How to improve FPS in Far Cry 6 (PC)
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.
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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 +30% free FPS.
Volumetric Fog
Yara's volumetric fog simulates real-time light scattering through vegetation and is one of the heaviest GPU loads in the game. Lowering it to Medium preserves the tropical atmosphere without the cost of full volumetric calculations.
Volumetric Clouds
Volumetric clouds render in layers with dynamic lighting, noticeable especially when looking at the horizon from elevated zones. On Medium they keep the dynamic-sky look without doubling the render cost of the upper layers.
Shadow Quality
Dynamic shadows from vegetation and NPCs consume a fair amount of rendering bandwidth, especially indoors in villages with multiple light sources. Medium reduces the resolution of distant shadow maps while nearby ones stay sharp.
Anti-Aliasing (TAA)
Far Cry 6's TAA is relatively light compared to other settings, but dropping from Ultra to High frees up some performance without introducing noticeable aliasing in the foliage, where shimmering is most visible.
Ambient Occlusion
Ambient occlusion affects contrast at the base of plants, rocks, and structures. Lowering it to Medium keeps overall visual depth and only loses detail in very fine contact shading.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Vegetation Quality / View Distance
This is the single most decisive setting in the whole game because it directly controls how much vegetation is simulated and rendered, and at what distance, across Yara. Dropping from Ultra to Medium drastically reduces both GPU and CPU load, since less vegetation means fewer objects simulated by the physics engine. The visual impact is noticeable in open landscapes, but the game still reads well in combat.
Water Quality
With so much coastline and islands, Far Cry 6's water uses real-time reflections and refractions that tax the GPU. Medium simplifies dynamic reflections without losing the readability of waves and transparency near the shore.
Texture Quality
Textures depend more on VRAM than compute power, so lowering them only makes sense on cards with 6GB or less. On High, weapon and clothing texture sharpness is preserved without saturating video memory on mid-range GPUs.
Ray Tracing Shadows
Ray-traced shadows add more realistic contact shadows in specific scenes, but the performance cost is disproportionate to the visual improvement, especially since they coexist with the already-heavy dense vegetation. Disabling them is the right call except on high-end GPUs with plenty of headroom.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
AMD FSR
+30% FPSFar Cry 6 was one of the first big AMD-partnered titles to integrate FSR 2.0 via a post-launch patch (it initially shipped with FSR 1.0 only). It works on any GPU, including NVIDIA and Intel, and in Balanced mode it offers a considerable performance boost with moderate sharpness loss, especially noticeable in fine foliage. There's no native DLSS support in this title.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Reflex Low Latency in the NVIDIA panel to reduce input lag, especially useful in village fights with lots of NPCs on screen.
- •With no native DLSS, use the game's own dynamic resolution scaling combined with FSR to keep FPS stable in dense vegetation zones.
- •Always update to the latest Game Ready driver: Far Cry 6 had several stability patches that depended on specific driver versions in its first year.
AMD
- •Being an AMD-sponsored title, Radeon Software usually ships specific optimized profiles for Far Cry 6; check they're enabled in Radeon Software's Gaming section.
- •FSR 2.0 in Quality is the best option on RX 6000/7000 to gain extra performance with barely any noticeable sharpness loss.
- •Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) gives a measurable improvement in this engine if you combine a recent Ryzen CPU with a recent Radeon GPU.
Sistema
- •The game is notably CPU-heavy in jungle and village zones with NPCs and simulated animals; if you're bottlenecked, prioritize lowering Vegetation Quality before purely graphical settings.
- •Install it on SSD: high-resolution textures on HDD cause visible pop-in when traveling across Yara by vehicle.
- •Only enable HDR if your monitor has genuinely decent peak brightness (400+ nits certified); on cheap panels, poorly calibrated HDR worsens perceived contrast.
5. Known game issues
Frametime hitches in dense village zones
In towns with many simultaneous NPCs, animals, and vegetation, frametime microstutters occur related to AI simulation on the CPU, regardless of the GPU used.
Shader compilation stuttering at startup
The first sessions after installing or updating the game can suffer occasional hitching while the engine compiles shaders in the background; it usually disappears after the first hour of play.
Memory leaks in long sessions
Several-hour sessions without restarting the game could lead to progressive FPS degradation in earlier versions; later patches mitigated this considerably but didn't eliminate it entirely.
Estado: v1.5
6. Frequently asked questions
Does Far Cry 6 have DLSS?▾
Which setting gives the most FPS in Far Cry 6?▾
Why do I get FPS dips in villages even though my GPU isn't at 100%?▾
Is it worth enabling Ray Tracing Shadows?▾
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 Far Cry 6 →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →