FPS and performance tuning

Display settings that cost you frames before the graphics tab

Sharpness defaults to 1.2, and turning it down to 1 makes the game easier to read, not harder, since the higher default can make someone crouched in a bush blend in rather than stand out. Brightness is mostly a monitor question with no universal number, so the default suits most setups; on an OLED panel with the panel's own brightness turned up, running the in-game slider at 100 is a reasonable starting point. VSync adds input delay because it has to queue frames, so leave it off unless screen tearing genuinely bothers you. Nvidia Reflex should stay on for any Nvidia card, switched to On Plus Boost specifically on an older PC or laptop. For anti-aliasing, DLSS with DLAA quality gives Nvidia owners a sharper image with no resolution scaling and, on current DLSS versions, no meaningful latency cost; without DLSS access, set anti-aliasing to none instead, since the alternatives tend to blur the picture.

Two configs, and where the settings guide already covers the detail

The rest of the graphics menu really comes down to two paths: one that keeps the game looking reasonable while still gaining frames, and one that goes fully Potato for maximum competitive clarity and does not care how it looks. The full per-setting breakdown for mesh detail, shading, reflections, particles and the rest already lives in the settings guide linked below, and a couple of those settings are counter-intuitive enough that it is worth reading in full rather than guessing: dropping shading or post-processing all the way to Potato can wash the picture out instead of cleaning it up. The one setting worth calling out twice here is particle spawn rate: on Potato it thins out smoke, fire and dust fast enough to see and shoot through effects sooner than someone who left it high, and it helps frame rate just as much as visibility. For anyone who genuinely does not care how the game looks, the blunt version is everything on Potato except view distance, which stays High regardless.

Best settings for visuals →

Steam and Windows: free frames that never touch the in-game menu

Inside Steam's own settings, turning off smooth scrolling and web views plus GPU-accelerated rendering under Interface removes background rendering work that has nothing to do with the match you are in. Under Library, enabling low bandwidth mode and low performance mode strips graphical extras from the Steam client itself, which matters more the older your PC is. The Steam overlay is worth turning off too if you never use it, though it is a small enough cost that leaving it on for a feature you actually rely on is a fair trade. On the Windows side, move off the Balanced power plan: at minimum use High Performance or Ultimate Performance, and a properly tuned custom power plan can beat even those, since Windows exposes only ten to fifteen power settings by default out of literally hundreds that exist but stay hidden; building or sourcing a custom plan is an advanced step, so verify any specific tool or file against your current Windows version before running it. Finally, open Task Manager's Startup Apps tab and disable anything that does not need to be running the moment your PC boots; chat and launcher clients such as Epic Games or Riot's launcher, and especially RGB control software, are named as some of the heavier offenders, and every extra thing loading at startup competes with the game for the same CPU cycles.

GPU driver settings, and the tweaks worth double-checking first

In the Nvidia app under Graphics, Global Settings, turn on Low Latency Mode and set Monitor Technology to Fixed Refresh. Power Management Mode can move to Prefer Maximum Performance, which despite the name is about lower driver-level latency rather than forcing the card to run flat out constantly. Shader cache can go to Unlimited, vertical sync should match the in-game setting and stay off, anisotropic filtering itself should be off while anisotropic sample optimisation stays on, a combination described as free performance with no visible quality loss, and texture filtering quality can move to High Performance for the same reason. Beyond the driver sit a few deeper Windows tweaks doing the rounds: registry edits, switching from the legacy to the modern system timer, and setting a GPU's MSI interrupt priority to Undefined specifically rather than High, since a High interrupt priority setting is flagged as a sign of a bad optimisation guide rather than a genuine fix. These go further into the operating system than anything above, they change faster than any guide can track, and getting one wrong can cost more than the frames are worth, so verify each one against your current Windows build and GPU driver version, and change one thing at a time so you can tell what actually helped.