How to improve FPS in Sons of the Forest (PC)
Sons of the Forest is Endnight Games's survival horror built on Unity, a direct sequel to The Forest. Its performance challenge doesn't come from 4K textures or ray tracing, but from an extremely dense generated forest: thousands of individual trees, bushes, and shrubs simulated with real-time wind physics, plus a building system where every log, rope, and panel placed by the player is calculated as its own physical structure. On top of that, there's the mutant and cannibal AI, which runs patrol, ambush, and flee routines considerably more complex than the average survival-game enemy. The game launched in Early Access in February 2023 with uneven performance (stutters, poor VRAM management, CPU bottlenecks in forested zones) that Endnight steadily polished through the 1.0 release in 2024. Even so, it remains a game demanding on the CPU due to vegetation and physics simulation, more than on raw GPU power.
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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 +66% free FPS.
Vegetation Density (Tree/Foliage Quality)
It's the setting with the biggest impact in the game because it directly attacks the root cause: the CPU and GPU have to process and render thousands of individual vegetation objects with wind physics. Lowering it reduces both the amount of simulated plants and their geometric detail.
Draw Distance (Draw Distance)
Reduces how many trees, rocks, and structures load and render at a distance. Since the map is a continuous forest without strong natural occlusion, this slider has a disproportionate weight on performance compared to other survival games.
Shadows (Shadow Quality)
With thousands of vegetation elements casting dynamic shadows, Unity's shadow engine saturates quickly. Lowering shadow resolution and distance frees up both CPU (culling) and GPU.
Antialiasing (TAA/FXAA)
The default TAA is costly and also generates noticeable ghosting on movement among wind-blown vegetation. FXAA is cheaper, though less clean on fine edges like branches.
Water and Surface Reflections (Reflection Quality)
The map's lakes, rivers, and puddles use real-time reflections that are constantly recalculated. Lowering their quality reduces extra render calls with almost no impact on gameplay.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality (Texture Quality)
On GPUs with little VRAM, high textures cause stuttering from constant disk streaming, especially when building shelters with many different materials in view. On GPUs with plenty of VRAM, the impact on raw FPS is smaller.
Building and Object Physics (Physics Quality)
Structures built by the player are simulated as their own physics systems. Very large structures or those with many connected pieces generate sustained CPU load even while standing still near them.
Render Resolution (Render Scale)
Slightly reducing the internal render resolution relieves both GPU and part of the post-processing load, with moderate sharpness loss that the built-in TAA/FXAA helps disguise.
Particle Effects (Particle Effects)
Campfires, dust, fog, and combat effects against mutants generate particle spikes that, combined with already-loaded vegetation on screen, can cause occasional frametime drops.
Global and Volumetric Lighting (Volumetric Lighting/Fog)
The light shafts piercing the forest canopy are one of the game's most striking visual effects, but also one of the most costly when combined with the already vegetation-heavy rendering load.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS 2/3
+30% FPSSons of the Forest includes DLSS 2 (and DLSS 3 Frame Generation support on RTX 40 GPUs) since patches released after the Early Access launch. On Quality it offers a good balance, being especially useful for offsetting the cost of dense vegetation without losing too much foliage definition.
AMD FSR 2
+25% FPSFSR 2 is available as a cross-platform alternative for AMD, Intel, and older NVIDIA GPUs. Its reconstruction is somewhat less sharp on fine leaf and branch edges than DLSS, but it's still a very noticeable performance jump in Balanced mode.
Intel XeSS
+20% FPSXeSS is supported on Intel Arc GPUs and as a generic option on other cards. On non-Intel hardware it runs in its DP4a compatibility mode, with lower reconstruction quality than on Arc but still delivering an appreciable FPS gain.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable DLSS in Quality mode as your first option: it's the cleanest gain relative to sharpness loss, especially among moving vegetation.
- •If you have an RTX 40, enable Frame Generation only once you already have 50+ base FPS, to avoid the perceptible latency increase in close combat against mutants.
- •Update to the latest Game Ready drivers: Endnight has released several performance patches since Early Access, and NVIDIA has optimized specific profiles for the game.
AMD
- •Use FSR 2 in Quality or Balanced mode instead of forcing native resolution; the vegetation engine benefits more from upscaling than from lowering individual sliders further.
- •On RX 6000/7000 cards, enable Radeon Anti-Lag to offset the added latency when combining FSR with vsync in combat scenes.
- •Check that Smart Access Memory (ReBAR) is active in the BIOS: it measurably helps with texture streaming for vegetation and built structures.
Sistema
- •This game relies on the CPU more than expected for a survival title: vegetation and structure physics simulation run on the CPU, so a mid-range processor can be a bottleneck even with a powerful GPU.
- •Install the game on SSD: continuous vegetation and open-forest asset streaming generates noticeable stutters on mechanical drives when moving fast.
- •Close background overlays and recorders; the game already uses several CPU threads for physics and mutant AI and competes directly for cycles with background software.
5. Known game issues
Stuttering when generating terrain and vegetation (streaming)
During Early Access it was common to suffer microcuts while exploring new forest zones, caused by hot-loading vegetation and textures. Endnight reduced the problem with several streaming patches, but on mechanical drives or with tight VRAM it's still perceptible.
Estado: 2023 Early Access performance patches (improved, not fully eliminated)
Memory leaks in long sessions
Multi-hour sessions, especially while building large bases, could lead to progressive FPS degradation and higher RAM/VRAM usage until a restart was needed. Significantly mitigated ahead of the 1.0 launch in 2024, though some players still report degradation in very long sessions.
Estado: 1.0 launch (2024)
Frametime drops when destroying large structures
Demolishing bases with many connected pieces causes physics-calculation spikes because the engine has to recalculate the structural integrity of the entire remaining assembly at once, generating a noticeable hitch even on powerful systems.
6. Frequently asked questions
Why do my FPS drop so much just entering dense forest zones?▾
Is it worth enabling DLSS or FSR in Sons of the Forest?▾
Has performance improved since the Early Access launch?▾
Does building very large bases affect performance even when I'm not near them?▾
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Calculate FPS for Sons of the Forest →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →