ARC Raiders: Best PC Settings for Max FPS After 1.45.0

ARC Raiders got a bigger technical overhaul than most players noticed. Live Update 1.45.0, which went live on September 8, 2026, moved the game from Unreal Engine 5.3 to Unreal Engine 5.7 — a jump that touches rendering, streaming and shader compilation under the hood. If you haven't opened the Graphics tab since before that patch, your settings are running on outdated assumptions about what the engine can do. Here's how to rebuild your setup from scratch, whether you're chasing frames on a mid-range rig or just trying to stop losing gunfights to stutter.

01Turn on the performance overlay before you change anything

Before you touch a single slider, open Settings and switch on the In-Game Performance Overlay. It's easy to skip because it doesn't change how the game looks, but it's the only way to know whether a setting change actually did anything — ARC Raiders' menus don't show you an FPS counter anywhere else, and guessing at frame rate from feel alone means you'll end up dropping a setting that was never the bottleneck. Drop into a quiet part of Speranza, note your baseline, then change one thing at a time and check the overlay again before moving on. If you're on a laptop, this is also where Idle Energy Saving and Inactive Window Energy Saving are worth checking — they throttle the game when it's idle or unfocused, which is good for battery life but can produce a confusing frame-rate dip if you're alt-tabbing to check a build guide mid-session and think the drop is a graphics problem.

02Start from a clean quality preset

Open Settings, go to the Graphics tab, and set Overall Quality Level to Low or Medium before you touch anything else. This preset drives a bundle of sliders at once — View Distance, Anti-Aliasing, Shadows, Post-Processing, Texture, Effects, Reflections and Foliage — so tuning individual sliders first only means the preset overwrites your work the next time you nudge it. Once the baseline is in place, raise Texture first if you have the VRAM to spare; it's one of the cheapest sliders to run high and has the biggest impact on how clean surfaces look at range, which matters for spotting other Raiders across Speranza's ruined skyline.

From there, work outward to the settings that actually cost frames in firefights: Shadows, Reflections and Global Illumination Resolution. ARC Raiders also exposes NVIDIA RTX Global Illumination as a separate toggle from the standard Global Illumination Resolution slider — leave it off unless you're on an RTX 40- or 50-series card and have frames to spend, since it's the single heaviest setting in the menu.

03Pick the right upscaler for your GPU

The settings menu lists NVIDIA DLSS Quality, AMD FSR 3 Quality and Intel XeSS Quality as separate options, plus a shared Resolution Scaling Method and Render Resolution slider underneath. Match the upscaler to your hardware rather than defaulting to whichever sits at the top of the list: DLSS on an RTX card, FSR 3 on anything else (it runs on AMD, Intel and older NVIDIA GPUs alike), and XeSS if you're on an Arc card and want Intel's own tuning. Quality mode is the safe starting point for a 1440p or 4K monitor; drop to Balanced only if you're still short of your target frame rate after the preset work above.

If your card supports it, NVIDIA also exposes a DLSS Model option separate from the Quality dropdown — this picks which version of the upscaling model runs, and newer models generally sharpen detail without extra cost, so it's worth switching over and comparing before you assume Quality mode alone is the ceiling.

04Frame Generation and Reflex: use them together, not alone

Both NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation and AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation are listed as independent toggles from the base upscaler, and either one can roughly double your displayed frame rate on a GPU that supports it. The catch is input lag: frame generation interpolates between rendered frames, which adds latency that a raw frame counter won't show you. Turn on NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency at the same time — it's built specifically to claw back the delay frame generation introduces, and in a game built around close-range gunfights and audio cues, that latency difference is the gap between winning and losing a fight you should have won.

Set a Frame Rate Limit that matches your monitor's refresh rate once frame generation is on. Uncapped frame generation output can overshoot what your panel can display, wasting GPU headroom for no visible benefit, and VSync is redundant — sometimes counterproductive — once Reflex is managing latency for you.

How to Set Up ARC Raiders for Max FPS

1. 1Open Settings > Graphics and set Overall Quality Level to Low or Medium before adjusting any individual slider by hand.1 min
2. 2Enable NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR 3 or Intel XeSS Quality mode to match your GPU, then set Resolution Scaling Method and Render Resolution.2 min
3. 3Turn on NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation or AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation for extra FPS, then switch on NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency to offset the added input lag.1 min
4. 4Lower Shadows, Reflections, Global Illumination Resolution and Foliage individually — they cost more than Effects or Post-Processing at the same visual return.2 min
5. 5Set Frame Rate Limit to match your monitor's refresh rate and turn VSync off once Reflex is handling latency.1 min
6. 6In Controls, split quick item cycling from the quick-use wheel added in Live Update 1.45.0 so closing the wheel no longer swaps your held item.1 min

05Rebind item cycling after the 1.45.0 controls change

Live Update 1.45.0 didn't just touch graphics. Embark separated quick item cycling from the quick-use wheel in the Controls menu, and you can now bind both to different keys — or the same key, or disable cycling outright. Before this patch, closing the wheel could silently swap your held item if your cycle key overlapped with a wheel input; if you've been caught holding the wrong gadget mid-fight since the update, this is almost certainly why. Open Controls, find the item cycling entries, and either give cycling its own dedicated key or turn it off if you exclusively use the wheel.

06Audio and display settings that matter more than they look

ARC Raiders is a game you win by hearing footsteps before you see them, so don't let Music During Gameplay or a high Master Volume bury Effects Volume in the mix. The Night Mode audio option compresses the dynamic range so quiet footsteps and distant gunfire sit closer in volume to loud explosions — useful if you're playing with headphones at a low level so you don't wake anyone up, without losing the audio information you actually need. On the display side, set Window Mode to Fullscreen rather than Borderless if you're chasing every frame; borderless costs a small amount of performance on most systems in exchange for faster alt-tabbing, which isn't a trade worth making in a match with a real economy on the line.

07Fix the two PC-specific bugs from this update

Update 1.45.0's patch notes flag two issues worth knowing about if you've had a rough week. Some players are seeing crashes tied to Windows Update KB5121003; if you've installed that update recently and started crashing afterward, that's the likely cause, and Embark has been tracking workarounds through its official Discord rather than a permanent fix at time of writing — treat it as unconfirmed until a follow-up patch addresses it directly. Separately, players running the game through the Epic Games Launcher have reported losing keyboard input entirely mid-match; disabling the Epic overlay is the workaround Embark has pointed to, and it costs you nothing since the overlay adds no functionality ARC Raiders itself needs.

If you're on Xbox Series S, 1.45.0 also shipped multiple stability fixes targeting crashes specific to that platform — worth updating for even if you never touch a graphics slider. None of this replaces a clean driver install: an engine jump this large changes how the game talks to your GPU driver, and an outdated NVIDIA, AMD or Intel driver is a more common cause of post-update stutter than any single setting in the menu above.

08A quick checklist before your next raid

Run through this in order and you'll cover the changes that actually move your frame rate and your win rate, rather than settings that just look impressive in a screenshot: quality preset first, then upscaler matched to your GPU vendor, then frame generation paired with Reflex, then a frame rate cap matching your monitor. Leave the individual quality sliders — Shadows, Reflections, Global Illumination Resolution, Foliage — as the last thing you touch, since they're the ones worth dropping individually if you're still short of your target after everything else is dialed in.