How to improve FPS in Assassin's Creed Valhalla (PC)
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.
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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 +38% free FPS.
Crowd Density
Reduces the number of NPCs simulated in settlements and during raid looting, two of the scenarios where the AnvilNext 2.0 engine suffers the most framerate drops from CPU load. The visual impact is noticeable in the crowds of Ravensthorpe or York, but combat doesn't lose any intensity.
Volumetric Clouds
Valhalla's volumetric clouds are constantly recalculated by the dynamic weather system, and on Ultra they add extra GPU load that's barely noticeable except when looking directly at the sky. Dropping to Medium keeps sunsets and storms believable.
Volumetric Fog
Volumetric fog is used a lot in Norway's forests and English mornings for atmosphere, but on Ultra it multiplies light-scattering calculations. Medium preserves the sense of depth without penalizing framerate as much.
Ambient Occlusion
Contact shading between objects and vegetation is costly in scenes with lots of foliage density, typical of the game's forested zones. Dropping to Medium slightly softens shadow contacts without visibly flattening scenes.
Motion Blur
Motion blur barely provides any performance gain when disabled, but it removes an effect many players find distracting in fast combat with Eivor and while galloping on horseback.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Vegetation Quality / View Distance
Controls both nearby foliage density and the distance at which trees and shrubs render, something critical on a map where Norwegian forests and English plains dominate much of the journey. Dropping from Ultra to High notably reduces the geometry streaming that saturates the CPU, though distant vegetation pop-in becomes somewhat more noticeable.
Shadow Quality
Valhalla's dynamic shadows cover a wide radius around Eivor and are recalculated with every change in the day/night lighting cycle. On Medium some edge definition is lost, but a considerable GPU load is freed up in settlement interiors.
Texture Quality
Textures on Ultra demand quite a bit more VRAM without a proportional visual improvement on most 1080p and 1440p monitors. High keeps armor, cloth, and Viking architecture sharp while reducing the risk of stuttering from video memory saturation.
Water Quality
The Norwegian fjords and English rivers use a water system with reflections and dynamic foam that's costly on Ultra, especially during longship voyages. Medium preserves the water's overall look while sacrificing some reflection detail.
Anti-Aliasing (TAA)
Valhalla's TAA smooths edges well in a world with very fine vegetation, but at its highest level it adds a rendering cost that isn't always justified over High. Dropping one notch keeps the image clean with a slight performance saving.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
AMD FSR 2.0
+28% FPSValhalla didn't include upscaling at launch; FSR was added months later via patch and remains the only option available, since the game never received native support for NVIDIA DLSS. In Balanced mode it offers a notable performance jump at 1440p and 4K with moderate sharpness loss, especially useful in forest scenes with lots of fine foliage detail where the rescaling has more work to do.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Reflex's Ultra mode if your GPU supports it via the control panel, since it reduces latency in raid combat with no FPS cost.
- •Force x16 anisotropic filtering from the NVIDIA panel instead of relying on the in-game setting, since Valhalla doesn't always apply it consistently to all terrain textures.
- •On cards with less than 8GB of VRAM, avoid combining Texture Quality on Ultra with Shadow Quality on Ultra at the same time: together they can cause microstutter from memory saturation in Ravensthorpe.
AMD
- •Update to the latest Adrenalin drivers before enabling FSR 2.0, since early driver versions had visible artifacts in hair and vegetation with this game.
- •If you have an RX 6000 or 7000 series card, enable Radeon Boost to gain extra FPS during horseback gallops and chases without sacrificing quality in static exploration scenes.
- •Smart Access Memory (SAM) brings a measurable improvement in heavy-streaming zones like the Norwegian forests if your CPU is also AMD Ryzen.
Sistema
- •Install the game on an SSD, not an HDD: Valhalla's continuous open-world streaming causes severe texture and geometry pop-in on mechanical drives, especially at high riding speed.
- •Close third-party overlays (Discord, GeForce Experience, MSI Afterburner) if you notice microstutter in large settlements, since the AnvilNext 2.0 engine is sensitive to extra hooks over the graphics process.
- •If your CPU has 4 cores or fewer, prioritize lowering Crowd Density before any graphics setting: the most frequent bottlenecks in this game are CPU-related, not GPU-related.
5. Known game issues
FPS drops during monastery raids
Assault sequences with dozens of NPCs fighting simultaneously generate CPU usage spikes that can cause occasional drops of 15-20 FPS, even on high-end systems, due to AI simulation and ragdoll physics.
Streaming stutter during zone transitions
When quickly crossing between biomes (for example, leaving a fjord for a dense forest) the engine can generate microstutters while it loads new assets, a problem more common on mechanical hard drives or with tight VRAM.
VRAM overload with Texture Quality on Ultra
On GPUs with 6GB or less, combining Ultra Texture Quality with 1440p resolutions can cause sharp framerate drops and textures that take time to load in settlements like York.
Estado: Partially mitigated in updates after launch, though the problem persists on GPUs with limited VRAM
6. Frequently asked questions
Does Assassin's Creed Valhalla have DLSS?▾
What's the setting that frees up the most FPS in Valhalla?▾
Why does the game run worse in settlements like Ravensthorpe than in the open countryside?▾
Is it worth playing with Vegetation Quality on Ultra?▾
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Calculate FPS for Assassin's Creed Valhalla →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →