How to improve FPS in Dying Light: The Beast (PC)
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.
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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 +67% free FPS.
Ray Tracing / Global Illumination
Ray tracing recalculates global illumination and reflections in real time, which is especially costly during the day/night cycle's lighting transitions.
Volumetric Fog
Volumetric fog is one of the C-Engine's biggest performance hogs, especially at night when combined with dynamic light sources scattered across the city.
Shadow Quality
Dynamic shadows for infected and the urban environment are constantly recalculated during parkour, making them one of the biggest sources of micro-stutter.
Crowd Density
Controls how many infected and NPCs are actively simulated on screen, a parameter inherited directly from Dying Light 2 that remains one of the most CPU-sensitive.
Motion Blur
With the frantic pace of first-person parkour, motion blur adds a blur that many players find nauseating and that contributes nothing to actual performance.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
High-resolution textures depend mostly on available VRAM rather than GPU compute power, so the real FPS cost is moderate if your card has enough memory.
View Distance
Draw distance directly affects how much dense vegetation and urban detail is rendered on the horizon, noticeable in the more open areas outside the city.
Ambient Occlusion
Ambient occlusion adds depth to the city's dark corners and alleys, reinforcing the sense of nighttime threat, but its highest-quality version has a disproportionate performance cost.
Volumetric Clouds
Volumetric clouds are an important part of how the lighting transition reads during the day/night cycle, but their full simulation hits performance hard in wide outdoor scenes.
Anti-Aliasing (TAA/DLAA)
TAA offers good edge smoothing at moderate cost, while DLAA demands more performance in exchange for greater sharpness, something that only pays off on powerful RTX GPUs.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS 3 (with Frame Generation on RTX 40)
+45% FPSDLSS 3 is the strongest option on RTX cards, with Frame Generation available on the 40 series to practically double the frames on screen. It's especially useful for smoothing out parkour chains.
AMD FSR 2/3
+35% FPSFSR works on any modern GPU, not just AMD, and offers a notable performance gain, though with somewhat more noticeable ghosting in dense foliage and fast motion.
Intel XeSS
+32% FPSXeSS is the cross-platform alternative that best holds up fine detail in vegetation and urban textures, with performance between FSR and DLSS.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Reflex in the options panel to reduce input latency during melee combat, especially noticeable when dodging infected at night.
- •If you have an RTX 40 card, combine DLSS Quality with Frame Generation only if your base FPS already exceeds 60, to avoid noticeable visual artifacts during fast parkour.
- •Update to the latest Game Ready drivers before playing; Techland usually coordinates specific optimization profiles with NVIDIA at launch.
AMD
- •Enable Anti-Lag+ from Adrenalin to offset the latency added by FSR, especially if you use the variant with frame generation.
- •RDNA 2 GPUs and older should prioritize turning off Ray Tracing/Global Illumination entirely, since their ray tracing performance is limited.
- •Check that the driver's performance mode is set to "Performance" instead of "Quality" if you're aiming to maximize FPS over image sharpness.
Sistema
- •Install the game on an SSD (preferably NVMe): the C-Engine's constant streaming of textures and dense vegetation suffers a lot on mechanical hard drives.
- •Close third-party overlays (Discord, capture tools) during the most demanding nighttime sessions, since they're the ones consuming the most CPU alongside the infected AI peak.
- •Make sure you have at least 16GB of RAM; with 8GB the game falls back on virtual memory and causes the most noticeable stutters during parkour jumps.
5. Known game issues
Shader compilation stuttering at the start
As in Dying Light 2, the first minutes of play after each driver update can show hitches while the engine compiles shaders in the background.
FPS drops during the day/night transition
Recalculating volumetric lighting and shadows when switching between day and night causes a brief frame drop, more pronounced with Ray Tracing enabled.
High VRAM usage with Ultra textures
At 1440p and 4K resolutions with textures maxed out, the game can exceed 8GB of VRAM and cause visible texture streaming on cards with limited memory.
6. Frequently asked questions
Is it worth enabling Ray Tracing in Dying Light: The Beast?▾
Which setting has the biggest impact on performance during parkour?▾
Why does the game run worse at night than during the day?▾
Which upscaling technology gives the best results?▾
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Calculate FPS for Dying Light: The Beast →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →