You don’t necessarily need the best graphics card to play Valheim and live out all your Viking fantasies, but that doesn’t stop you from wanting to squeeze out every last frame that your hardware can push. In their quest to boost fps, Redditor Blueyedillusion discovered a simple tweak that could be a game-changer for some, but your mileage may vary.
It turns out that Valheim’s in-game display settings don’t actually include a true fullscreen option. Selecting ‘fullscreen’ instead defaults to something that’s commonly referred to as borderless fullscreen or fullscreen windowed. While this is convenient to alt+tab into other applications without minimising the game, some gaming PCs perform better with a true fullscreen option at hand.
Valheim’s still in Steam’s Early Access program, so there’s plenty of time for this to be added in a future update. If you don’t want to wait around to see if it’ll improve your frame rate, however, it’s easy enough to take things into your own hands by heading into the game’s properties.
Much like enabling Vulkan, which can improve your frame rate and potentially fix crashes on its own, you just need to right-click on Valheim in your Steam library, navigate to properties, and enter this line of text:
-window-mode exclusive -screen-fullscreen
Blueyedillusion, who runs an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, Intel i9 9900K, and 32GB of RAM, claims to see a whopping 40 – 60fps jump after following the method, but our results are far tamer. We saw our highest frame rate improve between 10 – 30fps, but our lows and averages remain wildly inconsistent both before and after tinkering with the fullscreen settings.
Valheim is still young and we expect plenty more optimisations are on the way. This tweak likely won’t help those suffering from high instance numbers, but it’s worth a shot to see if it’ll bolster your frame rate.