How to improve FPS in PUBG: Battlegrounds (PC)
PUBG: Battlegrounds remains, almost a decade after its Steam Early Access launch (2017), one of the most demanding battle royales to optimize well. The Unreal Engine 4 engine (with a partial UE5 migration on Erangel since 2024, which added optional Lumen and Nanite) has to sustain up to 100 simultaneous players on maps as large as 8x8 km with terrain streaming, vehicles, ragdoll physics, and dense vegetation. The result is an unusually high CPU load for what the game offers graphically, especially in the first minutes of a match when all 100 players are still alive.
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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 +55% free FPS.
Foliage Quality
It's the single most influential setting in the whole game. On Very Low, grass renders much sparser and more transparent, which drastically cuts geometry load on maps like Erangel and Miramar and, incidentally, makes players who'd otherwise be camouflaged in tall grass at higher settings visible.
Shadows
The dynamic shadows from vegetation, buildings, and vehicles on large maps are expensive to calculate. Lowering to Low removes much of that cost without losing silhouette readability, which is what actually matters in combat.
Post-Processing
Reduces bloom, vignette, depth of field, and color grading. Besides freeing up performance, it removes effects that make it harder to spot enemies at range.
Anti-Aliasing
PUBG's TAA introduces a noticeable GPU cost and some motion blur. Lowering it to Low (or disabling it if you use DLSS/FSR) improves both FPS and perceived sharpness.
Render Scale
Lowering the render scale slightly below 100% reduces pixel load in a nearly imperceptible way at 1440p/4K.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
With 8x8 km maps constantly streaming terrain, building, and vehicle textures, too high a texture setting on GPUs with little VRAM causes microstutter from streaming, not just lower average FPS.
View Distance
This is the setting whose impact varies most by map: on Erangel and Miramar, lowering it to Medium saves a fair amount of performance; on Sanhok (4x4 km) the impact is much smaller.
Effects Quality
Affects explosions, grenade smoke, and vehicle particles. Lowering it doesn't just give FPS: it reduces the opacity and persistence of tactical smoke, which in practice makes it easier to see through enemy smoke grenades.
V-Sync
V-Sync adds unnecessary input lag in a competitive shooter. It's better to disable it and use an FPS limiter (or NVIDIA Reflex) to avoid tearing without penalizing latency.
Motion Blur
Low but non-zero cost, and it worsens visual clarity when turning the camera quickly, something critical in close-range fights.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS
+35% FPSNVIDIA DLSS (Super Resolution) arrived in PUBG in a 2022 update and remains active in the game's current versions. On RTX GPUs it's the scaling option with the best sharpness-to-performance ratio.
AMD FSR
+28% FPSAMD FSR is available as a cross-platform alternative (works on any GPU). The quality jump between modes is more noticeable than in DLSS, so it's recommended to use at least Quality mode.
Intel XeSS
+22% FPSIntel XeSS is supported for Arc GPU owners, with image quality behavior in between DLSS and FSR. On non-Intel GPUs, performance is noticeably worse than its native execution on Arc.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable NVIDIA Reflex from the game's options to reduce input lag, especially valuable in PUBG's close-range firefights.
- •Keep Game Ready drivers up to date: Krafton ships frequent seasonal patches that often introduce performance regressions fixed shortly after via driver.
- •On RTX 30/40, use DLSS in Quality mode before lowering the monitor's native resolution.
AMD
- •Enable AMD Anti-Lag in the Adrenalin panel to offset the extra latency added by Unreal Engine's rendering pipeline.
- •If your GPU doesn't support FSR natively in good conditions, try FSR in Quality mode first and only move up to Balanced if you're still below your target FPS.
- •Check that Radeon Chill is disabled during ranked matches: it can introduce noticeable frametime variations in combat.
Sistema
- •Install PUBG on an SSD (preferably NVMe): terrain and texture streaming on 8x8 km maps is one of the most common causes of stutter on HDD installs.
- •Disable Windows's fullscreen optimizations and the Game Bar; they tend to add microstutter in games with anti-cheat like BattlEye.
- •Leave at least 4-6 GB of RAM free for the operating system: with 100 players loading assets simultaneously, insufficient RAM causes more severe FPS drops than in most shooters.
5. Known game issues
Shader compilation stutter after every update
Every seasonal patch tends to cause noticeable hitching during the first minutes of play while the engine compiles new shaders, especially when entering a freshly updated map for the first time.
CPU bottleneck at the start of a match
With all 100 players alive at the start of the plane and the jump, physics simulation, networking, and terrain streaming saturate the CPU even on high-end processors, causing FPS drops that fade as the circle shrinks.
Increased requirements after Erangel's UE5 remaster
The 2024 update of Erangel to Unreal Engine 5 (with optional Lumen and Nanite) notably raised GPU and VRAM requirements on that specific map compared to the rest, which remains on the classic UE4 pipeline.
Estado: Erangel UE5 update (2024)
6. Frequently asked questions
Why does PUBG perform worse than its graphics would suggest?▾
What are the best settings to maximize visibility in competitive play?▾
Do Erangel and Miramar demand more than Sanhok?▾
Does PUBG support DLSS, FSR, or XeSS?▾
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 PUBG: Battlegrounds →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →