Ghost of Tsushima PC: Best Graphics Settings for Max FPS

If your Ghost of Tsushima experience is suffering from choppy frame rates or micro-stuttering, you are likely hitting a bottleneck with high-demand engine settings. Most performance issues in this title stem from the 'Level of Detail' setting being pushed too high for standard hardware, but we can fix that quickly.

Why performance dips occur

The game engine heavily taxes your GPU when high-fidelity settings are maxed out, particularly with texture and shadow quality. Properly pairing these with DLSS instead of FSR prevents frame time instability and common crashes.

Recommended baseline

Before starting, ensure your GPU drivers are updated to the latest version. This guide assumes you are playing on a system with at least 8GB of VRAM.

Steps

1. 01
   Open the game Options menu and navigate to Display settings to set Vsync to Off to prevent input lag and frame capping.
2. 02
   Set your Upscale method to DLSS and choose Quality mode for the best balance of visual clarity and performance.
3. 03
   Disable Dynamic resolution scaling, as it often fights with your chosen upscale method and causes inconsistent frame times.
4. 04
   Set Frame Generation to DLSS; avoid using FSR 3, as it is currently known to cause instability and crashes in this title.
5. 05
   Navigate to Graphics settings and set Texture Quality to High if you have 8GB of VRAM, or Very High only if you have 10GB or more.
6. 06
   Set Level of Detail to High rather than Very High, as this single setting can reduce your frame rate by up to 36 percent.
7. 07
   Configure Texture filtering to 16x, and set Shadow, Rain, and Volumetric fog quality to High for a stable frame rate without significant visual loss.
8. 08
   Apply all changes and monitor your performance using an overlay like MSI Afterburner to ensure your frame times have flattened out.

Still not working?

If you are still seeing low FPS, ensure your game is installed on an SSD rather than an HDD, as slow drive speeds cause stuttering during asset streaming. If the game crashes, delete the shader cache folder located in your Documents/Ghost of Tsushima folder to force a clean rebuild upon the next launch.

Frequently asked questions

Why should I avoid FSR 3 in this game?

Users consistently report erratic frame times, UI artifacts, and outright application crashes when using FSR 3 compared to the more stable DLSS implementation.

Does lowering the Level of Detail make the game look bad?

Not at all. The difference between High and Very High is negligible during active gameplay, but the performance gains are massive.