High, stable, FPS is critical in first-person shooters. Some FPS issues are a result of lower-end hardware, while others can be a result of settings or third-party applications. No matter the case, this article will provide a variety of troubleshooting steps to help get you back up to speed.
Minimum Specs
Make sure your PC meets the minimum required specifications to run EMPULSE. If your PC is below the minimum requirements, then you may experience performance issues and or crashing. You may also be completely unable to launch the game. Review the minimum specifications here.
Basic Troubleshooting
Most common performance issues can be resolved by attempting the below troubleshooting steps.
Lower In-game Settings
In some cases just a single in-game setting can cause less than ideal in-game performance. You may consider tinkering with your video settings to see if you notice any improvement.
GENERAL
- Try changing between Fullscreen and Windowed Fullscreen
- Decrease Field of View
SCALABILITY
Lowering these settings should improve in-game performance significantly. You'll see the largest impact by changing the following:
- Post Processing Quality
- Visual Effect Quality
- Reflection Quality
SUPER RESOLUTION
This will dynamically decrease your resolution, then upscale to your native resolution using DLSS or FSR in order to improve FPS.
- Super Resolution Method: Set this to DLSS or FSR depending on your GPU. You can then set the preset to whatever gets you the best balance between framerate and quality.
FRAME GENERATION
This will create fake frames to fill in the gaps if you're experiencing low FPS. Some players may notice a minor increase in input delay when this is enabled.
- This setting will be available based on your GPU manufacturer and how new the GPU is. Consider enabling this and testing to see if it fits your preferences.
LOW LATENCY
- Low Latency Method: Set this to none if you're experiencing FPS issues/stuttering
- NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency: In the case that you want to continue using low latency, you can also set this to "Enabled" instead of "Boost" to see if that improves in-game performance.
Graphics driver updates provide bug fixes, improved performance, and additional graphics driver features, among other important updates. You can update your graphics drivers from your graphics card manufacturer's website.
Some screen capture software can degrade in-game performance, especially on lower-end computers. If you have software that captures or streams your gameplay, then you may consider disabling that temporarily to see if your in-game performance improves.
Disable Third-Party Applications
Sometimes third-party applications can interfere with the game in unexpected ways. One way that we can test this is to disable third-party applications by doing a Clean Boot in Windows. Microsoft has a great support guide on how to do this on both Windows 10 and 11.
- On the Clean Boot guide click on the tab for your Windows version.
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Once you get to step 3 make sure to check "Hide all Microsoft Services" - Necessary Microsoft services will be disabled if this isn't checked.
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Make sure to restart your computer once you've completed all of the steps,
then open the game and test if the issue persists. - If that resolves the issue, then you may consider following the section on the Clean Boot guide titled "How to determine what is causing the problem after you do a clean boot" - This will help you determine what specific application or driver was causing the issue.