'PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' guide: How to achieve a smooth frame rate in-game

Promotional photo for "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" in Steam. Steam website

"PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" (PUBG) is now currently the most played game on Steam, with more than a million concurrent players. Each game session features 100 players on a map, all of who are trying to be the last one standing.

This scale of player population in the game can cause major performance problems for gaming PCs, which is why there are several optimization tips and workarounds that can help player greatly increase the performance of their PCs when playing "PUBG." 

The most important part of being able to play "PUBG" smoothly is to adhere to the game's system requirements. The minimum system requirements for "PUBG" notes a central processing unit (CPU), either an Intel Core i3-4340 or an Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) FX-6300. For the graphics processing unit (GPU), an Nvidia GTX 660 or AMD Radeon HD 7850 is necessary. In terms of space, at least 6 gigabytes (GB) of random access memory (RAM) and 30 GB of free hard disk space are required for the game.

No recommended specifications are mentioned in the game's Steam page, but PC Gamer did the courtesy of suggesting a CPU of either Intel Core i5-7600K or AMD Ryzen 5-1600, a GPU of at least either Nvidia GTX 1060 or its AMD equivalent, and 8 GB of RAM to play the game smoothly, even with all its graphical bells and whistles enabled to the max. It is important to note that anything less than this means players will have to disable some of the graphical settings of the game, resulting in it being less visually appealing.

With this in mind, the most taxing graphical settings in "PUBG" are Antialiasing and Shadows. Gamespot suggested that players use the "High" setting for the Antialiasing since it would not be too visually different from the "Ultra" setting, which is a tier higher.

As for shadows, the settings "High" and "Ultra" are the most taxing, so using "Medium" should be the best compromise, especially when there are a lot of players running around. Setting Shadows to "Very Low" will completely remove it, and that can ruin the atmosphere of the game and the visibility of other players.

Lastly, keeping Vertical Synchronization (V-Sync) turned off will provide a smoother experience at the cost of visual anomalies like "screen tearing."

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