ARC Raiders runs on Unreal Engine 5, and like most UE5 games, it has one setting that determines whether the rest of this menu is even worth tuning: RTXGI, the ray-traced global illumination system that replaces Unreal's default Lumen lighting here. Get that one right first, and the texture sliders and anti-aliasing modes below actually matter. Get it wrong, and you'll spend an hour chasing frames you could've had by changing one dropdown. This is a settings guide built around the decisions that actually move your frame rate in a PvPvE extraction shooter — not a generic "turn everything down" list, because some of what costs you frames here also costs you the ability to spot a raider crouched in a bush before they spot you.
The Setting That Decides Everything: RTXGI
Most games treat ray tracing as an optional coat of paint you can switch off without losing much. ARC Raiders doesn't, because RTXGI isn't a bolt-on — it's the game's actual lighting engine, a probe-based system that uses ray tracing to simulate how light bounces around a scene in real time, standing in for the Lumen system Unreal Engine 5 ships with by default. That's also why RTXGI isn't locked to Nvidia hardware the way the name suggests; AMD and Intel GPUs can run it too, just at the usual hardware ray-tracing cost on non-RTX cards.
The practical upshot: dropping from Ultra to High recovers a meaningful chunk of frame rate — testing by PC hardware outlets has put it around a 24% gain — for a lighting difference you'll struggle to spot mid-raid. Going lower than High starts to look genuinely flatter and more baked-in, because there's no Lumen fallback catching the slack. If you're chasing every frame on older hardware, turning RTXGI off entirely is still the single biggest performance lever in the whole menu — just know you're trading away the thing the game's lighting is actually built around, not just a shiny extra.
Match Your Upscaler to Your GPU, Not a YouTube Thumbnail
ARC Raiders supports all three: DLSS 4 for Nvidia (including multi-frame generation on RTX 40- and 50-series cards), FSR 3 for AMD, and XeSS 2.1 for Intel Arc. Pick based on what's actually in your PC, not whichever one a benchmark video made look best on different hardware.
On Nvidia, DLSS set to Balanced is the sweet spot for most GPUs below an RTX 4080 — Quality barely beats it in image clarity at a real cost to frame rate, and Performance starts losing fine detail you need to tell a Wasp's thrusters apart from its hull at range. If you're on a 40- or 50-series card, open the Nvidia app and override the in-game model to the newer transformer-based preset instead of the older CNN one; it resolves fine detail — foliage edges, distant silhouettes — more cleanly for a small performance cost that's worth paying on anything RTX 4070-class or above.
On AMD, FSR 3's built-in frame generation is solid, but there's a second option worth knowing about if you're on an RDNA 4 card (Radeon RX 9000-series): AMD's Adrenalin driver can now override the game's native FSR 3 frame generation with its newer ML-based model at the driver level, without the game needing a patch to add it. It's a free upgrade sitting in your driver settings, not the game's menu — check for it.
On Intel Arc, XeSS 2.1 is the one to use, and it's worth taking seriously here rather than treating it as the fallback option — ARC Raiders actually lists an Arc B570 as its recommended-tier GPU, so Embark clearly tested against Intel hardware directly rather than bolting XeSS on as an afterthought.
Frame Generation Is a PvE Tool, Not a PvP One
Frame generation inserts synthetic frames between the ones your GPU actually renders, which makes the number on your FPS counter bigger and your motion look smoother — but it doesn't reduce the time between you pressing a button and that action landing. If anything, it adds a small amount of latency to the real frames underneath it. In most single-player games that trade is easy to make. In ARC Raiders, it's a genuinely different call, because the moment frame generation's latency cost matters most — another raider opening fire on you from a doorway — is also the moment the game is actively trying to kill you for it.
The useful split is PvE versus PvP, not just "on or off." Looting, traveling between zones, and fighting ARCs are all forgiving of the extra input delay, so frame generation is a reasonable way to push a 40-ish fps base up into genuinely smooth territory while you're doing those things. The instant another squad is nearby, that smoothness is buying you nothing and costing you reaction time you don't get back. If you're the type to leave settings alone mid-raid, that argues for leaving frame generation off by default and only turning it on for GPUs that are already comfortably above 50-60 fps before it's enabled — below that, you're smoothing out an already-rough base rather than genuinely gaining anything.
What to Turn Down First (and What's Safe to Max)
| Setting | Cost | What to do with it |
|---|---|---|
| RTXGI | Highest single cost in the game | High for most builds; Off only if you're genuinely frame-starved |
| Post-processing (bloom, depth of field stack) | High — dropping to Low recovers roughly 15-17% in testing | Low; the visual loss is minor and mostly affects screen-filling effects, not combat readability |
| Shadows | Moderate-to-high, hits 1% lows harder than average fps | Medium is the usual landing spot; push lower only if you're seeing stutter in fights specifically |
| Reflections | Moderate, noticeable in Rust Belt's wet and metal surfaces | Medium; it's one of the more visually obvious settings to cut, so don't go lower than you have to |
| Effects (explosions, sparks, weapon muzzle flash) | Moderate | Medium is fine; Low can make it harder to read what's actually happening in a firefight |
| Texture quality | Cheap if you have the VRAM | Max it out until your in-game VRAM indicator gets close to your card's limit, then back off one notch |
| View distance | Moderate, but it's a gameplay setting first | Keep as high as your frame rate allows — see below |
| Anti-aliasing | Moderate; also controls shimmer on fine detail like fences and wires | Leave on; turning it off trades a small fps gain for distracting edge noise |
Foliage and Shadows Are Visibility Settings Wearing a Performance Costume
This is the one decision in this whole menu that isn't really about frame rate. Foliage density controls how fully grass, bushes and scrub render at distance, and in a game where a squad can be sitting still in cover watching your extraction route, thinner foliage doesn't just help your fps — it makes a crouched raider easier to actually see. Competitive players running Low or Medium foliage aren't only chasing frames; they're removing the visual noise another player could be hiding inside. If you're deciding where to spend your remaining fps budget after RTXGI and post-processing are handled, foliage is a better cut than view distance, because view distance is what lets you actually clock a silhouette crossing open ground three hundred meters out in the first place — the exact information that decides whether you get the first shot in a raid.
Get the Right Driver Before You Touch a Single Slider
Settings tuning is wasted effort on a stale driver in a game this actively patched. On Nvidia, make sure you're on Game Ready Driver 581.57 or newer to get DLSS 4 and Reflex working at all, and update again if you haven't since January — Nvidia shipped a dedicated Game Ready driver (591.86) alongside the game's Headwinds update with further DLSS 4 tuning specific to ARC Raiders. On AMD, Adrenalin 25.11.1 added official game support along with Unreal Engine 5 stability fixes and a fix for DX12 GPU-timeout crashes, and 25.12.1 is the one that unlocked the ML-based frame generation override for RDNA 4 cards mentioned above — don't skip past it if you're on a 9000-series Radeon.
Two settings are worth checking regardless of vendor. First, turn on Nvidia Reflex or AMD Anti-Lag 2 in the in-game menu — this is a CPU-heavy engine once a raid fills up with ARCs, destructible cover and other squads, and both features keep your GPU fed and your input latency down specifically when the CPU becomes the bottleneck, which happens here more than the fps counter alone will tell you. Second, check that Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling is on in Windows' Graphics settings (Settings > System > Display > Graphics) — it's a free few percent of CPU overhead back on a title that's already asking a lot of your CPU.
The Shader-Compile Stutter Everyone Hits in Their First Session
If your first raid after a fresh install, or right after any patch, has odd hitches that don't show up again later, that's very likely shader compilation stutter — a known Unreal Engine 5 trait, not unique to ARC Raiders and not a sign your PC is misconfigured. The engine compiles some shaders the first time it actually needs them rather than entirely upfront, so your first handful of matches on a new build will stutter more than your fiftieth. Play through it rather than tearing your settings apart in response; it typically clears up within a few matches as the cache fills in. On AMD specifically, a bloated or corrupted shader cache can make this worse over time — resetting it from the Gaming tab in Adrenalin forces a clean one-time recompile that's worth doing if hitching persists well past your first few sessions. It's also worth knowing this engine's stutter profile can regress with updates — players reported fresh microstuttering after a mid-2026 patch — so if raids suddenly feel rougher right after an update, suspect a new compile pass before you suspect your hardware.
Settings by Hardware Tier
| Tier | Example GPU | RTXGI | Upscaler | Realistic Target |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum | GTX 1050 Ti / RX 580 / Arc A380 | Off | Performance mode | 1080p, 60 fps on Low |
| Recommended | RTX 2070 / RX 5700 XT / Arc B570 | Off or Low | Balanced | 1080p 100+ fps, or 1440p 60-90 fps on Medium |
| High-end | RTX 4070+ / RX 7800 XT+ | High | Quality | 1440p 100+ fps on High |
| Enthusiast | RTX 4080/5080, RX 7900 XTX+ | High, with ray tracing | Quality + frame generation (PvE) | 4K 100+ fps, or well over 600 fps at reduced settings on the very top end |
That top line isn't an exaggeration — hardware outlets have clocked an RTX 5090 running DLSS 4 with ray tracing enabled past 600 fps at reduced resolution, which gives you a sense of how wide the game's actual scaling range is between its official Steam minimum (a GTX 1050 Ti) and the ceiling enthusiast hardware can hit.
If you're still deciding whether to buy in at all, our ARC Raiders review covers where the game actually stands a year on, and our beginner's guide is the better starting point if you haven't run your first raid yet.
Bottom Line
RTXGI is the setting that decides your frame rate budget before anything else does — High is the real sweet spot, and Off is the honest answer only if you're on genuinely dated hardware. Pick your upscaler by the GPU you actually own, keep frame generation reserved for looting and ARC fights rather than firefights, and treat foliage and view distance as gameplay settings first, performance settings second. Get your driver current — specifically Nvidia 591.86 or AMD 25.12.1 if you haven't updated since the Headwinds patch — and don't panic-tune your settings over stutter in your first few matches on a fresh build; that's Unreal Engine 5 compiling shaders, not your PC telling you something's wrong.
Alex writes practical, beginner-friendly guides for Gamingonix, turning confusing early-game decisions into clear next steps.
