ARC Raiders is still one of the most-played games on Steam in October 2026, regularly pulling in well over 100,000 concurrent players and sitting near the top of the weekly best-seller charts. In a PvPvE extraction shooter, though, raw popularity does not win raids — visibility and smooth performance do. The ARC Raiders best settings are the ones that keep enemy silhouettes readable, your aim responsive, and your frame rate steady when drones, explosions, and rival raiders are all filling the screen at once. This guide sticks to the stuff that actually matters: the competitive graphics setup, the upscaling choices, field of view, and the lag fixes that fix real problems instead of just looking good in a menu.
ARC Raiders Best Settings at a Glance
If you just want the short version, start here. This competitive preset is the consensus across the current settings guides, and it works on most mid-range PCs:
- Display mode: Borderless window (switch to fullscreen if you get stuttering)
- Shadows: Low
- Global illumination: Low or Off
- Reflections: Low
- Foliage: Low
- Effects and post-processing: Low
- Textures: High if your graphics card has enough VRAM, otherwise Medium
- Upscaling: DLSS or FSR on Balanced
- V-Sync: Off
- NVIDIA Reflex / AMD Anti-Lag: On
- Motion blur, depth of field, film grain: Off
- Ray tracing: Off
- Frame generation: Off
- Field of view: 75–80
Start here, then raise one setting at a time until your frame rate starts to dip. Do not start on Epic and guess what to cut — that is how you end up chasing stutters for an hour. That way you always know exactly which setting cost you the performance.
What Are the Best ARC Raiders Settings for FPS?
The heaviest settings in ARC Raiders are shadows, global illumination, reflections, and foliage — so that is where the biggest frame rate gains live. Shadows and global illumination light the game’s overgrown ruins and interiors, and dropping them from Epic to Low can win back a large chunk of performance on mid-range hardware. Reflections matter far less in the middle of a firefight than they do in a screenshot, so Low is an easy win there.
Foliage deserves a closer look. On higher settings, grass and bushes render thickly — but competitive players have found that Low foliage strips out much of that vegetation, which means enemies hiding in it are easier to spot. If you play ARC Raiders even semi-seriously, Low foliage is both a performance win and a visibility win.
Textures are the exception to the “turn everything down” rule. Textures mostly cost VRAM rather than raw speed, so if your graphics card has 8 GB or more, keeping textures on High costs very little and keeps the world looking sharp. If you have less VRAM, drop to Medium before you touch anything else — running out of VRAM causes the harsh stuttering that no other setting can fix.
Should You Use DLSS or FSR in ARC Raiders?
Yes — upscaling is the single biggest performance boost available in ARC Raiders. The game supports DLSS on NVIDIA cards and FSR on AMD and Intel hardware, and both can deliver roughly a 30 to 50 percent frame rate increase. Set it to Quality if your frame rate is already close to your target, or Balanced if you need the extra headroom.
Skip Performance mode unless your hardware genuinely cannot keep up — and be honest with yourself about whether that is actually the case. It renders at a much lower internal resolution, and distant enemies — the ones that matter most in an extraction shooter — turn into blurry smudges that are easy to miss. Balanced is the sweet spot for most players: a big frame rate gain with very little loss of clarity.
One related warning: leave frame generation off for multiplayer. It pushes the number on your FPS counter up by creating artificial frames, but it also adds input latency, because your real responsiveness is still tied to your base frame rate. In a PvP fight, that delay gets you killed. Only think about frame generation if your base frame rate is already above 180, where the penalty becomes much harder to feel.
What FOV Should You Use in ARC Raiders?
Most settings guides land on a field of view between 75 and 80, with 80 being the top of the in-game slider. That range gives you noticeably wider peripheral awareness than the default, without the fish-eye distortion and tiny distant targets that an extreme FOV causes.
FOV costs almost no performance, so this one is purely about comfort and awareness. Try 80 first, play a few raids, and only drop lower if distant enemies start feeling too small to track. The goal is simple: see more of the battlefield without making targets harder to hit.
How to Fix ARC Raiders Lag and Stuttering
If ARC Raiders stutters even when your average frame rate looks fine, the culprit is usually shader compilation or asset streaming rather than your hardware failing. As an Unreal Engine 5 game, it compiles shaders the first time new effects appear, which causes brief freezes, and it streams textures from storage as you move around. Work through these fixes in order:
- Install the game on an SSD. A mechanical hard drive is the most common cause of streaming hitches. An NVMe SSD is ideal.
- Update your graphics drivers. Both NVIDIA and AMD regularly ship game-ready drivers that smooth out new releases.
- Verify your game files on Steam. A corrupted or incomplete file can cause repeated hitches that no setting will fix.
- Close overlays and background apps. Discord overlays, the Xbox Game Bar, and browser tabs all compete for CPU time during raids.
- Lower effects and shadows first. These are the settings most likely to spike when a fight erupts on screen.
- Turn V-Sync off and enable Reflex or Anti-Lag. V-Sync adds input delay, while Reflex and Anti-Lag cut the time between your mouse movement and the screen reacting.
If stuttering only shows up in your first few raids of a session and then settles down, that is normal shader warm-up behaviour — it improves as the game caches what it needs. Stuttering that sticks around after that points to storage, drivers, or VRAM instead.
Best Settings for Low-End PCs
ARC Raiders is surprisingly forgiving at the low end: the official minimum spec targets 1080p at 60 frames per second on low settings, with hardware as modest as a GTX 1050 Ti or RX 580 and 12 GB of RAM. If that is roughly your machine, use the competitive preset above and set upscaling to FSR Performance — the one situation where Performance mode is the right call, because a playable frame rate beats perfect clarity.
Make sure the game is on an SSD, close everything you do not need, and keep at least 16 GB of RAM free if you can. On a low-end PC, background apps are not a minor tax — they are often the difference between a stable 60 and a stuttering mess.
Console players have fewer levers to pull, but the principle is the same: if your version offers a performance or frame-rate mode, take it over a fidelity mode. In an extraction shooter, a steady frame rate and fast response beat prettier shadows every single time.
ARC Raiders Settings FAQ
What are the best ARC Raiders settings for FPS? Shadows, global illumination, reflections, and foliage on Low, textures matched to your VRAM, DLSS or FSR on Balanced, V-Sync off, and NVIDIA Reflex or AMD Anti-Lag on. That combination gives the biggest frame rate gain with the least visibility loss.
Should I use DLSS or FSR in ARC Raiders? Yes. DLSS on NVIDIA cards or FSR on AMD and Intel hardware, on Quality or Balanced mode, delivers a 30 to 50 percent frame rate boost with minimal quality loss. Avoid Performance mode unless your PC cannot otherwise hold a stable frame rate.
How do I fix ARC Raiders stuttering? Install the game on an SSD, update your GPU drivers, verify the game files on Steam, close overlays and background apps, and lower effects and shadows. Early-session stuttering is usually shader compilation and settles down; persistent stuttering points to storage, drivers, or VRAM.
Final Thoughts
The best ARC Raiders setup is not the prettiest one — it is the one that keeps your frame rate stable and your enemies visible. Start with the competitive preset, set upscaling to Balanced, keep foliage on Low, and fix stuttering at the source instead of trying to mask it with settings. Do that, and the only thing left to worry about is the raid itself.
ARC Raiders is not slowing down — it recently held Steam’s No. 1 best-seller spot for a ninth straight week, and you can see how it stacks up against its biggest extraction rival in our ARC Raiders vs Marathon player-count comparison. If you are tuning other shooters too, our CS2 best settings guide follows the same visibility-first approach. For deeper reading, the detailed breakdowns at Hone’s ARC Raiders settings guide and The Vault’s PC settings and lag guide are both worth a look.
