Best ARC Raiders Settings for FPS in 2026: Competitive and Low-End Presets

Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders is a visual showcase built on a heavily modified iteration of Unreal Engine 5. Blending sweeping open-world landscapes with highly dynamic physics, destructible cover, and lethal machine AI, it demands a massive amount of computational throughput. Achieving a competitive edge in this extraction shooter requires high, consistent frame rates. When you are caught in an extraction point ambush or tracking a swift drone swarm across rolling terrain, a sudden drop in frame rate can lead to lost gear and a wiped run.

Understanding how the engine strains your system is key to selecting the best ARC Raiders settings for FPS. The game features two distinct performance bottlenecks. The GPU workload is dominated by Unreal Engine 5’s global illumination systems, volumetric atmosphere processing, and high-density procedural foliage. Meanwhile, the CPU workload surges during multi-agent AI encounters, complex destruction events, and dense player firefights. As Embark Studios continues to refine their engine pipeline in 2026, finding the sweet spot between visual clarity and hardware overhead is essential. This guide breaks down the optimal configuration for maximum performance, whether you are running a high-refresh-rate competitive rig or an aging budget PC.

Quick Preset

If you want to skip the manual tuning and jump straight into a raid, use the quick reference table below to configure your in-game options based on your hardware target.

Settings That Matter Most

Unreal Engine 5 features several settings that drastically alter GPU render times and frame-time stability. Lowering these critical options yields massive frame rate gains while maintaining maximum visual clarity for spotting enemies.

Global Illumination

Global Illumination controls how light bounces dynamically off terrain, structures, and metallic ARC units. At High and Epic settings, the game utilizes software-based Lumen ray tracing. While visually breathtaking, Lumen imposes an immense GPU penalty, costing anywhere from 25% to 40% of your total frame rate depending on scene complexity. Setting Global Illumination to Low switches the engine to Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI). This drastically reduces shader execution times and removes dark, dynamic shadows in shadowed areas, making enemy raiders far easier to spot in dark interior corridors.

Shadow Quality

Shadow Quality scales the resolution, filtering, and cascade distance of real-time directional and local shadows. The jump from Low to High causes a significant hit to GPU fill rates and memory bandwidth due to shadow map generation. Setting this to Low lowers shadow resolution and shortens the draw distance of dynamic shadows. Crucially, this prevents enemy models from hiding in deep, high-resolution environmental shadows, yielding a 12% to 18% improvement in average frame rates without compromising spatial awareness.

Foliage Quality

Because the surface maps in ARC Raiders feature expansive, overgrown landscapes, Foliage Quality has a disproportionate effect on performance. Higher settings increase grass density, leaf geometry details, and rendering draw distances for non-collidable vegetation. Dropping Foliage Quality to Low or Medium strips away dense grass layer meshes at a distance without removing structural cover objects like rocks or fallen trees. This reduces geometric complexity on the GPU, improves 1% low frame rates during fast movement, and stops dense grass from obscuring downed items or crawling players.

Volumetric Quality

Volumetric Quality governs the resolution and ray-marching step count of atmospheric fog, cloud cover, dynamic smoke, and explosion haze. Heavy ARC orbital bombardments and plasma weapons fill the air with volumetric particle buffers, which cause catastrophic frame drops on Low-End and Mid-Range GPUs. Dropping Volumetric Quality to Low simplifies fog buffers, recovering up to 15% of performance during intense firefights and ensuring your frame rate remains stable when weapon effects fill the screen.

Effects Quality

Effects Quality controls the particle density, alpha-blending passes, and physical debris generated when structures crumble or machine armor plates shatter. During large-scale combat against giant ARC crawlers, high particle counts can easily saturate GPU execution queues and trigger sudden frame-time spikes. Lowering Effects Quality keeps alpha-blending buffers light, stabilizing frame delivery when heavy environmental destruction is triggered.

View Distance

View Distance scales the Level of Detail (LOD) transition distances for terrain structures, buildings, and large mechanical props. Unlike foliage, View Distance impacts both CPU draw calls and GPU geometry pipelines. Setting this option to Low can cause visible object pop-in, which distracts from player tracking. We recommend keeping View Distance on Medium or High; it incurs a minimal GPU cost (around 3-5%) while ensuring enemy movement and distant structures remain fully rendered across wide engagement ranges.

Upscaling and Frame Generation

Running ARC Raiders at native resolution without spatial or temporal upscaling is unviable for high-refresh-rate gaming on most mid-tier GPUs. Fortunately, the engine incorporates modern spatial reconstruction pipelines.

NVIDIA DLSS vs. AMD FSR vs. Intel XeSS vs. TSR:

• NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling): If you own a GeForce RTX card, DLSS is the gold standard. Setting DLSS to Quality mode at 1440p or 4K provides superior anti-aliasing compared to default TAA, resolves thin metallic wires on ARC machines cleaner than native resolution, and boosts overall FPS by 30% to 50%.
• Intel XeSS: On non-RTX cards (such as AMD Radeon or Intel Arc GPUs), XeSS set to Quality provides cleaner temporal stability and fewer ghosting artifacts than FSR, making it the preferred fallback upscaler.
• Temporal Super Resolution (TSR): Built natively into UE5, TSR provides excellent edge reconstruction but carries a slightly higher performance overhead than DLSS or XeSS.

The Verdict on Frame Generation:
While DLSS 3 and FSR 3 Frame Generation can boost your displayed frame rate on paper, they introduce added input latency and slight UI motion artifacts. In an extraction shooter where winning a duel relies on precise click-to-photon latency, hardware-generated interpolated frames can make gunplay feel floaty. For competitive play, keep Frame Generation Off and rely on Super Resolution upscaling combined with NVIDIA Reflex or AMD Anti-Lag to keep latency as low as possible.

Outside the Game

In-game settings only tell half the story. To ensure Unreal Engine 5 runs smoothly without micro-stutters, you must calibrate your operating system and graphics driver control panels.

NVIDIA Control Panel Optimizations

• Shader Cache Size: Set this to 10GB or Unlimited. UE5 constantly compiles and streams shaders. Expanding your cache prevents the driver from overwriting pre-compiled asset shaders, eliminating micro-stutters when visiting new areas.
• Low Latency Mode: Set to On or Ultra to tighten frame delivery queues on the CPU.
• Power Management Mode: Select Prefer Maximum Performance to prevent your GPU clock speeds from downclocking during passive looting phases.

AMD Software Optimizations

• Radeon Anti-Lag: Enable this setting to minimize input delay in GPU-bound scenarios.
• Radeon Boost: Keep this disabled, as dynamic resolution scaling during rapid mouse sweeps can distort long-range target tracking.
• Shader Cache: Reset and set to Enabled/Always On via registry if driver defaults cause hitching.

Windows System Adjustments

• Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS): Ensure HAGS is toggled On in Windows Graphics Settings to allow the GPU to manage its own VRAM allocation, improving minimum frame times.
• Game Mode: Turn Windows Game Mode On. This prevents background Windows update threads and indexing processes from taking CPU core cycles away from the game’s main render thread.
• Disable Fullscreen Optimizations: Right-click the game executable, navigate to Properties > Compatibility, check Disable fullscreen optimizations, and set high DPI scaling to be performed by Application.

Settings to Leave Alone

Not every setting needs to be turned down to reach competitive framerates. Lowering these options either grants zero performance boost or actively harms your spatial awareness:

• Texture Quality: As long as your GPU has sufficient VRAM (8GB for 1080p, 12GB+ for 1440p/4K), Texture Quality has no measurable impact on frame rate. Leaving this on High keeps player skins, weapon optics, and terrain textures sharp without taxing the shader cores.
• NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency / AMD Anti-Lag: Always keep this enabled (ideally on On + Boost). It reduces input queue latency without lowering visual rendering fidelity or frame rates.
• Field of View (FOV): While lowering FOV technically reduces the amount of geometry rendered on screen, dropping it below 90 severely restricts your peripheral vision. The 2-3 FPS gain from a narrow FOV is never worth losing the ability to spot flankers. Keep this between 95 and 105.

FAQ

Why does ARC Raiders stutter during heavy machine combat?

Stutters during combat against large ARC bots are typically caused by dynamic CPU processing. When a massive machine attacks, the engine calculates real-time destruction physics, multi-part particle armor breaks, and pathfinding AI logic simultaneously. These tasks create sudden CPU frame-time spikes. Lowering Effects Quality and expanding your graphics driver’s Shader Cache Size to 10GB mitigates these drops.

Should I use DLSS or native resolution for competitive play?

You should almost always use DLSS or XeSS set to Quality mode over native resolution. Unreal Engine 5 uses heavy temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) at native resolution, which introduces motion blur and ghosting during fast turns. DLSS Quality sharpens fine details, removes anti-aliasing smearing, and improves frame rates significantly.

Does Foliage Quality give a competitive advantage in ARC Raiders?

Yes. Setting Foliage Quality to Low lowers the rendering density and draw distance of decorative, non-solid grass blades. This makes players who are crouching or prone in fields significantly easier to see from a distance, while also stabilizing frame times when moving through dense wilderness zones.

How much VRAM does ARC Raiders require at 1440p?

At 1440p resolution with High textures and Quality upscaling, ARC Raiders typically uses between 8.5GB and 10.5GB of VRAM. If your graphics card has 8GB of VRAM, set Texture Quality to Medium and keep Post Processing on Low to avoid VRAM swapping and texture pop-in hitching.