How to improve FPS in Z1 Battle Royale (PC)
Z1 Battle Royale is one of the foundational battle royales of the genre, a direct descendant of H1Z1: King of the Kill, and it's still alive thanks to a competitive community that demands brutal performance above any visual flair. It runs on ForgeLight, the same engine as PlanetSide 2, which explains both its somewhat dated graphics and its particular technical quirks. Unlike modern battle royales, there's no Lumen, Nanite, or cutting-edge upscaling here: the goal is squeezing the most FPS possible out of modest hardware.
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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 +73% free FPS.
Foliage/Grass Density
Vegetation in ForgeLight is processed inefficiently and hits the CPU directly on every frame, not just the GPU as you might expect.
Draw Distance
A direct legacy of PlanetSide 2, ForgeLight's draw distance scales poorly on open maps and hurts performance even on powerful GPUs, because the bottleneck is in CPU-side geometry streaming.
Shadow Quality
ForgeLight's dynamic shadows recalculate geometry expensively and are one of the heaviest parts of the frame in scenes with several buildings or nearby vegetation.
Post-Processing
Effects like bloom, vignette, or chromatic aberration add nothing in combat and also reduce the contrast needed to spot rivals through vegetation or shadows.
V-Sync
V-Sync introduces unnecessary input lag in a competitive shooter and caps the framerate to the monitor's refresh rate, something the Z1 community avoids at all costs.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
ForgeLight's textures are already modest by today's standards, so the impact of lowering them isn't as drastic as with other settings, but it does free up some VRAM.
Anti-Aliasing
Edge smoothing in ForgeLight has a disproportionate cost for what it delivers visually, since the engine lacks modern, efficient solutions like a well-optimized TAA.
Ambient Occlusion
ForgeLight's ambient occlusion darkens corners and edges inefficiently, a cost that isn't justified in a game where spotting enemy outlines in dark areas matters more than lighting realism.
Resolution Scale
With no smart upscaling in ForgeLight, the only way to gain performance this way is to render at a below-native internal resolution, which noticeably blurs the image.
Model Quality
Character and object model quality has less impact than other settings because ForgeLight already uses relatively simple geometry even at its highest level.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable "Prefer maximum performance" in the NVIDIA control panel to prevent the card from downclocking during match waiting screens.
- •Force Low Latency Mode to "Ultra" from the NVIDIA panel to reduce input lag, since Z1 doesn't offer this option natively.
- •With Pascal or newer GPUs there's graphics headroom to spare; the real bottleneck is almost always the CPU.
AMD
- •Enable Radeon Anti-Lag in the driver to compensate for the lack of a native latency limiter in the game.
- •Check that the power mode is set to "High Performance" in Adrenalin, since Z1, being a lightweight engine, can make the driver underestimate the actual load.
- •As with NVIDIA, a mid-range GPU from recent years is already more than enough for this game; prioritize budget toward a faster single-thread processor instead.
Sistema
- •Prioritize a processor with good single-thread frequency over core count: ForgeLight, like PlanetSide 2, still doesn't distribute load well across multiple threads.
- •Install the game on an SSD to reduce hitches when loading vegetation and textures upon landing.
- •Close third-party overlays, since in an engine this light on the GPU, any background process competes noticeably for the same CPU threads.
5. Known game issues
CPU spikes when landing in areas with dense vegetation
When starting a match and flying over wooded areas like Pleasant Valley or Ranchito, vegetation streaming momentarily saturates the CPU and causes sharp FPS drops.
Micro-stutter after several hours of play
It's a known community issue that the game accumulates small hitches after long sessions, attributed to poorly refined memory management typical of an engine over a decade old.
FPS drops when looking toward the sea or wide bodies of water
Extensive water surfaces generate a disproportionate rendering cost relative to the rest of the environment, a behavior inherited from ForgeLight's engine quirks.
6. Frequently asked questions
Why does Z1 Battle Royale depend so much on the CPU if its graphics aren't demanding?▾
Does it make sense to use DLSS or FSR in Z1 Battle Royale?▾
Which setting gives the most immediate FPS?▾
Do I need a powerful GPU to play Z1 Battle Royale well?▾
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 Z1 Battle Royale →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →