The hardcore first person survival game Escape from Tarkov, also called EFT for short, is on everyone’s lips right now. Since the game is still in a Close Beta, which you can participate in by purchasing the Early Access version of the game, the game has little or no optimizations in terms of in-game FPS. In this little guide I want to try to give you some ideas if Escape from Tarkov is lagging you or if you want to get the last FPS out of your computer. Of course, these little tips and tricks for more FPS in Escape from Tarkov are also partially applicable to other games. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Basically, you should still do without 2K or even 4K resolution in the game in the beta, since there is little or no optimization by the developers. 2K resolution can be played with an NVIDIA 1070TI or 1080, anything below that should try to stay in the FULL HD resolution of the game. For your information, the GUIDE is aimed more at NVIDIA graphics cards when it comes to graphics settings, since I only installed NVIDIA graphics cards myself.
Escape from Tarkov Tuning Guide – Use your SSD
Escape from Tarkov benefits from an SSD hard drive, loading the map and loot at the beginning of a round is much faster with an SSD. If you want to avoid a so-called late spawn in Escape from Tarkov, you should preload the map you want to play in offline RAID without boots. Most of the data on the map is still available in your computer’s memory, so loading the map in online mode is much faster. In this way you will definitely secure one of the first spawn spots on the map. Especially important for ax runners.
Escape from Tarkov Tuning Guide – Do not start from the launcher
According to the developers, this is no longer possible from patch 0.6.1 due to anti-cheat measures.
Escape from Tarkov currently uses its own game client with its own launcher. For many users it probably helped not to start the game via this launcher, but to start EscapeFromTarkov.exe manually.
Escape from Tarkov Tuning Guide – Run the game as admin and disable DPI scaling
Speaking of the launcher, if you don’t use it, you can start the game as an admin. At the same time you should also set the “High DPI scaling behavior override” to Application mode. To do this, simply right-click on the EscapeFromTarkov.exe and go to the properties. Set here to run the program as an administrator and set the DPI scaling to application. For many EFT players, this has resulted in up to 10 FPS more in the game.
Escape from Tarkov Tuning Guide – Setting Paging File
Normally, Windows regulates its paging file itself. There is no rule of thumb to be observed here, everyone uses their PC differently, and you shouldn’t switch off the paging file completely either, there are many programs and games that require a paging file despite having enough main memory and therefore often cause difficulties. If you have one or more SSD hard drives, you should also make sure that you set your swap file to this. You can see my swap file settings with currently 16GB Ram in the screenshot. But with Windows 10 you no longer need to use this old rule of thumb that the paging file has to be twice as large as the actual RAM, this is absolute madness and only wastes hard drive space. You should only set a fixed size for the file here so that it does not have to be adjusted again and again by Windows. Can be an advantage for users who do not use an SSD.
Escape from Tarkov – Set NVIDIA Control Panel
The tips here are the best for me and are also based on a single monitor solution. Just look at the pictures. It is important to know that the graphics card is always assigned full power via the energy saving management of the driver and that the precalculation of the images is limited to 1. I prefer to set the texture filtering to performance, which is a good middle ground for me personally. If you have enough graphics card power, you should leave it at high quality. You should also place the PhysX completely on the graphics card so as not to disturb the processor with these complex calculations. Graphics cards are much better suited for this. But pictures often say more than words here?
Escape from Tarkov – Ingame graphic settings for more FPS
Here you can see my graphics settings for Escape from Tarkov with an NVIDIA 970. I usually have my 60FPS in Escape from Tarkov, because I play with VSYNC I can no longer have it here. Currently in Escape from Tarkov the point Object LOD Quality draws the most FPS. Here it is specified from when the level of detail is displayed to you. Unfortunately, the game always calculates all objects here, including those that you don’t like very much because they are in a house or one floor above. Therefore, you should rather leave this point at 2. Since the shadows, as well as SSAO and SSAA, create a very good atmosphere in the game, you should try to leave them activated or go to medium. There is no antialiasing mode in Escape from Tarkov yet. If you have enough reserves in the graphics card, you might want to use ReShade here. But maybe more on that in another article soon. As always, these are just rough guides. Trying it out yourself and finding the best settings for you is still the best here.
Enable Escape from Tarkov FPS display
If you want to control your FPS in the game, you have to do it once in the game O press and fps 1 enter in the console. With FPS 0 turn off the FPS display
Turn off Windows Game DVR mode for better game performance
Microsoft brings a so-called Game DVR mode from Windows 10 onwards. This allows you to automatically save short clips of achievements, mainly for Microsoft games, so that you can share them with your XBox Live friends. But the Game DVR mode is also active for all other games, so that you can record clips and videos of your games using this mode from time to time. If you want more performance and thus more FPS for your games, you should switch off this Windows DVR mode.
More FPS in Escape from Tarkov without Windows Game DVR mode
In Windows, use the key combination “Windows key + I” to call up the Windows settings and go to the point there To play
If you like, you can turn off the use of the game bar right here in the game bar menu item. Under the menu item Game DVR you turn off the background recording for video and audio.
More frames in EFT by turning off NVIDIA Shadow Play
Anyone who has installed a graphics card from Nvidia usually also has the extra program Nvidia GeForce Experience installed. Similar to Windows’ own Game DVR mode, switching off the game’s internal overlay in the options can help get a few more FPS out of your computer. You can find the whole thing in the GeForce Experience options under General. Simply drag the slider there to the left.
I hope you enjoyed the little FPS guide to Escape from Tarkov. I was able to avoid most lags and FPS drops that way. In the current version of the game, however, there are often lags just before players or SCAVs spawn. I think this will be fixed in a later update of the game. If you have any other tips and tricks to avoid lags in Escape from Tarkov, please leave a comment. I would be glad.
See you in Tarkov!
