How to improve FPS in Anno 1800 (PC)
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.
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Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +50% free FPS.
Population Detail
Controls how many individual citizens are rendered with full animation versus simplified or grouped versions at a distance. On islands with very dense residential districts, it's the setting with the biggest direct impact on framerate.
Shadow Quality
The dynamic shadows of buildings, ships, and moving citizens themselves are expensive to calculate when there's so much animated geometry on screen. Dropping from Ultra/High to Medium noticeably reduces GPU load without shadows losing their job of visually anchoring buildings to the terrain.
Water Reflections
Anno 1800 is played surrounded by sea and rivers, and high-quality water reflections constantly recalculate the reflected environment on every visible liquid surface. Lowering it improves performance on maps with many islands with barely any effect on gameplay.
Anti-Aliasing
Edge smoothing in a game with so much architectural detail and thousands of small silhouettes can weigh more than expected. Switching from a heavier option to FXAA reduces GPU consumption while keeping edges reasonably clean in the city view.
Ambient Occlusion
Ambient occlusion adds subtle shading between adjacent buildings and in the narrow streets typical of dense districts. On Medium it keeps much of that visual depth without the cost of higher-resolution passes.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
Anno 1800's textures are part of its visual identity, with strongly marked industrial detail on facades and floors. Dropping from Ultra to High frees up VRAM and improves streaming without sacrificing too much close-up sharpness.
View Distance
Determines how far neighboring buildings and islands load and get detailed on the map. In sessions with large maps and multiple visible islands at once, reducing it noticeably relieves both CPU and GPU.
Vegetation Quality
Vegetation on the New World's tropical islands and the Old World's forests includes lots of individual elements with wind animation. Reducing it to Medium removes rendering load without leaving the landscape bare.
Water Quality
Beyond reflections, overall water quality affects wave and foam simulation around ports and moving ships. On Medium it keeps an attractive look at considerably less GPU cost.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable the performance mode in the NVIDIA control panel for Anno 1800, since the game doesn't saturate the GPU as much as the CPU and prioritizing clock speed helps in large cities.
- •Update to the latest Game Ready drivers; Ubisoft has shipped several performance patches and optimized drivers help avoid streaming microstutter.
- •If you use a GPU with little VRAM (4GB or less), avoid Texture Quality on Ultra on maps with many islands, since it can cause sharp FPS drops from lack of memory.
AMD
- •On AMD GPUs, disable Radeon Chill or dynamic FPS caps while playing, since they can interact poorly with abrupt loading transitions between map view and city view.
- •Use Radeon Software to set a dedicated high-performance profile for Anno1800.exe, preventing the card from downclocking during in-game simulation pauses.
- •Keep drivers updated to a known stable version, since Anno 1800 uses DirectX 11 and some driver versions have shown more stability than others with this engine.
Sistema
- •The CPU is the real bottleneck in advanced games: prioritize a CPU with good per-core performance (high IPC) over having many cores, since simulation depends heavily on fast threads.
- •Install the game on an SSD; save files for advanced games with many islands can weigh several GB, and loading and autosave times benefit enormously from disk speed.
- •Have at least 16GB of RAM if you play long games with many islands and active DLCs, since memory consumption grows steadily as the city expands.
5. Known game issues
Sim lag in very advanced games
Past a certain city size and number of active islands, the economic simulation starts running slower than the game clock, making game speed feel "sticky" even with good framerate. Reducing Population Detail and View Distance helps, but the problem is inherent to the engine in marathon games.
Microstuttering when switching islands or zooming quickly
Texture and citizen model streaming when jumping between islands or zooming abruptly can cause small hitches, especially on mechanical hard drives or with little VRAM. Installing on SSD and lowering Texture Quality mitigates the problem quite a bit.
FPS drop in session editor and multiplayer
Multiplayer games and some co-op sessions show additional performance drops compared to single-player mode, attributed to simulation sync between clients.
Estado: Patch 16 (partially mitigated)
6. Frequently asked questions
Why does my FPS only drop in advanced games and not at the start?▾
Does Anno 1800 have DLSS or FSR?▾
What's more important for Anno 1800, CPU or GPU?▾
Does lowering Population Detail make the city look empty?▾
Want to know exactly how many FPS YOUR PC will get?
Enter your GPU and CPU in our calculator and measure the real impact of each setting.
Calculate FPS for Anno 1800 →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →