built for hex-grid boards, many units on screen, and dozens of AI systems calculating in parallel each turn. Unlike a shooter, hardware here isn't measured in rendering FPS but in how long the game takes to process the other civilizations' turn: that "turn time" is the real bottleneck, especially in Huge games with 10-12 civilizations from around turn 150 onward. This guide covers both the graphics settings that do affect map framerate and, more importantly, the options that drastically reduce the wait time between turns.
Metro Exodus
Metro Exodus runs on 4A Games' 4A Engine, a proprietary engine that already stood out at its original 2019 launch for volumetric lighting and semi-open levels heavily loaded with vegetation and particles. The Enhanced Edition (2021) went much further: it completely replaced the traditional lighting pipeline with mandatory Ray Tracing Global Illumination (RT GI), becoming one of the market's first "RT-only" games, with no option to disable ray tracing. This spikes GPU requirements even at low resolutions, especially in semi-open stretches like the Caspian, where draw distance and sand/storm simulation saturate both GPU and CPU. This guide covers how to tell the original version apart from the Enhanced one, which settings have a real FPS impact, and how to get the most out of DLSS/FSR/XeSS without sacrificing the image quality that defines the game.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Shadow of the Tomb Raider closes out Lara Croft's reboot trilogy with the Foundation engine pushed to its limit: dense jungles in Peru and Mexico with volumetric vegetation that sways with the wind, underground tombs lit almost entirely by Lara's torch, and one of the earliest shadow ray tracing implementations, added via a post-launch patch. It's a game that punishes the CPU in open jungle zones due to the sheer number of simulated plant objects, and punishes the GPU indoors because of dynamic lighting and volumetric effects. With the right tuning of vegetation, shadows, and the resolution-scaling options (including DLSS in the updated versions), it's perfectly playable at a stable 60 FPS even on mid-range hardware like an RTX 3050.
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection
Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection arrived on PC in October 2022 as Naughty Dog's first port in collaboration with Iron Galaxy, and its launch was rocky: massive crashes forced a delay of the planned simultaneous console release and several stability patches followed in the weeks after. Once polished, the game relies on a proprietary engine well-optimized for asset streaming, with ray-traced reflections that look especially striking in the water and snow sequences featuring Nathan Drake and Chloe Frazer. This guide covers the settings with the biggest performance impact, how to get the most out of DLSS/FSR without losing sharpness, and the fixes for the technical issues that still affect some configurations.
God of War Ragnarök
God of War Ragnarök arrived on PC in 2024 confirming something already suspected since the 2018 port: Santa Monica Studio knows how to adapt its proprietary engine to PC architecture better than almost any other PlayStation studio. This is, simply put, one of Sony's best ports to date, without the endless shader-compilation hangs or the launch bugs that plagued other exclusives. The engine, evolved since 2018, adds ray tracing in reflections and shadows, much denser geometry in settings like Asgard, and the full modern trio of upscalers: DLSS 3 with Frame Generation, FSR 3.1, and XeSS. The result is a game that scales with unusual elegance from a GTX 1060 all the way up to an RTX 4090, as long as you know which settings to touch first.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
Shadow of the Erdtree runs on the same internal engine as base Elden Ring, so it inherits its hard 60 FPS cap and its lack of advanced scaling options in the graphics menu. The real difference lies in the new map, the Land of Shadow: forest zones with much denser vegetation, enemies spawning in larger waves, and bosses with more aggressive particle effects than the base game. That translates into occasional frametime drops you wouldn't see in Limgrave or Caelid, even with a GPU capable of a stable 60 FPS the rest of the time. Here are the settings that actually move the needle without sacrificing combat readability.
Star Wars Outlaws
Star Wars Outlaws, developed by Massive Entertainment on the Snowdrop engine, is one of the most demanding 2024 titles in terms of hardware requirements. Unlike almost any other open-world game, Ray Tracing here is NOT optional: it's mandatory across every graphics preset, including the lowest, because the game's global illumination system depends on it to render shadows and indirect lighting. This means even relatively recent mid-range GPUs struggle to maintain a stable 60 FPS, and cards with no RT support are directly excluded from running the game. This guide covers the settings with the biggest real performance impact, upscaling techniques (practically essential), and the port's known technical issues.
Avowed
Avowed is Obsidian Entertainment's first-person action RPG set in Eora, the world of Pillars of Eternity, and it's one of the first major releases built entirely on Unreal Engine 5. The engine brings dynamic global illumination with Lumen and virtualized geometry with Nanite, resulting in dense forests, caves with realistic reflections, and very striking magic effects, but also the usual UE5 toll: shader compilation, VRAM demands, and framerate drops in heavily vegetated zones. This guide covers the settings with the best FPS/visual-quality ratio tested in the Living Lands and the rest of the game's regions.
Battlefield 2042
Battlefield 2042 brings DICE's 128-player chaos to Frostbite with environmental destruction, massive vehicles, and dynamic weather events like tornadoes and sandstorms. After a 2021 launch marked by low server tick rates, network bugs, and a lack of content, the game has received seasons and corrective patches that have notably stabilized performance. Even so, it remains one of the market's most CPU-demanding shooters: 128-player All-Out Warfare matches generate a simulation and networking load no previous Battlefield had reached before. This guide covers the settings that really make a difference in FPS without sacrificing battlefield readability.
Assassin's Creed Mirage
Assassin's Creed Mirage marks Ubisoft Bordeaux's return to the series' stealth roots, leaving behind the RPG scale of Odyssey and Valhalla to offer a densely reconstructed but more compact 9th-century Baghdad. It runs on an evolved version of the Anvil engine, and although the map is notably smaller than its recent predecessors, NPC density in souks, alleyways, and residential districts is much higher, which shifts a large share of the CPU load to the foreground even on modest configurations. The rendering itself is reasonably efficient, so with the right settings it's possible to get solid performance even on entry-level GPUs like the RTX 3050.
Among Us
Among Us is, graphically, one of the lightest games out there: 2D sprites, static backdrops, and a Unity engine with barely any effects to demand from a GPU. In practice, any PC from the last ten years runs it at hundreds of FPS with no effort, even with integrated graphics. So this guide isn't about "how to raise graphics" — there's barely anything to touch — but about why Among Us sometimes runs badly despite being so light. The cause is almost never your GPU or CPU: it's usually the connection to the server (official or the host's), third-party overlays interfering with the process, or massive matches on large maps like Airship with many players and visual mods active at once.
Factorio
Factorio isn't a game measured in FPS in any meaningful way: its engine renders even enormous factories effortlessly, and the counter that actually matters is UPS (Updates Per Second, with a fixed target of 60). The frame rate rarely drops because Wube's engine is written in C++ and hand-optimized over more than a decade of early access; what does collapse in advanced games is UPS, and that isn't fixed by lowering graphics settings, but by redesigning the factory. This guide focuses on how to diagnose and cure simulation bottlenecks in megabases, not on shadow sliders.
Risk of Rain 2
Risk of Rain 2 is a third-person action roguelike with a low-poly art style, so in the first minutes of any run it runs effortlessly on practically any PC. The real problem appears later: as you stack items (Wisp, Ukelele with electric chaining, stacked area items, shield gems, etc.) the game's Unity engine starts generating hundreds of simultaneous projectiles, particle effects, and physics calculations per second. In "endless mode" or runs that go past 40-50 minutes, this becomes a massive single-thread CPU load that no GPU can compensate for. This guide focuses on identifying what's actually the bottleneck (CPU, not GPU) and which settings move the needle surgically without wrecking the visual readability of combat.
World of Tanks
World of Tanks has run on Core Engine for more than 15 years, Wargaming's internal evolution of the old BigWorld engine. It's one of the few competitive games where you literally choose the rendering engine from the graphics menu (Standard, Enhanced, or Ultra), not just a quality preset: each mode activates a different pipeline with very different DirectX requirements and GPU cost. It scales to an extreme degree, from Intel UHD integrated graphics up to high-end RTX cards, but the real bottleneck isn't always the GPU: with 15-vs-15 battles, the engine has to simulate projectile physics, terrain deformation, and collisions for up to 30 tanks at once, which loads the CPU quite a bit on large maps like Prokhorovka or Erlenberg.
Dota 2
Dota 2 runs on Source 2, an engine that's light in appearance but demanding at the moments that really matter: 10-hero team fights with illusions, summons, and ultimates all at once. Most players can maintain 200+ FPS on an empty map, but those numbers collapse right when they're needed most: in an Enigma Black Hole under a Faceless Void Chronosphere, surrounded by Naga Siren illusions and Lycan creeps. This guide focuses on optimizing exactly those spikes, not main menu performance.
The Sims 4
The Sims 4 runs on a proprietary Maxis engine that's more than 10 years old, and it shows: the game is practically single-thread despite EA having added partial multi-core support over the years. In practice, performance depends far more on your CPU's per-core frequency and on the state of your install (packs, Custom Content, mods) than on having a powerful GPU. The number one cause of FPS drops, stutter while building, and eternal load times isn't graphics: it's the buildup of thousands of unorganized Custom Content (CC) files, corrupted caches, and a neighborhood overloaded with simulated Sims. This guide focuses on cleaning up and optimizing that layer before touching any graphics setting.
Brawlhalla
Brawlhalla is a free-to-play platform fighter on a proprietary engine, graphically very basic (sprites and simple models, flat stages, no complex lighting effects). It's not a game that needs optimization in the classic sense: any PC from the last 8-10 years, including Intel or AMD iGPUs, runs it above 200 FPS with no effort. The real goal here isn't "looking good," it's minimizing input lag and maximizing frametime stability, because Brawlhalla uses rollback netcode and how input feels is directly tied to framerate and frametime consistency, not just to average FPS. This guide is meant for anyone competing in ranked 1v1/2v2 or wanting the lowest possible input lag.
Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
The PC port of Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales arrived in November 2023 with the seal of Nixxes Software, the same studio that had already polished Spider-Man Remastered a year earlier. It shows: the game launches with fewer shader-compilation hangs, more reliable resolution scaling, and a more stable ray tracing implementation than its predecessor. It runs on the same Insomniac Engine adapted to DirectX 12, but here the technical challenge is different: Miles moves through a snowy Harlem and New York on Christmas Eve, with dynamic snow accumulation on cars, streetlights, rooftops, and sidewalks calculated in real time. On top of that, Miles's own bioelectric powers — Venom Blast and Venom Punch — generate very dense full-screen electric particle effects during combat, one of the biggest frame consumers in the whole game.
PUBG: Battlegrounds
PUBG: Battlegrounds remains, almost a decade after its Steam Early Access launch (2017), one of the most demanding battle royales to optimize well. The Unreal Engine 4 engine (with a partial UE5 migration on Erangel since 2024, which added optional Lumen and Nanite) has to sustain up to 100 simultaneous players on maps as large as 8x8 km with terrain streaming, vehicles, ragdoll physics, and dense vegetation. The result is an unusually high CPU load for what the game offers graphically, especially in the first minutes of a match when all 100 players are still alive.
Sea of Thieves
Sea of Thieves uses a proprietary Rare engine whose biggest resource consumer isn't geometry or textures (the cel-shaded style keeps assets relatively light), but real-time water simulation: the ocean is calculated with real wave physics, not animated textures or cheap normal maps. This means performance drops noticeably during storms, Kraken/megalodon events, and Tall Tales with adverse weather, moments when the water mesh deforms with much higher resolution and frequency. On top of that, naval combat with several ships, cannon fire, and simultaneous explosions generates CPU spikes from physics and network sync.
Resident Evil Village
Resident Evil Village runs on RE Engine, Capcom's proprietary engine that since Resident Evil 7 has earned a reputation as one of the best-optimized in the industry: excellent scaling on modest hardware, near-instant loading times with SSD, and a baseline performance that rarely falls below expectations for its tier. Even so, Lady Dimitrescu's castle and its halls packed with gothic geometry, tapestries, and detailed statues, along with optional ray tracing in reflections and shadows, demand specific tweaks if you're aiming for stable 60 fps or want to push a high-refresh-rate panel.
Dying Light 2: Stay Human
Dying Light 2: Stay Human runs on Techland's C-Engine, an engine that combines high-speed parkour with a dynamic day/night cycle that completely changes GPU load: by day you have a dense open world in Villedor, at night waves of infected with active AI and more particles/lighting are added on screen. On top of that there's a ray tracing system (global illumination and reflections) that at launch (2022) was one of the most demanding in the catalog, capable of crushing the framerate even on high-end GPUs if enabled without judgment.
Garry's Mod
Garry's Mod runs on Source Engine, a 2006 engine that in theory any modern PC can run without breaking a sweat. The problem is that almost nobody plays GMod "clean": real performance depends on which Steam Workshop addons the server (or your client) has installed, how many physics props have piled up on the map, and how much Lua code runs every tick. A DarkRP or sandbox creative server with months of activity can bring an RTX 4080 to its knees just as easily as a GTX 1050, because the bottleneck isn't your GPU: it's the CPU processing physics and scripts.
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord isn't a game that suffers from the graphics engine itself, but from what you ask it to calculate: sieges and field battles with up to 1,000 units on screen, each running its own combat AI, pathfinding, and per-hit collision physics. That makes Bannerlord one of the titles in the catalog most dependent on a single fast CPU core, well ahead of the GPU.
Project Zomboid
Project Zomboid is an outlier in any FPS optimization list: it doesn't run on Unreal Engine or Unity, but on a proprietary engine from The Indie Stone written in Java, running inside a virtual machine (JVM). This means the real bottleneck is almost never the GPU, but the CPU (a single heavily loaded main thread) and the RAM allocated to Java. The real performance "monster" isn't the 2D isometric graphics, but the individual simulation of every zombie: pathfinding, line of sight, sound, and body state are calculated for every active zombie in the cells loaded around the player. In multiplayer the problem shifts to the server, which has to simulate zombies for every connected player at once.
Control
Control (Remedy Entertainment, 2019) remains, years later, one of the most demanding stress tests for any PC thanks to the Northlight Engine. It's not just a game with ray tracing: it's THE game Nvidia used to showcase what full ray tracing (reflections, contact shadows, transparent indirect lighting) and DLSS 2.0 meant in the same title. On top of that there's environmental destruction of the brutalist Federal Bureau of Control, with walls, ceilings, and furniture fragmenting in real time with simulated physics, plus Jesse Faden's telekinetic powers hurling debris around the Oldest House.
Fallout 4
Fallout 4 runs on the Creation Engine, the same Gamebryo-derived foundation Bethesda used for Skyrim, so it inherits both its virtues (a dense, persistent open world, unlimited mods) and its technical flaws. The engine is notoriously dependent on a single CPU core for world simulation, cell streaming, and the Havok physics engine, so a fast single-thread CPU matters more than a powerful GPU in most configurations. On top of that, Fallout 4 carries a problem inherited from the entire Gamebryo/Creation lineage: animation speed, object physics, and some quest triggers are mathematically tied to framerate. Going above 60 FPS without fixing this causes everything from NPCs walking in fast-forward to objects flying off or quests that fail to trigger correctly. This guide covers how to squeeze out real FPS without breaking the game, and how all of this coexists with the game's huge modding community, which can be your best ally or your worst performance enemy depending on how you manage it.
Cities: Skylines II
Cities: Skylines II is Colossal Order's city-management simulator that, in October 2023, was the star of one of the most technically troubled launches in recent PC gaming history: not even an RTX 4090 could sustain a stable 60 FPS in medium-to-large cities. The cause wasn't graphical, it was architectural: the game individually simulates every "cim" (citizen), with their own daily routine, job, vehicle, and route calculated in real time, instead of aggregating traffic and population the way the original Cities: Skylines did. This guide covers what settings actually move the needle in 2026, after several rounds of Colossal Order optimization patches throughout 2024 and 2025.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Hollow Knight: Silksong is a hand-drawn 2D metroidvania on Unity, a direct successor to the original Hollow Knight in terms of technical demand: practically none. Team Cherry is a small studio that prioritizes a clean PC port without complex graphical flourishes, so this game runs at hundreds of FPS on almost any PC with a dedicated GPU from the last 8-10 years. There's no ray tracing here, no upscaling, no volumetric-shadow sliders to squeeze: the real optimization work is about locking in a stable, consistent framerate, because Silksong's combat demands frame-perfect parries, dashes, and jumps where any microstutter can cost you an unfair death.
Age of Empires IV
Age of Empires IV runs on an evolution of Relic's Essence Engine, the same technological lineage as Company of Heroes. While it isn't a visually demanding game for the GPU, its massive sieges with hundreds of units (soldiers, archers, battering rams, trebuchets, siege towers) generate CPU load spikes from pathfinding, collision, and simultaneous order calculations, especially in 4v4 matches with high population. The competitive 1v1 scene prioritizes a stable, consistent framerate over visual effects, since micro-stutters during a decisive battle can cost you the match. This guide covers the settings that actually move the needle in AoE IV, both for competitive players chasing a stable 144+ FPS and for those who want to enjoy the historical campaigns without frame drops in large battles.
Sons of the Forest
Sons of the Forest is Endnight Games's survival horror built on Unity, a direct sequel to The Forest. Its performance challenge doesn't come from 4K textures or ray tracing, but from an extremely dense generated forest: thousands of individual trees, bushes, and shrubs simulated with real-time wind physics, plus a building system where every log, rope, and panel placed by the player is calculated as its own physical structure. On top of that, there's the mutant and cannibal AI, which runs patrol, ambush, and flee routines considerably more complex than the average survival-game enemy. The game launched in Early Access in February 2023 with uneven performance (stutters, poor VRAM management, CPU bottlenecks in forested zones) that Endnight steadily polished through the 1.0 release in 2024. Even so, it remains a game demanding on the CPU due to vegetation and physics simulation, more than on raw GPU power.
Hades II
Hades II is Supergiant Games's isometric action roguelike, with hand-drawn 2D art and a proprietary engine (the same technological lineage as Hades I). Graphically it's a lightweight game: there's no 3D geometry to render, no complex dynamic shadows, no ray tracing. The real bottleneck isn't texture resolution or lighting, but the number of sprites, particles, and effects that pile up on screen during advanced fights, especially when you chain Boons that generate projectiles, summons, or chained effects from several gods at once. The game was in Early Access from May 2024 with frequent performance patches, and reached version 1.0 with a solid optimization baseline inherited from Supergiant's strong technical reputation with the first Hades.
Lethal Company
Lethal Company is the indie cooperative horror phenomenon created by a single developer, Zeekerss, on Unity. While the engine is lightweight by design, the game leans heavily on a very demanding positional 3D audio system for detecting monsters by sound (similar to Phasmophobia) and on procedurally generated interiors created every match, lit almost exclusively by your flashlight. Being a solo-developer project, it doesn't have the same optimization polish as a large studio, and much of the bottleneck comes from how Unity handles procedural generation, audio, and Thunderstore mods, not demanding graphics. This guide helps you get stable FPS without sacrificing your ability to hear (and see) what's hunting you.
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon runs on an evolution of FromSoftware's internal engine, the same one powering Elden Ring, but adapted to a radically different pace: 3D mech combat with constant boosting, evasive dashes, vertical flight, and a camera reacting to sharp turns in fractions of a second. Unlike a traditional Souls game, here the engine has to sustain a high framerate while moving entire combat arenas around the player at high speed, on top of rendering massive bosses like Balteus or the Ibis with dozens of simultaneous projectiles, particles, and explosion effects. The result is a game more CPU-demanding than it looks, with clear frametime spikes during geometry streaming in open missions and during boss fights' final phases with the most effect spam.
Horizon Zero Dawn
Horizon Zero Dawn arrived on PC in 2020 after Nixxes Software's work on Guerrilla Games' Decima engine, the same engine that powers Death Stranding. It's an open world dense with procedural vegetation, volumetric lighting, and extremely high-polygon machine models, so the CPU/GPU load split is more balanced than usual for a single-player game. The PC launch was rocky, with crashes from memory management and shader stuttering, but Nixxes' later patches left the port in a very solid, well-scaling state. Today it's a good example of a port "made with care," with dynamic resolution scaling options and support for several upscaling technologies.
THE FINALS
THE FINALS is one of the most demanding competitive shooters on the market, and it's no accident: its Unreal Engine-based engine with proprietary real-time destruction tech puts a physics and networking load on the CPU that few games match. Every building that collapses, every floor that gives way, and every wall that shatters is calculated and synced live for every player in the match. This makes THE FINALS an outlier among free-to-play shooters: a powerful GPU isn't enough, the processor matters far more than usual. Embark Studios has kept optimizing the game every season, but the destructible nature of the environment remains its core technical bottleneck. This guide focuses on the settings that actually make a difference for sustaining 144+ FPS without sacrificing combat readability.
Far Cry 6
Far Cry 6 brings Ubisoft's open-world formula to Yara, a fictional Caribbean island rebuilt with an evolved version of the Dunia Engine. The engine drives extremely dense tropical vegetation, simulated wildlife, real HDR, and volumetric weather effects, making it one of the most demanding titles of its generation on both GPU and CPU. As an AMD-sponsored title, it launched with FSR support from day one but without native NVIDIA DLSS. This article covers which settings to touch first to gain FPS without sacrificing Yara's visual readability, and what to expect based on your hardware.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Dragon Age: The Veilguard runs on a heavily modified version of Frostbite, the same engine behind Battlefield and the latest Mass Effect titles, so it inherits its clearly GPU-bound nature. BioWare has polished optimization considerably compared to earlier Frostbite titles, with a solid baseline even on mid-range hardware, but the dynamic global illumination system (similar in philosophy to Lumen) and combat scenes with multiple allies, spells, and simultaneous particles can make the GPU sweat at high resolutions. VRAM usage is also something to watch if you max out texture quality. With the right settings and a good upscaler, it's perfectly playable at a stable 60 FPS even on mid-to-high-end GPUs. Here's the full guide to squeeze out every frame without sacrificing the game's visual identity.
Subnautica
Eight years after launch, Subnautica remains one of the most demanding underwater exploration games relative to what it shows on screen. Its Unity engine generates the world via voxels and procedural terrain streaming, meaning much of the heavy lifting happens on the CPU, not the GPU. This causes the characteristic microcuts when entering new biomes or diving quickly toward deep zones, especially if the game is installed on a mechanical HDD. Despite its relatively simple graphics, it suffers from known memory leaks that degrade performance in long sessions. With the right settings and some patience with memory management, it's perfectly playable at stable FPS even on modest hardware.
Death Stranding
Death Stranding arrived on PC in 2020 courtesy of 505 Games and Kojima Productions, and from day one became the textbook example of how to optimize a PS4 port. Built on the Decima engine (the same one that powers Horizon Zero Dawn), it scales extraordinarily well on modern hardware, delivering over 200 FPS on high-end cards without breaking a sweat. It was also a launch title for NVIDIA DLSS 2.0, making it a technical showcase for AI upscaling. This isn't a fight to reach a stable 60 FPS: the real conversation here is how to make the most of that very high ceiling to take advantage of a high-refresh-rate monitor. This guide focuses on which settings make a real visual difference and which only cost FPS without perceptible benefit.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
Oblivion Remastered is a rare case among remasters: Virtuos has stitched Unreal Engine 5 on top of the original Gamebryo/Creation Engine game logic, without fully replacing it. The visual result is spectacular thanks to Lumen and Nanite, but it also carries UE5's typical headaches (shader compilation, traversal stutter) on top of the rigidity of Bethesda's original engine underneath. Optimizing it well requires tweaking UE5 rendering settings while also keeping an eye on behavior inherited from the Creation Engine in interiors, cells, and NPCs. Here's the configuration that really makes the difference between a smooth Cyrodiil and a slideshow with swords.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was one of the biggest surprises of 2025: a turn-based RPG with hand-painted art direction that surprised even those who expected nothing from a small studio like Sandfall Interactive. Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game combines Lumen and Nanite to achieve that moving-oil-painting aesthetic, but that also means it inherits the engine's typical problems: on-the-fly shader compilation and microstutters during transitions into combat. The good news is that, being a turn-based game, you don't need a constant 240 FPS to enjoy it, just stability during attack animations and heavy visual effects. With the right settings you can eliminate most of the stutter and keep a smooth experience even on modest hardware. This guide focuses on what to touch first and what to leave alone so you don't sacrifice the art that makes this game unique.
Final Fantasy XIV
Final Fantasy XIV has come a long way since its relaunch as A Realm Reborn, but it still carries engine decisions from over a decade ago, especially in how it handles other players. With the Dawntrail expansion (2024), Square Enix genuinely overhauled the graphics side, adding improved lighting, DLSS and FSR support, and better load distribution across CPU cores. Even so, the game remains notoriously CPU-dependent in crowded social zones, where hundreds of character models with glamours, mounts, and minions compete for processor cycles. This guide helps you tell which settings actually free up FPS and which just cosmetically tweak the result. The goal is to keep things smooth whether you're at the Limsa Lominsa Markets or in a 24-player raid.
Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley runs on an extremely lightweight custom C#/MonoGame engine, designed to run smoothly on practically any PC from the last decade. There's no fighting volumetric shadows or ray tracing here: the real performance ceiling is the CPU, in how the game simulates hundreds of objects, crops, and NPCs every tick. The number one cause of FPS drops isn't the graphics card, but the pile of SMAPI mods and giant save files with thousands of placed items. This guide focuses on squeezing out those few real graphics settings and, above all, on managing mods and saves so the simulation doesn't choke.
Silent Hill 2 Remake
Silent Hill 2 Remake is Bloober Team's return to the foggy streets of Toluca Lake, rebuilt on Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen lighting and Nanite geometry. The visual result is impressive, but it's also one of the most demanding titles on both CPU and GPU we've analyzed, especially because of the volumetric fog that defines its atmosphere. This engine suffers the typical UE5 stumbles: shader compilation and traversal streaming that cause microstutters when crossing doors or narrow hallways. Here we show you which settings to touch so exploration flows smoothly without sacrificing the oppressive feel that makes the game unique. The good news is that resolution scaling (DLSS, FSR, and XeSS) gives plenty of room to balance sharpness and performance.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart arrived on PC in 2023 as one of Insomniac Games' best-cared-for ports, inheriting from PS5 its instant interdimensional rift tech, full ray tracing, and an art direction packed with color and detail. It's a game that demands a lot from the GPU in ray tracing and VRAM due to the number of unique assets coexisting across each dimension, but it also knows how to scale down well if you touch the right settings. The real bottleneck isn't just in the shaders: the ultra-fast texture streaming during rifts depends on having an SSD, it's not optional. In this analysis we look at what to tweak to keep FPS stable even in fights with the most particles and sharp camera changes, without losing the game's visual identity.
Dead Space Remake
Dead Space Remake is Motive Studio's take on the 2008 horror classic, rebuilt on Frostbite, the engine EA usually reserves for shooters like Battlefield. It's an unusual choice for a survival horror, but it lets Motive show off volumetric lighting and dismemberment physics that few engines match. Its signature feature is the uninterrupted single take: there are no loading screens or cuts when changing zones on the USG Ishimura, which forces the engine to keep much more level data loaded simultaneously than a conventional linear game. On top of that, combat centers on chopping up necromorphs with the Plasma Cutter, generating blood and viscera effects that get very demanding in scenes with lots on screen. This guide helps you balance visual fidelity and stable performance without sacrificing the tension that makes the game great.
Civilization VII
Civilization VII is Firaxis Games' new entry in the 4X series, and like its predecessors, it poses a very different performance challenge from a shooter or action game. During active play, with a top-down camera and relatively simple units, almost any modern GPU runs the game smoothly at high framerates. The real bottleneck appears in advanced games on large maps with many civilizations: "turn processing," where the AI calculates movement, diplomacy, and pathfinding for dozens of units and cities, can turn the simple act of clicking "next turn" into a several-minute wait. This guide first covers how to minimize those simulation waits (the number one complaint from 4X players) and then the graphics settings that do affect actual FPS during active play.
Split Fiction
Split Fiction is Hazelight Studios' new co-op game, the creators of It Takes Two, and once again it's built 100% around being played by two people. Built on Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen and Nanite, the game constantly jumps between neon-and-particle-heavy sci-fi settings and fantasy levels with dense vegetation and volumetric effects, each with a completely different performance profile. On top of that, local co-op forces two simultaneous cameras to render on the same screen, effectively doubling the load on the GPU. This guide helps you understand why your FPS can vary so much from one chapter to another and which settings make a real difference in each render pass.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide
Darktide throws you into the bowels of Tertium, an industrial hive devoured by Chaos corruption, where your squad of four Rejects hacks through endless enemy hordes with chainswords. Fatshark's engine has to calculate in real time how dozens of cultists and poxwalkers surround, dodge, and attack you at once, something that in 2022 tanked performance on nearly any CPU. With successive patches the game greatly improved its load distribution across cores, but mass combat remains the real bottleneck, more so than the GPU itself. On top of that there's a grimy, oppressive aesthetic, with volumetric fog, dense lighting, and highly detailed dismemberment that demand plenty from the graphics card. This guide helps you find the balance between smoothness and that gothic atmosphere that makes the game unique.
Lost Ark
Lost Ark is Smilegate's free-to-play isometric ARPG that still runs on Unreal Engine 3, an already-veteran technical base for an MMO in active service. The engine handles normal dungeons with ease, but it gets pushed hard in Legion Raids and Guardian Raids, where eight players unleash skill effects, boss telegraphs, and status overlays all at once. That volume of simultaneous particles is the game's real bottleneck, not resolution or the graphics hardware itself. Main cities like Vern or Punika also generate extra load from the sheer number of cosmetics and characters rendered on screen. Tuning effects and character quality carefully makes far more difference than raising resolution.
The Forest
The Forest has spent eight years piling up vegetation, physics systems for your cabins, and a mutant AI that patrols caves and woods without rest, all on a 2018 Unity engine that never got the polish of its sequel. The result is a game that on paper should fly on any modern PC, but stumbles into microstutters the moment the camera looks toward dense foliage or your trap-and-structure-filled base. Here the bottleneck is almost always the CPU, not the GPU: tree simulation, cannibal AI, and your camp's physics all compete for the same main thread. With the right vegetation, shadow, and draw distance settings you can eliminate most of the hitching without sacrificing the oppressive forest feel that makes the game special. This guide focuses on squeezing CPU and GPU equally, because in The Forest both demand their share.
Wuthering Waves
Wuthering Waves is Kuro Games' open-world ARPG competing directly with Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero, but with much more frantic combat built around dodges, counters, and team combos. Having been designed from the ground up to run on mid-range mobile phones, its PC version turns out very forgiving performance-wise: almost any rig with at least a dedicated GPU can run the game at a stable 60 FPS. Even so, character skill effects, dynamic weather, and open-world lighting can make the GPU sweat if you push everything to Ultra. On top of that, being a live-service game with frequent patches, there's a shader-recompilation stuttering pattern worth knowing about before sitting down to play after each update. This guide covers the settings that actually matter for squeezing out more FPS without sacrificing combat readability.
Stellaris
Stellaris isn't a game that suffers from low framerates: its Clausewitz engine renders a simple top-down camera that almost any current GPU handles effortlessly. The real bottleneck shows up over hours of play, when galaxy simulation (AI empires, populations, economy, fleets) grows to the point where each calendar tick takes seconds to resolve. This isn't about optimizing for "more FPS", but about keeping the simulation pace smooth in long games on large galaxies. This article clearly separates both problems and prioritizes the settings that actually affect the late-game "turn lag". If you play short games or small galaxies, you'll barely need any of these settings.
V Rising
V Rising combines vampire survival with castle building and real-time PvP, all under the Unity engine with a fixed isometric camera. Although its art style doesn't demand a high-end GPU, the real bottleneck shows up when your castle (or your neighbors') accumulates hundreds of furniture pieces, traps, and decorations that the engine must constantly simulate and render. On top of that comes the load from heavily populated PvP servers, where dozens of players and castles share the same world region. The result is a game where performance depends as much on your hardware as on how densely other people build, something no graphics setting can fully compensate for. Here's what to tweak to maximize FPS without losing combat readability.
Path of Exile
Path of Exile is Grinding Gear Games' free-to-play ARPG known for its near-infinite build depth and its proprietary engine, which carries more than a decade of history and technical debt. Unlike most modern games, the bottleneck here is almost never the GPU: the engine processes particle physics, projectile collisions, and skill logic on a single main CPU thread. That means a powerful graphics card won't save you if your build generates hundreds of simultaneous effects on screen. This article focuses on avoiding framerate crashes in "juiced" endgame content and in high monster-density maps. Getting this right is the difference between playing at a smooth 100+ FPS or suffering a 5 FPS slideshow right when it matters most, during a boss fight.
Total War: Warhammer III
Total War: Warhammer III pushes the Total War Engine 4 to its limit with massive battles where thousands of individually animated units can fight at once, giant monsters, and spells that flood the screen with particle effects. On top of that there's a turn-based campaign map that, in advanced games with many active factions, can slow down AI turn processing. The result is a game with two completely different performance profiles coexisting in the same title. Optimizing well means understanding which of the two bottlenecks you're actually suffering from. Here are the settings that really make a difference in both scenarios.
The Last of Us Part II Remastered
The Last of Us Part II Remastered arrived on PC in January 2024 having done its homework: Naughty Dog learned from the serious shader compilation and stuttering problems that plagued Part I's 2023 launch, and implemented a much more robust shader precompilation step from day one. The result is a notably more stable port, though it keeps the same technical demands: characters with strand-based hair rendering, extremely detailed facial animation, and lush, dense vegetation in Seattle's outdoor areas. It's a linear, tightly directed game, which allows for aggressive LOD optimizations without sacrificing the narrative experience. In this article we go through the settings with the biggest performance impact, from the simplest to the most demanding, so you can enjoy Ellie and Abby at the FPS your rig can deliver.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth arrived on PC in 2025 after its run on PS5, and its port carries the same challenges as any large-scale Unreal Engine 4 production: shader compilation, massive texture streaming, and huge open regions for a turn-based JRPG. The Grasslands, the Junon area, and Gongaga are gigantic maps with dense vegetation, NPCs, and weather systems, something unusual for the series and demanding for any GPU. On top of that there's an ATB combat system with up to three characters acting at once, summons with very heavy particle effects, and minigames with their own rendering logic. The result is a game that can run comfortably in simple fights but suffers frame-pacing spikes in open zones or complex cutscenes. This guide sorts out the settings that really make a difference without sacrificing the visual readability of the world of Gaia.
Zenless Zone Zero
Zenless Zone Zero is HoYoverse's latest bet, the creators of Genshin Impact, and it transplants their gacha formula into an urban hack-and-slash set in the city of New Eridu. The Unreal Engine 4 engine drives a very stylized visual style, with fast combat, flashy combos, and particle effects that flood the screen during chain finishers. Since it's designed to also run on mobile and consoles, the game is tremendously flexible on PC: almost any mid-range rig can hold high framerates. Even so, there's real room for optimization in the most effects-heavy combat scenes and in the stutters caused by shader compilation after each update. This guide covers which settings to tweak to get the most out of your hardware without sacrificing combat readability.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla
Assassin's Creed Valhalla is probably the largest open world Ubisoft has built to date, combining England and Norway into a single continuous map full of dense forests, fjords, settlements, and changing weather. The AnvilNext 2.0 engine has to simultaneously manage vegetation, water systems, dynamic lighting, and dozens of NPCs during monastery raids, making it demanding for both CPU and GPU. Unlike other recent titles, Valhalla launched without native DLSS and only received AMD FSR through a later update, so the available upscaling is limited. With the right settings it's perfectly playable even on mid-range hardware, but there are specific options — especially those related to NPC density and vegetation — that make a notable difference to framerates. This guide covers what to tweak to gain performance without sacrificing the game's visual identity.
7 Days to Die
7 Days to Die has spent years in Early Access and remains a particular beast when it comes to running well. Its fully destructible voxel terrain forces the engine to recalculate meshes and physics every time you dig, build, or blow something up, which makes the CPU the game's real bottleneck. The GPU paints the scene, but it's your processor's single-thread performance that decides whether your base holds up during Horde Night without turning into a slideshow. Here we'll squeeze out the settings that really matter: render distance, chunk generation, and the zombie load of full-moon blood nights.
Anno 1800
Anno 1800 is Ubisoft Blue Byte's city builder that brings the series to the industrial revolution, and its graphics engine is designed to show off detail rather than speed. Every citizen walking your streets is an individually animated model, and when you have several islands with residential districts maxed out, the game can end up rendering and simulating thousands of pedestrians at once. On top of that there's a complex economic simulation: production chains, trade routes, and island AI running in the background even when you're not looking at them. The result is a game that rarely needs a top-tier GPU, but that can drag on CPU in advanced games if you don't properly tune the simulation and density parameters. This guide shows you what to tweak to keep stable FPS both on the map and in close-up views of your city.
Metaphor: ReFantazio
Metaphor: ReFantazio is Studio Zero's new RPG, the team behind Persona 5, and it carries that same obsession with staging into a hand-painted fantasy world. The game runs on Unreal Engine 4 and prioritizes art direction and interface readability over raw graphical power, so it's not a title that demands a top-tier GPU. The optimization challenge here isn't about cutting-edge effects, but about keeping a stable 60 FPS during transitions between the city hub (with NPCs and dynamic shadows) and dungeons, where texture streaming can generate microstutters. With the right settings, practically any rig from the last five years can enjoy it smoothly.
ARK: Survival Evolved
ARK: Survival Evolved remains, years after its 2017 launch, one of the toughest stress tests for any PC. Studio Wildcard's Unreal Engine 4 never quite digested the combination of dense jungles, hundreds of dinosaurs with active AI, and tribe bases packed with physics-driven structures. Unlike its remaster, ARK: Survival Ascended, this original title doesn't have modern scaling like DLSS or FSR, so all room for improvement depends on tuning native graphics parameters well. On official servers with high population and dinosaurs nearby, even a powerful GPU can suffer severe FPS drops. Here we go over what to tweak to get maximum performance without sacrificing the visuals that matter.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is Konami's full remake of the 2004 classic, rebuilt from scratch in Unreal Engine 5. The jungle of Tselinoyarsk is no longer just a backdrop: every clump of grass, every bush, and every mud texture is an active part of the camouflage system that defines the game's stealth. That vegetation density, combined with Lumen's global illumination simulating the jungle canopy filtering light onto Snake, demands quite a bit from hardware. On top of that there are ultra-high-fidelity character models in the cutscenes, a series hallmark for Metal Gear. Here we cover which settings to tweak to keep stable FPS without giving up camouflage readability.
Doom: The Dark Ages
Doom: The Dark Ages marks a shift within the series: slower, shield-based combat, massive battles against giant mechs and dragons, and a use of ray tracing that's no longer optional like in Doom Eternal, but a core part of global illumination and reflections. idTech 8 inherits id Software's reputation for surgical optimization, but here the engine has to sustain scenes with far more geometry, destruction physics, and simultaneous ray tracing. The result is a game that still scales well on modest hardware, but where certain RT and shadow settings have a real cost worth understanding before touching anything blindly. This guide prioritizes what to lower first without losing combat readability, and what to keep so you don't ruin the visual parry.
Ninja Gaiden 4
Ninja Gaiden 4 marks the return of Team Ninja and PlatinumGames to the most merciless hack-and-slash formula in the genre, built on Unreal Engine 5. Combat demands parries and dodges with windows of just a few frames, which turns performance into part of the gameplay itself, not just a visual luxury. Here smoothness rules: a high and, above all, stable framerate matters more than pretty shadows or exaggerated reflections. This guide prioritizes settings that reduce input lag and eliminate UE5's typical microstutters, so your reactions reach the screen without delay.
Forza Horizon 5
Forza Horizon 5 is probably the best example of open-world optimization the last generation has produced. Playground Games built the ForzaTech engine to scale almost miraculously between a modest iGPU and an RTX 4090, without sacrificing the visual density of the recreated Mexico. Even so, with everything maxed out at 1440p or 4K, the dense jungle vegetation, volumetric sandstorms, and online convoys with dozens of cars can make any GPU sweat. This guide breaks down which settings really cost FPS and which just polish shadows almost nobody notices at 100 km/h.
Hunt: Showdown 1896
Hunt: Showdown 1896 is Crytek's deep rebuild of its PvPvE bounty-hunting extraction shooter, keeping the CryEngine base but overhauling lighting, textures, and materials from top to bottom. The result is a denser, more oppressive Louisiana swamp than ever, with volumetric fog and vegetation that punish any mid-range GPU. Unlike a typical competitive shooter, lowering certain graphics here isn't just a performance question: it literally changes what you can see and hear. Positional audio is the game's core mechanic, so the CPU and audio processing matter as much as the frame count. This guide covers the settings that really move the needle without wrecking your competitive edge.
World of Warships
World of Warships is Wargaming's free-to-play naval game where you command battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and carriers in battles of up to 24 ships. Its engine, inherited from the BigWorld technology used in World of Tanks, isn't demanding by modern graphical standards, but it is on physics calculation: it simulates real-time ocean water across the whole map, hundreds of ballistic projectiles in flight, and AI-controlled aircraft squadrons. The result is a game that runs well on almost any rig, but that can suffer CPU-driven FPS drops in large battles with many ships, smoke, and planes on screen at once. Optimizing here means identifying which settings are purely cosmetic (water, shadows, reflections) and which affect CPU load and real combat smoothness.
Don't Starve Together
Don't Starve Together is one of the least demanding games you'll find on this site: its hand-drawn 2D art and Klei's proprietary engine barely ask anything of the GPU, so almost any rig from the last decade runs the game at a stable 60 FPS without breaking a sweat. The real bottleneck isn't pixels but code: very long games with giant bases and, above all, the huge Steam Workshop mod scene, where poorly optimized Lua scripts can introduce stutters no GPU will fix. This guide therefore focuses on managing mods, worlds, and servers rather than adjusting graphics sliders, because there are barely any.
Raft
Raft throws you adrift in the middle of the ocean with nothing but a hook and the determination to survive, but its real technical challenge begins when your raft grows. Unlike most survival games, here you don't explore a static world: you literally build the physical object you move on, piece by piece, and the Unity engine has to simulate that entire structure as a single rigid body floating on procedural water. The more platforms, furniture, and decorations you add, the more expensive every frame becomes, regardless of how powerful your GPU is. On top of that there's an ocean that never stops calculating waves, buoyancy, and foam across the entire visible surface. Getting the settings right is the difference between sailing at a stable 60 FPS and suffering hitches every time you place a new wood plank.
Human: Fall Flat
Human: Fall Flat is probably one of the least demanding games you'll ever optimize. Its levels use simple geometry, minimal textures, and very basic lighting, so the graphics engine barely breaks a sweat. The real work is done by the CPU simulating the wobbling ragdoll physics and interactive objects (ropes, pulleys, vehicles, levers). If you have low FPS here, it's almost never your GPU's fault: it's usually a poorly optimized Steam Workshop level or a multiplayer match with many players at once.
Counter-Strike: Source
Counter-Strike: Source has been running on Valve's original Source Engine for over twenty years and is still very much alive thanks to a competitive community that squeezes every last frame out of its PC. This isn't about "being able to run it" — practically any hardware built in the last decade handles it without breaking a sweat. The real challenge is pushing the framerate well above the monitor's refresh rate to minimize input lag, since the engine ties mouse processing and physics to the frame rate. That's why you'll see players on 144Hz or 240Hz monitors configuring the game to run at an uncapped 300, 400, or even more FPS. The list of legacy console commands — fps_max, mat_queue_mode, cl_threaded_bone_setup — comes directly from two decades of community testing in LAN and Matchmaking. This guide focuses on stripping the engine of everything superfluous to maximize frame consistency and minimize input latency.
Battlefield V
Battlefield V brings DICE's 64-player chaos to World War II, with tanks, planes, and infantry sharing the same destructible map in real time. The Frostbite engine demands a lot from both the CPU (physics simulation and player count) and the GPU (effects, destruction, and, if enabled, ray tracing). In 2018 it was the first major shooter to offer real-time ray-traced reflections on RTX 20-series cards, groundbreaking but costly. It also debuted DLSS 1.0, now remembered as a limited implementation that's noticeably less sharp than today's standards. With the right graphics settings, it's perfectly possible to get smooth matches even on modest hardware.
New World: Aeternum
New World: Aeternum is the 2024 relaunch of Amazon Games' MMO, built on a heavily modified version of the Lumberyard engine. Visually it stands out for its dense vegetation and richly detailed coastal environments on the island of Aeternum, which makes it fairly demanding on the GPU during free exploration. But its real historical bottleneck is the CPU: 50-vs-50 faction wars, with hundreds of players, spells, and siege weapons active at once, cause severe FPS drops even on top-tier hardware. Amazon has kept polishing the engine since the original 2021 launch, but massive wars remain the worst-case scenario, graphics card or no graphics card. This guide covers both the graphics fine-tuning for smooth exploration and realistic expectation-setting for massive combat.
inZOI
inZOI has arrived to challenge The Sims for its throne with a radically different approach: instead of stylized characters, Krafton bets on hyper-realistic Zois built on Unreal Engine 5, with global illumination via Lumen and entire cities simulated in real time. That aesthetic choice comes with an enormous technical cost, because the game not only has to render near-photorealistic faces and hair, but also sustain dozens of NPCs living their lives simultaneously in the same frame. The result is a life simulator that demands a lot from both CPU and GPU, something unusual for the genre. In this article we go over which settings to touch first to gain frames without sacrificing the visual identity that makes inZOI unique, and what hardware setup you need depending on your performance goal.
R.E.P.O.
R.E.P.O. went from an almost unknown indie project to a viral phenomenon in a matter of days, which means it runs on a Unity engine designed for a small dev team, not the flood of simultaneous players it received. Its charm (and its performance cost) lies in the physics: dragging valuable objects between several players while ragdolls collide, bounce, and get tangled generates constant CPU spikes. On top of that there's procedural generation of the facilities and monster AI that has to recalculate paths through corridors that change every match. The good news is that graphically it's a modest game, so the optimization margin lies mainly in easing the physics simulation and CPU load, not in brute-forcing texture quality down. Here are the settings that actually move the needle in R.E.P.O.
Resident Evil Requiem
Resident Evil Requiem is Capcom's new mainline entry built on RE Engine, the same engine behind the RE2, RE3, and RE4 remakes and Village. It keeps the formula that has made RE Engine famous on PC: great graphical fidelity with surprisingly contained resource use, prioritizing skin shaders and photorealistic lighting over raw polygon count. Being a more ambitious entry, it adds more aggressive ray tracing options and less linear scenarios than its predecessors, which raises the demand on the GPU. The good news is that, as with the rest of the series, the engine remains relatively CPU-light, so almost all the room for improvement is in the graphics settings. This guide covers the settings that most impact performance without sacrificing the horror atmosphere that defines the game.
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Simulator isn't just any flight simulator: it rebuilds the entire planet in real time using satellite imagery and elevation data from Bing Maps, combined with AI-generated buildings via photogrammetry. This means that, unlike almost any other game, your performance depends as much on your internet connection and SSD speed as on your GPU. Flying over rural areas or ocean is relatively light, but approaching cities with dense photogrammetry like New York or Tokyo can make even an RTX 4090 struggle to hold 60 FPS. Properly tuning data streaming, terrain level of detail, and volumetric clouds is the difference between a smooth experience and a slideshow with spectacular scenery. This guide covers the key settings to squeeze the most out of Asobo's engine without sacrificing the visual immersion that makes this game unique.
Delta Force
Delta Force has been revived as one of the most ambitious free-to-play military shooters around, combining the large-scale chaos of "Havoc Warfare" (64+ players, vehicles, helicopters, and destructible cover) with the more tactical tension of extraction mode and a campaign inspired by Black Hawk Down. Built on Unreal Engine 4 and designed to scale from mobile devices to high-end PCs with cross-play, the game is surprisingly flexible with graphics settings. Even so, combined-warfare matches demand a lot from the CPU due to the number of entities, vehicles, and simultaneous network calculations, while the detailed urban environments and sand and dust effects in the campaign load more of the GPU's work. This guide covers the settings that free up the most FPS without sacrificing visibility, something critical in a competitive shooter.
Grim Dawn
Grim Dawn runs on a heavily evolved version of the Titan Quest engine, so in terms of raw rendering it's a lightweight game that any modern GPU handles without breaking a sweat. The real problem shows up in the endgame content: Crucible, Shattered Realm, and multiplayer runs with summoner builds or status-effect stacking generate a brutal amount of particles, auras, and floating damage numbers on screen at once. That's where the bottleneck stops being the GPU and becomes the CPU, which has to process hundreds of simultaneous entities and effects. This guide focuses on taming those particle spikes without giving up on the game still looking good. We also cover the basic tweaks for anyone who just wants stable FPS from minute one.
Trove
Trove is the voxel sandbox from Trion Worlds (now under Gamigo) that blends Minecraft-style building with action dungeons and constant looting. Being free-to-play and highly moddable, its player base is huge and varies wildly in hardware, which has forced the engine to offer a ton of graphics tuning options. The proprietary voxel engine generates and renders the world in chunks, so performance depends much more on how much terrain the CPU has to calculate than on raw GPU power. It's an ideal game for modest PCs if configured well, but social worlds (the Hub) can bring even powerful rigs to their knees. This guide covers the settings that genuinely move the needle on FPS without wrecking the visual readability of blocks and effects.
