How to improve FPS in Where Winds Meet (PC)
Where Winds Meet is Everstone Studio's (backed by NetEase) open-world action RPG set in a recreation of late Tang-dynasty China, blending wuxia martial arts, a fluid combo-and-dodge-based combat system, and a massive map scale that includes bamboo forests, snowy mountain ranges, and cities densely packed with NPCs. The graphics engine leans heavily on cloth and hair physics to bring characters' robes, capes, and hair to life during combat and movement, one of the game's visual trademarks, along with very dense vegetation and elaborate particle effects in martial-arts techniques. That combination of an extensive open world, real-time cloth/hair simulation, and combat with lots of visual effects makes the load fall mostly on the GPU, though urban areas with crowds of NPCs also demand quite a bit from the CPU.
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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 +47% free FPS.
Shadow Quality
Dynamic shadows from vegetation, traditional Chinese architecture, and moving characters are constantly recalculated in such an extensive open world, being one of the engine's most expensive settings.
Foliage/Vegetation Density
Bamboo forests and mountain vegetation are one of the game's strongest visual trademarks, but also among the most expensive to render given the number of individual elements the engine must draw and move with the wind.
Cloth/Hair Physics
Simulating cloth and hair physics in robes, capes, and hairstyles during combat and movement is one of the game's most notable technical features, but its real-time calculation carries a notable CPU/GPU cost when several characters are on screen.
Combat/Skill Particle Effects
Martial-arts techniques generate energy trails, shockwaves, and elaborate particle effects that pile up quickly in fights with several enemies or players at once.
Motion Blur
Motion blur makes it harder to read combat combos and fast movement with mobility techniques (qinggong), on top of adding a small post-processing cost.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
Textures of traditional architecture, clothing, and landscapes cost mostly VRAM rather than raw compute power, so High is usually enough without needing Ultra on most modern GPUs.
Global Illumination
Dynamic global illumination recalculates the effect of light filtering through bamboo forests and temple/palace interiors, one of the highest GPU costs in scenes with dense vegetation.
View Distance/World Detail
Draw distance in an open world of this scale, with mountains and valleys visible from far away, has a considerable performance cost that grows the further you can see terrain and vegetation.
Crowd/NPC Density
The game's cities and markets can be populated with quite a few simultaneous NPCs, each with their own cloth physics and animations, adding load to both CPU and GPU in the busiest areas.
Anti-Aliasing
Edge smoothing helps clean up the visual noise of dense vegetation and cloth physics in motion, but at its highest level adds a notable sampling cost at 1440p/4K resolutions.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
NVIDIA DLSS
+30% FPSIt's reasonable to expect DLSS support in a modern open-world RPG of this scale, especially useful at 1440p/4K to offset the cost of dense vegetation and cloth physics, though it's worth checking the game's graphics menu to confirm the exact version available.
AMD FSR
+24% FPSFSR works on any GPU regardless of manufacturer and is usually the go-to alternative in recent open-world games for those without an NVIDIA card compatible with DLSS.
Intel XeSS
+20% FPSIf the game includes this upscaling plugin, XeSS is a viable option on both Arc GPUs and NVIDIA and AMD hardware, though its exact availability is worth verifying in the graphics options.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Use DLSS in Quality or Balanced mode at 1440p/4K to offset the combined cost of dense vegetation and cloth physics without sacrificing too much sharpness in bamboo forests.
- •Enable NVIDIA Reflex if the game supports it to reduce input lag in the fastest martial-arts combat, where dodge precision matters.
- •Keep Game Ready drivers updated, since recent open-world RPGs usually receive specific optimizations after launch and the first major updates.
AMD
- •Enable FSR in Quality mode if your GPU suffers load spikes in very dense bamboo forests or cities with high NPC population.
- •Enable Radeon Anti-Lag to offset latency in the fast combat exchanges characteristic of the game's combo system.
- •Check that Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) is enabled in the BIOS, since it can bring a measurable improvement in open-world scenes with lots of vegetation geometry.
Sistema
- •Install the game on an SSD, preferably NVMe: streaming assets for an open world of this scale depends heavily on read speed to avoid vegetation and texture popping as you travel.
- •Close third-party overlays (Discord, capture software) in the most NPC-populated areas, where any background process can amplify CPU spikes.
- •Prioritize a CPU with strong per-core performance, since cloth/hair physics simulation and city crowd AI depend quite a bit on main-thread speed, not just on having many cores.
5. Known game issues
CPU spikes in urban areas with high NPC density
The open world's busiest markets and cities, with dozens of NPCs simulating individual cloth physics and animations at once, can generate occasional framerate drops that don't always resolve by lowering graphics settings, a sign the bottleneck is more in the CPU than the GPU.
Stuttering from open-world streaming
As with many large-scale open-world RPGs, it's common to notice brief hitches when quickly crossing between regions or loading new zones while the engine streams vegetation, textures, and terrain geometry on the fly.
FPS drops with cloth/hair physics in crowded combat
When several characters with individually simulated capes, robes, and hairstyles take part in the same fight or open-world event, the accumulated cost of cloth simulation can cause more noticeable framerate drops than in one-on-one combat.
6. Frequently asked questions
What setting gives the most FPS with the least visual loss in Where Winds Meet?▾
Does Where Winds Meet have DLSS, FSR, or XeSS?▾
Why does my framerate drop in the game's cities and markets?▾
Do I need a powerful GPU to play Where Winds Meet well?▾
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Calculate FPS for Where Winds Meet →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →