What are the best Gray Zone Warfare settings for max fps? Early access releases strike again in the worst way possible, as Gray Zone Warfare simply isn’t fit to play right now, thanks to a number of technical and server-based issues.
While the Gray Zone Warfare system requirements don’t demand the best graphics card, they do paint the picture of a game with better optimization for Nvidia hardware than AMD GPUs. That being said, early negative reviews suggest that, regardless of your hardware, playing the game will be tricky.
Here are the best video and gameplay settings for Gray Zone Warfare:
- Window Mode: Fullscreen
- Display Resolution: 1,920 x 1,080
- VSync: On
- Frame Rate: Match monitor refresh rate
- Global Illumination: Low
- Shadow Quality: Low
- Texture Resolution: Low
- Effects Quality: Low
- Reflections Quality: Low
- Foliage Quality: Low
- Post Processing: Low
- Motion Blur: None
- Sharpening: 0
- Anti-Aliasing/Upscaling Method: FSR
- FidelityFX Super Resolution: Quality
- FidelityFX Frame Generation: On
Unfortunately, Gray Zone Warfare is suffering from poor optimization and endless server issues, such as rubber banding, making my time testing the game frustrating. There are so many performance issues, in fact, that you basically have to run the game at low settings and use both upscaling and frame generation to get a smoothly playable frame rate, and that’s a problem if you don’t have a GPU from Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series.
If you have one of Nvidia’s latest GPUs, you can enable both DLSS Super Resolution and DLSS 3 Frame Generation at the same time, and give your frame rate a boost, but everyone else needs to use AMD FSR 3 if they want frame generation. That’s because, with AMD FSR 3 (though not with FSR 3.1), if you use frame generation you also have to use the FSR upscaler, with no option to use a combination of both DLSS Super Resolution and FSR frame generation together.
This means that users of RTX 3000-series GPUs, such as our RTX 3070 test GPU, are stuck using FSR if they want to maximize performance, which means putting up with the inferior image quality of FSR upscaling compared to DLSS Super Resolution. Indeed, the first hotfix for the game has made AMD FSR the default upscaling setting for all graphics cards outside of the Nvidia RTX 40 series.
The frame rate results below are taken from the following settings, from top to bottom: global low presets at 1080p with AMD FSR 3, global low presets at 1080p with DLSS Super Resolution, global low settings at 1440p with AMD FSR 3, and global low settings at 1440p with DLSS Super Resolution.
The settings I finally landed on did produce an average frame rate of 67.9fps, with 0.2% lows of 35.5fps, which on paper is perfectly fine for an extraction shooter. This issue is that, despite this ostensibly decent frame rate, the game is never this smooth to the naked eye, with endless rubber banding due to unstable servers, and frequent frame stuttering that was present no matter how many changes were made to the settings.
It’s also worth highlighting that the in-game fps counter frequently reported numbers above 100, which is why we never rely on such data and opt for third-party software instead.
Best gameplay and accessibility settings for Gray Zone Warfare
- Vertical FOV: 75
- Enable Proximity VOIP: On
- Enable Squad VIOP: On
- Show Health and Stance: On
- Show Compass: On
- Show FPS Counter: Off
There aren’t many gameplay settings to tweak in Gray Zone Warfare, but the ones available make the difference between having an authentic hardcore experience, and one with some traditional game elements still showing. You can also make changes to how proximity voice chat works.
A lot of this will come down to personal preference, but one setting we suggest turning off is the in-game fps counter. This is because, as mentioned before, its reporting is inaccurate so it’s nothing more than a distraction.
In terms of accessibility settings, a colorblind mode is available from launch and can be found under the post-processing section in the graphics settings.
How we tested Gray Zone Warfare
At PCGamesN, we use specific gaming rigs to test the best settings for performance and gameplay in the latest releases. Currently, our test rigs include the following components; Intel Core i7 11700F, MSI Ventus Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 8GB, 32GB of DDR4 3200MHz RAM, MSI B560 motherboard. We also test using Widows 11 64-bit.
We always run our testing first at 1080p to identify the best settings, then again at 1440p using the same setup to gauge the difference in performance. As we can see in Gray Zone Warfare, there is a considerable drop between the two resolutions, marking a clear example of where we highlight what resolution we recommend rather than leaving it to your monitor’s default option. We use CapFrameX to capture frame data and compare testing sessions.
Can you play Gray Zone Warfare on a hard drive?
Gray Zone Warfare doesn’t require or even recommend using a gaming SSD rather than a hard drive. However, we strongly recommend that you install this game on an SSD to help with the sometimes never-ending load times.
How to monitor performance in Gray Zone Warfare
If you want to keep an eye on performance in Grey Zone Warfare, which is yet to add an in-game benchmarking tool, there’s an easy method that works whether you’re using an Nvidia or AMD graphics card.
For Nvidia cards, ensure you have GeForce Experience or the Nvidia App installed and the in-game overlay enabled, and then hit ALT + R in-game to bring up your performance monitor. With AMD cards, you can enable performance monitoring via the Radeon overlay using the shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + O.
Or, you can download free software such as CapFrameX or Nvidia FrameView, for a cleaner, more simplified benchmarking tool that works with any graphics card.
If you fancy trying your hand assembling a machine to take on Gray Zone Warfare, follow our hand guide on how to build a gaming PC and we’ll take you step by step from start to finish.