Schedule I
Schedule I went from an unknown indie project to a viral phenomenon almost overnight, and that rapid growth exposed the technical seams of a Unity engine managed by a small team. The game doesn't stand out for its graphical fidelity but for the simulation underneath: dozens of NPCs with their own routines, a business that grows across properties, employees, and plants, and pathfinding that has to be constantly recalculated. That's why the bottlenecks show up less on the GPU and more on the CPU, especially once the player's empire starts scaling. This guide focuses on the settings that genuinely ease that simulation load without sacrificing the game's visual readability. With modest hardware it's perfectly playable at high FPS if you tweak the right options.
Black Squad
Black Squad is a free-to-play tactical team shooter built on Unreal Engine 3, with a design philosophy inherited directly from Counter-Strike and Sudden Attack: short rounds, weapon economy, and precision over visual spectacle. Its now-veteran engine was designed to run in internet cafes across Latin America and Asia on modest hardware, so the performance ceiling on current PCs is practically limitless if the parameters are tuned properly. The competitive community — very active in countries like Peru, Brazil, and the Philippines — has spent years refining configurations to squeeze out every possible frame. The real goal here is to maximize stable FPS and minimize input lag to play at a competitive level.
World of Tanks Blitz
World of Tanks Blitz was originally designed to run on a mid-range smartphone from several years ago, so its hardware requirements on PC are practically nominal. Wargaming's proprietary engine (a descendant of BigWorld) prioritizes cross-platform compatibility over any modern visual effect. What you can actually gain is frame consistency and input responsiveness, which in a game with short 7v7 matches where a single shot decides an exchange, matters far more than any pretty shadow. The real optimization conversation here revolves around eliminating micro-stutters when opening the sniper scope and trimming any trace of input lag. With almost any dedicated GPU from the last eight years you'll have plenty of FPS to spare; the work here is polishing the experience, not getting the game to run.
Counter-Strike: Condition Zero
Counter-Strike: Condition Zero runs on GoldSrc, the same engine as Half-Life 1 and CS 1.6, so in 2026 its performance ceiling isn't set by the GPU but by the engine and operating system itself. Any hardware from the last ten years can run this game well above 300 FPS without breaking a sweat, so optimization here isn't about raising graphics settings but about squeezing every last bit of refresh rate, minimizing input lag, and dodging the compatibility quirks carried over from a 2004 executable running on Windows 10/11. The community still playing it follows the same recipes as CS 1.6 for console, netcode, and full-screen mode. Don't expect next-gen graphics: this is about brutal framerate and zero friction.
Unturned
Unturned is one of those games that should, in theory, fly on any PC, and in most cases it does. Its low-poly block aesthetic recalls Minecraft, but underneath it hides a DayZ-style survival system with looting, base building, and zombies. The problem usually isn't your GPU, but the CPU: when you join heavily populated modded servers with hundreds of players, custom maps, and heavy zombie AI mods, the engine has to process a brutal amount of entities and network syncing. This guide helps you tell apart which settings actually improve graphical performance and what to do when the bottleneck is really your processor and your connection to the server.
Life is Strange 2
Life is Strange 2 bets on narrative and staging over frenetic action, so you don't need a top-of-the-line machine to enjoy it smoothly. Dontnod's Unreal Engine 4 engine handles Sean and Daniel's detailed facial animations, the dynamic lighting shifts across the road trip, and the particle effects tied to Daniel's powers with ease. Even so, there's real room for optimization in shadows, volumetric fog, and post-processing, especially in the heavier outdoor stretches like the snowy forest or the desert. The goal isn't to maximize FPS at all costs, but to maintain a stable 30-60 fps without sacrificing the atmosphere that defines the game.
Pathologic 3
Pathologic 3 plunges us back into the agony of the town in the Russian steppe, this time from the perspective of Bakhtin before the events of Pathologic 2. Ice-Pick Lodge has upgraded its engine to Unreal Engine to sustain a pictorial art direction, almost like moving oil paint, backed by a volumetric fog and suspended dust system that wraps every infected street. Beneath that visual layer runs an NPC simulation that never stops: every villager follows their own routine, sick or not, whether you're there to see it or not. That combination of dense atmosphere and living simulation is gorgeous, but also demanding, and not every rig runs it equally well out of the box. Here we go over which settings to tweak so the game can breathe without your FPS suffocating along with it.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 brings back two of the series' most beloved maps with Unreal Engine 5, keeping the arcade formula of combos, grinds, and reverts against the clock. Unlike a photorealistic remake, the art here is colorful and stylized, so the engine can afford to go easy on the GPU if the options are set right. What really matters is framerate consistency: speedrunners and leaderboard players notice a real difference between 60 and 144+ FPS when chaining reverts and manuals with frame-perfect precision. On modest hardware the game already runs well, but fine-tuning the settings makes the difference between "playable" and "competitive."
War Robots: Frontiers
War Robots: Frontiers brings Pixonic's saga of mech combat to PC with Unreal Engine 5, adding destructible environments, dynamic lighting, and massive battles between giant robots. Being a free-to-play live-service title, it's designed to scale from modest rigs up to high-end configurations. Large-scale battles with multiple mechs firing energy weapons, missiles, and simultaneous explosions generate very demanding GPU load spikes, especially when cover or terrain gets destroyed. With the right settings for effects, shadows, and destruction quality, you can double the framerate without losing combat readability.
Dying Light: The Beast
Dying Light: The Beast pushes Techland's C-Engine to its most ambitious version yet, combining a dense open world full of vegetation with a dynamic day/night cycle that isn't just cosmetic — it dictates the infected's aggressive behavior. Parkour as the backbone of gameplay demands the game maintain a stable frame time, because an FPS drop mid-chain of jumps and slides feels worse than a lower but constant FPS ceiling. Techland keeps its tradition of shipping the game with a very granular range of graphics options, including optional ray tracing for global illumination and reflections.
Z1 Battle Royale
Z1 Battle Royale is one of the foundational battle royales of the genre, a direct descendant of H1Z1: King of the Kill, and it's still alive thanks to a competitive community that demands brutal performance above any visual flair. It runs on ForgeLight, the same engine as PlanetSide 2, which explains both its somewhat dated graphics and its particular technical quirks. Unlike modern battle royales, there's no Lumen, Nanite, or cutting-edge upscaling here: the goal is squeezing the most FPS possible out of modest hardware.
Nioh 3
Nioh 3 pushes Team Ninja's souls-like formula to its most demanding point yet, with combat based on stance-switching and pixel-perfect dodges where every frame counts. Koei Tecmo's proprietary engine, inherited and refined from Nioh 2 and polished in Wo Long, now renders much denser yokai effects, samurai armor with detailed texturing, and feudal Japan settings with high particle density. By design, this is a game meant to run at a locked 60fps at minimum, since parries and dodges depend on very strict timing windows.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is Owlcat Games' isometric CRPG set in the Warhammer 40k universe, a direct heir to the Pathfinder formula but taken to a much larger scale. Built on Unreal Engine 4, the game combines exploration of ships and space stations packed with NPCs with turn-based combat extremely dense in visual effects. It's more CPU-dependent than most isometric RPGs, due to the individual simulation of every character on screen.
Dynasty Warriors: Origins
Dynasty Warriors: Origins is Omega Force's reboot for the musou saga, with a silent protagonist who cuts through entire armies during the Three Kingdoms period. The Unreal Engine 4 engine has to sustain hundreds, even over a thousand, individual soldiers on screen, each animated with its own basic combat logic, something few genres demand at this level. On top of that, a musou ability system unleashes massive area effects capable of wiping out dozens of enemies at once with particles and flashes.
It Takes Two
It Takes Two is Hazelight Studios' cooperative adventure that reinvents its own genre every few minutes: one chapter is a platformer, the next a third-person shooter, and the one after that a racing stage or a musical minigame. It all runs on a heavily modified version of Frostbite, Battlefield's engine, adapted here to render dollhouse-sized scenes with an unusually high level of detail for a game of this kind. The key to its performance isn't the complexity of a single frame, but the fact that the game is designed for local split-screen play, which forces the GPU to render two complete cameras simultaneously. Fortunately, Hazelight optimized the game to run well on PS4/Xbox One-generation hardware, so on current PCs it runs smoothly even on modest rigs.
Squad
Squad is the benchmark for large-scale tactical shooters: matches of up to 100 players split into squads, with heavy vehicles, supply logistics, and FOB construction all simulated at once on the client. Offworld Industries built the game on Unreal Engine 4, but the real load doesn't come from the graphics side — it comes from processing dozens of players, vehicle AI, ballistic projectile physics, and real-time radio communication systems. The result is an engine that pushes the CPU harder than almost any other multiplayer title, leaving the GPU in a secondary role except at high resolutions.
FIFA 24
FIFA 24 was the last entry under the FIFA name before the jump to EA Sports FC, and it arrived with HyperMotionV, the motion-capture system that animates all 22 players in real time from real match data. That leap in fidelity comes at a cost: the Frostbite engine splits the load between CPU (animation, ball physics, AI) and GPU (crowds, dynamic lighting, pitch), and on mid-range PCs the result doesn't always deliver the smoothness the marketing promises. For the competitive Ultimate Team player, every frame counts: the timing of a skill move or a shot feels different at 60 than at 120+ FPS.
Eternal Strands
Eternal Strands is the debut title from Yellow Brick Games, a studio founded by BioWare veterans, and it mixes giant-creature climbing in the vein of Shadow of the Colossus with a magical combat system that destroys the environment in real time. Built on Unreal Engine 5, it leans heavily on Nanite and Lumen for its fantasy landscapes, but its true signature is physics: you can freeze a lake, set a wooden structure on fire, or knock down an ice pillar and watch the consequences ripple through the level.
NBA 2K24
NBA 2K24 arrives with Visual Concepts' ProCore engine polished after years of iteration, but its PC performance hides a trap many players don't see coming. Inside an actual game, graphics load is relatively contained. The problem appears the moment you step into The City or the Neighborhood, MyCareer's and MyTeam's social modes, where hundreds of avatars with clothing, animations, and effects load simultaneously in a far more demanding open space.
Fall Guys
Fall Guys looks like the least demanding game in your library, and for the most part it is: its simple, colorful, low-poly art is designed to run on almost any rig. But behind that innocent facade hides an Unreal Engine 4 engine that has to simulate ragdoll physics for up to 40-60 players at once, all colliding with each other, with moving platforms, and with the level itself. That massive physics calculation falls almost entirely on the CPU, not the GPU.
Last Epoch
Last Epoch is Eleventh Hour Games' ARPG that has gained ground against giants like Diablo and Path of Exile thanks to its deep crafting system and narrative time-travel setup. It runs on Unity and, during the campaign, is a relatively light game that any modern rig pushes past 200 FPS without effort. The real optimization challenge comes in the endgame: the Monolith of Fate and, especially, the Arena mode, where dozens of skill effects, minion summons, and damage-over-time auras stack on screen at the same time.
Wallpaper Engine
Wallpaper Engine is a completely different case from any other title on this site: it's not a game you "play" and close, but an application that lives permanently in the background rendering your animated desktop background — a 3D scene, a looping video, or an interactive web page — while you use your PC normally. Its own "FPS" doesn't matter by itself; what matters is how much GPU and CPU it silently steals while you play something else. Poorly configured, it can shave several frames per second off your actual game without any warning or error message appearing.
Genshin Impact
Genshin Impact is HoYoverse's gacha open world, combining elemental combat with constant exploration across increasingly larger regions: Mondstadt, Liyue, Inazuma, Sumeru, Fontaine, and whatever arrives with each new update. Since it was designed from the ground up for mobile and console, the PC client carried limitations for years that had nothing to do with hardware power and everything to do with options-menu design choices. Here we go over which settings really move the needle on framerate, what the community does to unlock the 60fps cap, and how to get the most out of your GPU without sacrificing readability of the cel-shaded art style.
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft has been standing for more than twenty years, and its graphics engine has gone through more internal overhauls than most players realize: DirectX 12 support, progressive multithreading, and texture streaming improvements. But the real performance challenge has never been "how many polygons your GPU can push" — it's how many characters, spells, and addons your CPU can process at once in a single corridor. Solo, almost any rig from the last decade runs the game at very high FPS without effort. The problem shows up in Valdrakken, Dornogal, or a 20-40 player mythic pull, where the framerate tanks even though your graphics card is bored at 40% usage.
Company of Heroes 3
Company of Heroes 3 pushes real-time destruction and squad tactics to the series' most ambitious point yet, with buildings that crumble piece by piece and terrain that reshapes mid-battle. The Essence Engine has to sustain dozens of individual units with detailed animations, rubble physics, and constant pathfinding, all at once on large maps like the ones in the Italy campaign. The 2023 launch was particularly rough on performance, with severe FPS drops in 4v4 battles and frequent stuttering, which Relic has been polishing with successive patches.
Total War: Pharaoh
Total War: Pharaoh brings Creative Assembly's formula to Bronze Age Egypt, combining a turn-based campaign map with real-time battles where thousands of individual soldiers clash on screen. It runs on Total War's proprietary engine, polished over more than a decade of entries. The technical challenge isn't so much on the graphics side as in simultaneously calculating AI, formations, and pathfinding for every unit on the battlefield.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
Black Ops Cold War launched in 2020 on a variant of the IW Engine shared with Modern Warfare, and from day one the competitive community treated it as a tournament shooter rather than a graphical showcase. The absolute priority is a high, stable framerate, with no drops mid-firefight, and the lowest possible input lag thanks to Nvidia Reflex. Integration with Warzone adds background texture and asset streaming that can cause micro-stutters if storage speed and VRAM don't keep up.
ARC Raiders
ARC Raiders is the PvPvE extraction shooter from Embark Studios, the team behind THE FINALS, and shares that game's obsession with real-time destruction. Built on Unreal Engine 5, it leans on fully destructible environments, dynamic global illumination via Lumen, and a ruined-world aesthetic that demands a lot from the GPU even on modest setups. The competitive nature of the game makes keeping a stable framerate during firefights just as important as clearly seeing enemies at medium and long range.
Once Human
Once Human mixes survival, crafting, and cosmic horror in an infected open world shared with hundreds of players in real time. It runs on Unreal Engine 4, and its performance challenge isn't so much its own graphical load as the number of other players' bases the engine must load and render simultaneously in each "scenario." That makes the CPU the usual bottleneck in populated areas, while volumetric fog and weather effects on the corrupted terrain do demand the GPU in open exteriors.
VRChat
VRChat is a completely atypical case for an FPS optimization site: it's not a game with levels designed by a studio, but a social platform where thousands of creators upload their own worlds and avatars with no technical performance review whatsoever. That means your framerate can go from a stable 90 FPS to 15 FPS in a matter of seconds, simply by entering a crowded room or running into the wrong avatar. Optimizing VRChat isn't just about tweaking the graphics menu — it's about understanding how the Unity engine handles (or suffers under) unoptimized user-generated content.
FragPunk
FragPunk is NetEase's (Bad Guitar Studio) free-to-play tactical team shooter, combining Valorant/CS-style 5v5 round structure with 'Shard Cards' — cards that alter the match rules in real time (invert gravity, heal enemies with your bullets, blow up part of the map) — plus terrain destruction as a core tactical mechanic. Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game uses a deliberately stylized, low-to-medium polygon fidelity look designed to run well on modest hardware and keep competitive combat readable, but it inherits the same Achilles' heel as other UE5 titles: shader compilation and CPU spikes when scenery destruction and the most chaotic Shard Cards trigger at once on screen.
CyberCorp
CyberCorp is a cooperative PvPvE extraction shooter set in a dystopian corporate future, where mercenary squads infiltrate megacorp-controlled facilities to steal data, technology, and resources while dodging both rival squads and the complex's automated security. Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game leans on dense industrial environments, dynamic global illumination via Lumen, and highly detailed geometry through Nanite to give corporate interiors that neon-and-metal cyberpunk look. As with most recent extraction shooters on UE5, the workload splits between a GPU stressed by Lumen and neon effects, and a CPU that has to simulate guard AI, partial cover-destruction physics, and network sync between several simultaneous squads.
Street Warriors Online
Street Warriors Online is an online multiplayer street-brawler beat 'em up with a very direct focus: deep character customization, fast turn-based combat against up to several players at once, and a low-poly 2.5D/3D look designed to run on any PC. Its engine is simple and doesn't chase cutting-edge graphical effects, so the vast majority of rigs, even modest laptops or office PCs, run it at max settings without any issue. The real limiting factor is almost never the GPU or the CPU, but the network connection: as an online multiplayer game with real-time hit synchronization, latency and server stability weigh far more on the experience than any graphics setting.
Forza Motorsport
Forza Motorsport (2023) is the reboot with which Turn 10 Studios relaunched the racing sim franchise, built on an evolved version of the ForzaTech engine that now features real-time ray tracing, even during the races themselves rather than just in replays like in previous entries. The game renders ray-traced reflections on the bodywork of up to 24 simultaneous cars, a very detailed dynamic damage and lighting model, and a weather system that alters asphalt physics in real time. That combination of graphical fidelity and a large grid with aggressive AI makes Forza Motorsport one of the most demanding driving titles on PC, with load split unusually between GPU (ray tracing, lighting) and CPU (physics for 24 cars, AI, damage).
Slay the Spire 2
Slay the Spire 2 is the sequel to MegaCrit's roguelike deckbuilder that redefined the turn-based card game genre, and technically it has barely moved from the original's philosophy: hand-painted 2D art, a fixed camera, and turn-based combat with no physics or 3D geometry. The engine barely has to draw sprites, card icons, and a handful of particle effects when you cast a spell or deal massive damage. There's no open-world streaming, no complex dynamic shadows, no geometry to calculate: it's, by far, one of the least demanding games you'll install this year, and its performance ceiling sits almost always in the hundreds of FPS.
Little Nightmares 3
Little Nightmares 3 keeps the formula that made the saga iconic — a childhood-horror aesthetic built from crushing scale, silhouettes against the light, and unsettling proportions — but takes the leap to real online co-op for two players, something Supermassive Games built on the foundation left by Tarsier Studios. Visually it's not a game that relies on cutting-edge effects like ray tracing or massive geometry; its technical challenge lies in its art direction, with volumetric fog, high-contrast lighting, and dramatic shadows defining almost every shot. That means it generally runs reasonably well even on modest hardware, though the lighting and fog settings are the ones that weigh the most when you want to sustain a high framerate.
eFootball
eFootball is Konami's free-to-play football simulator that replaced the Pro Evolution Soccer franchise, built on a version of the Konami/Fox Engine adapted to deliver very realistic player animations at a relatively low hardware cost. Unlike other sports sims with packed stadiums and heavy weather effects, eFootball prioritizes smoothness and low input lag over visual spectacle, something especially critical in its flagship mode: online 1v1 and team duels, where connection stability and control responsiveness matter far more than a few extra FPS. The result is a game that runs smoothly on almost any PC from the last decade, which turns optimization into an exercise focused more on consistency and latency than on squeezing out frames.
Mafia: The Old Country
Mafia: The Old Country is Hangar 13's prequel that abandons the open world of previous entries to tell a linear story set in rural early-20th-century Sicily. Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game leans on Lumen for global illumination and Nanite for the massive geometry of vineyards, quarries, and coastal towns, all with a level of detail befitting a cinematic title. Not having to sustain a persistent open map, the load concentrates on artistically polished scenes: interiors with complex indirect lighting, rural exteriors with dense vegetation, and action sequences with heavy particle effects. The result is a hardware-demanding game but one that's more predictable in its performance than an open world, since each chapter has a well-defined graphical budget.
South of Midnight
South of Midnight is Compulsion Games' (the studio behind We Happy Few) action-platformer set in the deep South of the United States, where Hazel, a young 'Weaver,' journeys through swamps, flooded towns, and folklore-steeped forests to mend the broken threads of reality using her Weaving powers. Its technical trademark is the art direction: characters and environments animated with a 'digital stop-motion' style that mimics the choppy look of classic frame-by-frame animation, built on Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen for global illumination and Nanite for swamp vegetation and geometry. Being a linear action-platforming experience without a massive open world, the game doesn't demand the hardware of a competitive shooter, but it inherits the same Achilles' heel as other recent Unreal Engine 5 titles: shader-compilation stutter and frametime drops in the sections with the most vegetation, water, and folklore magic effects on screen at once.
Anno 117: Pax Romana
Anno 117: Pax Romana is the latest entry in Ubisoft/Blue Byte's legendary city-building and economic management saga, this time set in Ancient Rome, with two playable regions (a Mediterranean Latium and a more Nordic Albion) and the franchise's trademark: cities that grow building by building, interdependent production chains, sea trade routes, and thousands of citizens individually simulated reacting to taxes, needs, and events. Graphically the game cares a lot about close-up detail (packed markets, ornate villas, ports with ships coming and going), but the real performance challenge, as in the whole Anno saga, appears over the course of a playthrough: the more districts, citizens, and trade empires pile up on the map, the more work the CPU has to do simulating economy, routes, and population, long before the GPU becomes the limiting factor.
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is RGG Studio's (SEGA) action spin-off starring Kazuma Kiryu, who abandons the turn-based combat of the latest mainline entries to return to a real-time combat system in the style of the early Yakuza games, now with a pirate theme: boarding actions, naval combat with your own ship, and exploration of a fictional archipelago inspired by Hawaii. Built on the Dragon Engine, the same engine that powers Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Gaiden, it inherits its usual technical profile: solid overall optimization, moderate graphical demand compared to other open-world AAA titles, and a workload split between the GPU (lighting, water, naval combat reflections) and the CPU (NPC density on the urban streets of Honolulu and the simulation of street life the saga is known for).
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is the long-awaited sequel to the 2004 cult classic, developed by The Chinese Room under Paradox Interactive after a notoriously troubled development that included studio changes and several delays. Built on Unreal Engine 5, it places the player in a nocturnal Seattle rebuilt with Lumen for real-time global illumination and Nanite for urban geometry, recreating rain-soaked streets, alleys lit by neon and sodium lights, and club/dive-bar interiors with a heavily light-source-dense gothic-urban atmosphere. That commitment to dramatic nighttime lighting as a visual trademark makes Lumen and dynamic shadows the settings that impose the highest GPU load, while NPC simulation and the stealth/vampiric-discipline system split part of the demand onto the CPU.
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is the latest numbered entry in RGG Studio/SEGA's Like a Dragon (formerly Yakuza) saga, continuing the series' transition to turn-based RPG combat started in Yakuza: Like a Dragon. The adventure is split between Ijincho in Yokohama, already familiar from the previous entry, and a new Honolulu (Hawaii) city recreated with open streets, beaches, and a very high density of NPCs dedicated to minigames, shops, and side activities. Built on the Dragon Engine, the same proprietary engine the saga has used since Yakuza 6, the game prioritizes stability and smoothness on its urban streets packed with pedestrians and shops over cutting-edge graphical effects, resulting in a technically solid, well-optimized title that doesn't depend on technologies like ray tracing to look good.
Where Winds Meet
Where Winds Meet is Everstone Studio's (backed by NetEase) open-world action RPG set in a recreation of late Tang-dynasty China, blending wuxia martial arts, a fluid combo-and-dodge-based combat system, and a massive map scale that includes bamboo forests, snowy mountain ranges, and cities densely packed with NPCs. The graphics engine leans heavily on cloth and hair physics to bring characters' robes, capes, and hair to life during combat and movement, one of the game's visual trademarks, along with very dense vegetation and elaborate particle effects in martial-arts techniques. That combination of an extensive open world, real-time cloth/hair simulation, and combat with lots of visual effects makes the load fall mostly on the GPU, though urban areas with crowds of NPCs also demand quite a bit from the CPU.
Need for Speed Unbound
Need for Speed Unbound (2022) is Criterion Games' entry that reinvents the saga's street-racing formula with Lakeshore, a fictional Chicago-inspired open-world city, adding a very distinctive visual style: on top of the Frostbite engine (the same technological base as Battlefield and Battlefront, adapted here for driving), the game blends realistic 3D car models and environments with hand-drawn 2D graffiti-style particle effects that burst out while drifting, activating nitro, or performing stylish actions. That combination, plus dense urban traffic and police chases that can escalate to involve dozens of simultaneous AI cars (civilian traffic, patrol cars, reinforcements, roadblocks), means the load splits noticeably between GPU (graffiti effects, reflections, urban lighting) and CPU (traffic and police AI, multi-car collision physics).
Naraka: Bladepoint
Naraka: Bladepoint is 24 Entertainment's (NetEase) melee-combat battle royale that replaces ranged gunfights with fast, highly technical wuxia martial-arts duels, backed by a vertical movement system with grappling hook, gliding, and climbing that turns every map into a three-dimensional parkour course. Built on Unreal Engine 4, the game pits up to 60 players against each other in matches where the camera constantly shifts between close-range melee combat, aerial grappling-hook chases, and hero abilities with very flashy particle effects. Unlike a tactical shooter, here smoothness and framerate stability matter more than texture resolution: a single-frame hitch during a melee exchange can decide the duel, so most of the community prioritizes high, consistent FPS over visual fidelity.
Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred
Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred is Blizzard's major expansion that expands Sanctuary with new zones, an all-new final boss, and a skill system noticeably expanded compared to the base game. Built on the same proprietary Diablo IV engine, it keeps the isometric hack-and-slash formula with a top-down camera, procedurally generated dungeons, and world events where dozens of players share the same zone. The expansion intensifies exactly what already defined Diablo IV's performance profile: skill builds loaded with ever more simultaneous particle effects, enemies stacked on screen, and high-density zones where the engine has to simulate physics, collisions, and AI for dozens of entities at once, on top of rendering the new zones with their own level of environmental detail.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero
Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is Spike Chunsoft's spiritual successor to the Budokai Tenkaichi saga, a 1v1 (or 3v3) arena fighting game built on Unreal Engine 4, where two fighters clash in open, massive stages that get destroyed in real time: mountains that crumble to dust, buildings that collapse, and terrain that deforms with every energy impact. Being a fight with very few simultaneous characters, the engine doesn't need to simulate crowds or complex AI, but it does have to render large-scale transformations (Super Saiyan, Ultra Instinct, fusion forms) that completely change the stage's lighting and ki effects, on top of constantly recalculating destruction across a huge terrain. That combination makes Sparking! Zero markedly GPU-dependent, where energy effects and real-time stage destruction weigh far more than character simulation.
Cronos: The New Dawn
Cronos: The New Dawn is Bloober Team's sci-fi survival horror (the studio behind Layers of Fear and the Silent Hill 2 remake), set in a dystopian New Húsov with a Soviet industrial aesthetic and time travel as the central mechanic of both its narrative and combat. Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game leans on dynamic global illumination via Lumen that lights corridors, abandoned facilities, and organic-mechanical fused creatures in very high contrast, backed by dense volumetric fog and dramatic shadows that are the studio's visual trademark. That combination of Lumen, fog, and Nanite-rendered detailed geometry makes Cronos one of the most GPU-demanding titles in the recent horror catalog, with the usual Unreal Engine 5 Achilles' heel: shader-compilation stutter and hitching, especially in the first few hours of play.
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Resynced
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Resynced is Ubisoft's revision of the 2013 pirate classic, rebuilt on an updated graphics engine that modernizes lighting, textures, vegetation, and above all the dynamic ocean that was always the original game's trademark. The result is a huge Caribbean open world split between sea navigation with ship physics, naval combat with cannons and boarding actions, and on-foot exploration across densely vegetated tropical islands and colonial cities full of NPCs. Being a remaster that rebuilds the rendering systems rather than just bumping texture resolution, the load splits unevenly: the ocean with its real-time waves, foam, and reflections, along with dynamic weather and storms, pulls mostly on the GPU, while cities with high NPC density and the ship's own simulation demand quite a bit from the CPU.
Lords of the Fallen 2
Lords of the Fallen 2 is the continuation of Hexworks' (CI Games) dark gothic-world soulslike, built once again on Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen for dynamic global illumination and Nanite for the massive geometry of its ruined cathedrals, rotten forests, and impossible architecture. The saga keeps its most ambitious technical trademark: the 'Umbral,' a mirror dimension rendered simultaneously with the real world that the player can cross at any moment, effectively doubling much of the lighting, shadow, and geometry load visible on screen. That double rendering, combined with the vegetation density and volumetric fog that define the game's tone, inherits from the first entry — which launched with notable performance issues and stuttering — the need to keep a close eye on shader compilation and VRAM management.
Mortal Shell 2
Mortal Shell 2 is the sequel to Cold Symmetry's atmospheric soulslike, bringing back the distinctive mechanic of 'possessing shells' to inhabit different bodies with their own stats and combat styles, within a decaying gothic setting marked by rot, weathered stone, and a very restrained light palette. The first entry was technically light for what it visually offered, leaning more on art direction (fog, point lighting, high-contrast organic textures) than graphical brute force, and it's reasonable to expect this sequel to keep that philosophy with a moderate jump in fidelity, without reaching the scale of a big-budget AAA title. The slow, tactical combat, built around parrying and blocking, means frametime stability matters more than peak FPS.
Kena: Scars of Kosmora
Kena: Scars of Kosmora is Ember Lab's sequel to the acclaimed Kena: Bridge of Spirits, an action adventure that keeps the studio's visual trademark: a Pixar-style digital animation aesthetic, with warm, artistically crafted lighting, magical forests dense with vegetation, and the endearing Rot, small furry creatures that accompany Kena and actively take part in the game's agile combat. The sequel jumps to Unreal Engine 5, leaning on Lumen for dynamic global illumination and a dedicated fur-shading system to render individual fur for dozens of Rot on screen at once, plus Nanite for the organic geometry of the forest vegetation. That combination of real-time indirect lighting, simulated fur, and dense foliage makes the game clearly GPU-oriented, following the same performance pattern as other recent Unreal Engine 5 titles.