How to improve FPS in The Forest (PC)
The Forest has spent eight years piling up vegetation, physics systems for your cabins, and a mutant AI that patrols caves and woods without rest, all on a 2018 Unity engine that never got the polish of its sequel. The result is a game that on paper should fly on any modern PC, but stumbles into microstutters the moment the camera looks toward dense foliage or your trap-and-structure-filled base. Here the bottleneck is almost always the CPU, not the GPU: tree simulation, cannibal AI, and your camp's physics all compete for the same main thread. With the right vegetation, shadow, and draw distance settings you can eliminate most of the hitching without sacrificing the oppressive forest feel that makes the game special. This guide focuses on squeezing CPU and GPU equally, because in The Forest both demand their share.
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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 +62% free FPS.
Tree Quality
Tree quality controls mesh detail and LOD for the entire forest, the heaviest geometric structure in the game. On Ultra, the engine recalculates LODs for thousands of trees with every step, generating CPU spikes that feel like hitching. Dropping it to Medium drastically reduces those recalculations without turning the forest into a flat backdrop.
Grass Density
Grass and shrubs use simplified wind physics recalculated for every visible blade, which is especially costly in open clearings. Lowering the density reduces the number of instances the CPU has to animate each frame. The visual impact is noticeable up close, but the smoothness gain outdoors more than makes up for it.
Shadow Quality
Dynamic shadows from thousands of trunks and branches keep recalculating with the game's day/night cycle, and on Ultra they generate a render cost disproportionate to the visual gain. Dropping to Low keeps readable contact shadows in caves and bases without the cost of long-range shadow cascades.
Draw Distance
Controls how far trees and terrain render at full detail before switching to simplified versions. On Ultra it forces the engine to keep full geometry for distant zones that are rarely seen clearly through the foliage. Medium trims that load without generating annoying pop-in in coastal areas where you do have long sightlines.
V-Sync
V-Sync adds input latency and can double the existing hitching by forcing the game to wait for monitor refresh right when the CPU is already saturated by AI or base physics. Disabling it and using your GPU panel's FPS limiter or an external limiter gives finer, more consistent control.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Anti-Aliasing
The engine's heavier temporal AA fights against the visual noise of thousands of moving leaves and branches, a scenario where the performance cost rises fast for a marginal gain. FXAA smooths the most obvious edges at minimal cost, though it introduces some general softening of the image.
Water Quality
Water quality affects reflections and wave simulation for the coast and the island's internal rivers, areas you'll visit often while gathering resources. On Ultra it adds real-time reflections that hurt framerate outdoors near the coast without adding much during normal exploration.
Texture Quality
Unlike vegetation, textures depend mostly on VRAM and barely touch the CPU, so keeping them high preserves the sharpness of trunks, rocks, and structures without hurting framerate on most cards with 6GB or more. Only worth lowering on GPUs with very limited memory.
Ambient Occlusion
Ambient occlusion adds contact shading between branches, leaves, and structures, but in an environment with so much organic geometry its computational cost skyrockets for an effect that's partially hidden by the already-active dynamic shadows. Disabling it frees up GPU headroom without it being too noticeable under the forest canopy.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Threaded Optimization in the NVIDIA control panel to help spread AI and physics load across CPU cores.
- •Use Low Latency Mode "Ultra" only if you manually cap FPS; combined with V-Sync on, it can worsen existing hitching.
- •Keep Game Ready drivers updated, since several optimizations for older Unity engines like this one arrive via driver profile.
AMD
- •Enable Anti-Lag to offset the input latency introduced by V-Sync if you decide to keep it on at some point.
- •Check that Radeon Chill isn't aggressively limiting FPS in static forest scenes, since it can mistake them for low-activity scenes.
- •Set the performance mode in Radeon Software to "Performance" instead of "Power Saving" during long base-building sessions.
Sistema
- •Install the game on an SSD: continuous loading of cave zones and vegetation streaming benefit a lot from low access times.
- •Close third-party overlays (Discord, recorders) during base-building sessions, where the CPU is already maxed out managing structure physics.
- •If you play multiplayer, keep in mind performance also depends on the host: a very large base on another player's server can cause FPS drops that don't depend on your own hardware.
5. Known game issues
Progressive FPS drops near large bases
The more structures, traps, and objects you place at your camp, the more physics and collision calculations the engine must maintain every frame, causing a cumulative FPS degradation as the playthrough progresses.
Microstutters when generating new vegetation
Entering forest zones not recently visited, tree and shrub streaming can generate brief but noticeable hitching while the game loads geometry and applies the corresponding LOD.
Mutant AI causing CPU spikes in caves
Mutant cannibals navigating the cave systems, with their irregular geometry and multiple possible routes, generate CPU usage spikes that can translate into occasional hitching during underground fights.
6. Frequently asked questions
Why does The Forest hitch even though my PC is powerful?▾
Is it worth playing with Tree Quality on Ultra?▾
Why does my base lose FPS the more I build?▾
Does The Forest have DLSS, FSR, or any upscaler?▾
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Calculate FPS for The Forest →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →