How to improve FPS in New World: Aeternum (PC)
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.
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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 +60% free FPS.
Population Density
Controls how many other players and their effects are rendered simultaneously on screen, something critical in crowded zones and sieges. It's the setting with the most real impact on the game's CPU bottleneck.
Vegetation Quality
Aeternum's foliage density is one of the game's visual trademarks, but it's also one of the biggest GPU consumers outdoors. Dropping it from Ultra to Medium drastically cuts rendering load.
Shadow Quality
New World's dynamic shadows are costly, especially in wooded areas with lots of vegetation casting overlapping shadows. Dropping them to Medium smooths out frametime spikes.
Ambient Occlusion
Ambient occlusion adds subtle contact shadows in corners and foliage, but its cost doesn't offset the visual gain in most configurations.
View Distance
Draw distance in Aeternum's open world affects both GPU load and terrain streaming load. Reducing it from Ultra to Medium keeps landscapes recognizable while freeing up resources.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
Depending mostly on available VRAM rather than compute power, keeping textures on High is usually safe on cards with 8GB or more without hurting the framerate.
Effects Quality
Spell effects, auras, and ability VFX multiply exponentially in group combat, being one of the factors that most saturates CPU and GPU during wars.
Anti-Aliasing
The engine's heavier antialiasing options have a notable cost at high resolutions. FXAA offers acceptable smoothing with minimal impact.
Water Reflection Quality
With so much coastline and so many islands, water reflections carry considerable rendering weight, especially near ports and coastal settlements.
Object Detail Distance
Controls the geometric detail level of environment objects and props at medium distance. Reducing it eases GPU load in heavily decorated settlements.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS 3
+35% FPSAvailable on RTX 40-series GPUs with frame generation, it offers the biggest performance jump in open-world exploration. It helps less in massive wars because the bottleneck there is the CPU, not the GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS 2
+25% FPSCompatible with the entire RTX lineup, in Balanced or Performance mode it noticeably improves the framerate in areas with lots of vegetation and water reflections without sacrificing too much sharpness.
AMD FSR 2
+20% FPSWorks on any GPU, including NVIDIA and current-gen consoles. It's somewhat less sharp than DLSS in motion but is still a substantial improvement over native resolution.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Reflex if available via the control panel to reduce latency in PvP fights where every millisecond counts.
- •On RTX 40-series, DLSS 3 with frame generation helps during exploration, but doesn't fix the FPS drop in wars because there the limit is the CPU.
- •Always update to the latest Game Ready driver before big war sessions.
AMD
- •Use FSR 2 in Quality mode as a starting point before lowering individual graphics settings.
- •Radeon Anti-Lag reduces the feeling of input lag in massive PvP fights, though it doesn't improve the framerate itself.
- •Check that your Adrenalin driver is up to date; New World has had specific compatibility patches since the Aeternum relaunch.
Sistema
- •A processor with good single-thread performance matters more than extra cores for 50v50 wars, since the engine doesn't scale combat load well across many threads.
- •Install the game on an SSD, not an HDD, to reduce texture streaming and object popping in war zones.
- •16GB of RAM is the real minimum recommendation; with 32GB, microstutters are reduced during long war or invasion sessions.
5. Known game issues
Severe FPS drops in 50v50 wars
In faction battles with the maximum number of players, area spells, and siege weapons active simultaneously, the framerate can plummet even on high-end rigs.
Microstuttering when entering settlements and war zones
Texture and object streaming load when crossing into high player-density areas can cause momentary hitches, especially on mechanical hard drives.
CPU usage spikes with many simultaneous ability effects
Certain combinations of area spells with many players within the same radius can generate anomalous CPU usage spikes.
Estado: Partial patches in updates following the Aeternum relaunch, without a complete fix
6. Frequently asked questions
Why do FPS drop so much in New World: Aeternum wars even with a powerful graphics card?▾
Is it worth enabling DLSS or FSR in New World: Aeternum?▾
Which setting has the most impact on improving war performance?▾
How much RAM and what CPU do I really need to play New World: Aeternum well?▾
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Calculate FPS for New World: Aeternum →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →