Escape from Tarkov has been in Early Access since August 2016 and is still in beta at the moment. So, naturally, the game is not without its performance flaws, but this article will help you fix those in no time.
Keep reading this guide to optimize your Escape from Tarkov settings and enjoy a much smoother gaming experience.
By following this guide, you can expect to fix Escape from Tarkov performance issues such as lagging, freezing, low FPS, stuttering, lag spikes and FPS drops.
The first thing you need to do is ensure that you meet the recommended system requirements listed below. If you don’t, then you can expect some issues. We recommend that you upgrade your PC in that case.
Escape from Tarkov is a CPU-intensive game, so you can expect to boost your performance by freeing up CPU resources or upgrading your processor.
Minimum System Requirements
- OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit)
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo/Intel Core i3 2.4GHz or AMD Athlon/Phenom 11 2.6 GHz
- RAM: 6 GB
- GPU: DX9-compatible graphics card (1 GB VRAM)
- HDD: 20 GB
Recommended System Requirements
- OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit)
- CPU: Intel Core i5/Intel Core i7 3.2 GHz, AMD FX/AMD Athlon 3.6 GHz
- RAM: 8 GB
- GPU: DX11-compatible graphics card (2 GB VRAM)
- HDD: 20 GB
GPU requirements usually list one or multiple GPUs but not in this case. To check if your GPU is DX9-compatible or DX-11 compatible, follow these steps:
- Open the Windows start menu
- Type dxdiag and press Enter
- If it asks permission to check whether your drivers are digitally signed, we recommend that you press Yes
You should now be able to see your DirectX version — refer to the image below:
There are multiple ways to increase your performance in Escape from Tarkov (EFT). Let’s start with the most obvious one.
Table of ContentsShow
Update Your GPU drivers
This may sound generic but updating your drivers is the first thing you must check as both AMD and NVIDIA usually release new drivers that can drastically increase FPS. It’s as easy as updating a piece of software on your PC.
Open up AMD Radeon Software (for AMD GPUs) or NVIDIA GeForce Experience (for NVIDIA GPUs) and check for updates. If there is an update available, download and install it.
Best Graphics Settings For Escape From Tarkov
The next step is to optimize your settings in the game itself. This is probably what you came here for, so let’s get started.
Note that these settings prioritize High Performance. If you have a PC that barely meets the minimum or recommended system requirements, you can skip this step. If you have a powerful PC and don’t want to sacrifice your visual settings for extra performance, keep on reading.
Without any further ado, here are the steps:
- Open up Escape from Tarkov
- Go to Settings and then click on the Graphics tab
- Set Screen resolution to your monitor’s native resolution
- Set Screen mode to Fullscreen
- Make sure VSync is unchecked
- Set Texture quality to medium
- Set Shadows quality to low
- Set Object LOD quality to 3.5
- Set Overall visibility to 3000
- Set Shadow visibility to 75
- Set Antialiasing to TAA
- Set Resampling to 1x off
- Set HBAO to off
- Set SSR to off
- Set Anisotropic Filtering to per texture
- Set Sharpness to 1.3
- Set Lobby FPS Limit to 60
- Set Game FPS Limit to 120
- Make sure Z-Blur is unchecked
- Make sure Chrom. aberrations is unchecked
- Make sure Noise is unchecked
- Make sure Grass Shadows is unchecked
Best Game Settings For Escape From Tarkov
We’ll now list the best game settings for Escape from Tarkov. Simply follow these steps:
- While still in the Settings view, click on the Game tab
- If you’re having performance issues and you have an NVIDIA graphics card, you should uncheck Enable NVidia Highlights
- Make sure Auto RAM Cleaner is checked
- Make sure the setting Use only the physical cores is checked if you have a processor with hyper-threading or SMT
- Set FOV to 75 (or higher if you prefer it and have that option)
- Set Head Bopping to 0.2
Optimize NVIDIA Control Panel Settings
If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, you can optimize the NVIDIA Control Panel by following these steps:
- Open NVIDIA Control Panel
- Click on Adjust Image Settings with Preview on the left side under 3D Settings
- Click on Use my preference emphasizing and move the slider to Performance if it’s not there already
- Click on Apply
All good! Let’s now manage some settings specific to Escape from Tarkov:
- Click on Manage 3D Settings
- Click on Program Settings
- Select Escape from Tarkov in the dropdown menu. If you can’t find it, click on Add and find EscapeFromTarkov.exe.
- Set Power management mode to Prefer maximum performance. You may want to split test this and the Optimal power as this setting’s effect depends on your GPU.
- Set Preferred refresh rate to Highest available
- Set Shader Cache to On
- Set Texture filtering – Quality to High performance
- Set Triple buffering to Off
- Set Vertical sync to Off
- Set Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames to 1
If you have a laptop, make sure you have selected High-performance NVIDIA processor as the preferred graphics processor.
Optimize AMD Radeon Settings
If you have an AMD graphics card, then follow these steps to optimize your AMD Radeon settings.
- Open up AMD Radeon Settings
- Click on the Gaming tab
- Click on Global Settings
- Set Anti-aliasing Mode to Override application settings
- Set Anti-aliasing Level to 2X
- Set Anisotropic Filtering Mode to On
- Set Anisotropic Filtering Level to 2X
- Set Texture Filtering Quality to Performance
- Set Wait for Vertical Refresh to Always Off
- Set Tessellation Mode to Override application settings
- Set Maximum Tessellation Level to 32x or lower
Disable Windows Update Delivery Optimization
Moving on, here’s a simple trick that will help you free up some resources:
- Open the Windows Start Menu, enter Windows Update settings and click on the search result for it
- Click on Advanced Options
- Click on Delivery Optimization
- Make sure that the Allow downloads from other PCs setting is off
Disable OneDrive
We also recommend that you disable OneDrive if you’re not using it. Right-click on the OneDrive icon on your taskbar and click on Exit.
Optimize Discord
If you’re playing Escape from Tarkov, you’re most likely using Discord for communication or just running it in the background while you’re playing solo.
Let’s optimize Discord. Here’s how:
- Open up Discord and go to the User Settings page
- Click on the Appearance tab and uncheck the Hardware Acceleration setting
- Click on the Overlay tab
- Make sure that Enable in-game overlay is unchecked
Optimizing Google Chrome
If you use Google Chrome, you can turn off hardware acceleration as well. We recommend doing this and here’s how:
- Open Google Chrome and go to the Settings page
- Scroll down to the end and click on the Advanced tab
- Again, scroll all the way down and make sure that the setting Use hardware acceleration when available is switched off
- Make sure that the setting Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed is switched off
- Relaunch Google Chrome
High-Performance Power Plan
You can boost performance by enabling the high-performance power plan on your PC. Just follow these simple steps:
- Open the Windows start menu
- Type powercfg.cpl and press Enter
- Select the High performance option
Enable Game Mode
Windows 10 has a setting called Game Mode that we recommend you turn on. Here’s how you do it:
- Open the Windows start menu
- Type Game mode settings and press Enter
- Make sure that the Game Mode option is turned on.
Move The Game To An SSD
If you have Escape from Tarkov installed on your HDD (which we don’t recommend), you can get much faster loading times by moving the game to an SSD if you have one.
Final Thoughts
That’s it! Hopefully, you’ll get much higher frame rates now.
You might also be dealing with network lag or high ping. In that case, we recommend checking out this guide on how to reduce ping in all games.
Also, since Escape from Tarkov is very CPU-intensive, you can look into investing in a new processor. Or perhaps a new graphics card or more RAM if you have the required budget.