Biomutant is the latest release from developer Studio Experiment 101, who you may know from their famous ‘Just Cause’ game franchise. This open-world RPG game has some pretty impressive visuals for a game of its kind, which makes it quite hard to run on low-end hardware.
If your PC rig is having a bit of a tough time running Biomutant and you’re looking for ways to squeeze out more performance from the game, look no further than this guide where we’ll be showing you how you can improve your FPS in Biomutant.
How to Improve FPS for Biomutant PC
Below, we’ve listed all the different ways you can improve your FPS in Biomutant. But before you do that, you should take a look at the minimum and recommended system requirements for the game to see how your PC specs compare to them.
Biomutant Minimum System Requirements
- CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K / AMD FX-8350
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 / AMD Radeon R9 380
- Graphics memory: 4GB
- DirectX: 11
- RAM: 8GB
- Storage: 25GB
- OS: Windows 7 (64-bit)
Biomutant Recommended System Requirements
- CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K / AMD Ryzen 5 1600
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti / AMD Radeon RX 590
- Graphics memory: 6GB
- DirectX: 11
- RAM: 16GB
- Storage: 25GB
- OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
Now that you know what the minimum and recommended PC requirements for Biomutant are, let’s dive into all the different ways you can improve FPS in Biomutant.
Update your GPU Drivers
Keeping your GPU drivers updated is imperative to keep your PC’s performance high in newer games. Every time a big release like Biomutant comes out, NVIDIA and AMD usually release some new drivers for their GPUs that optimize the GPU’s performance for said game.
To update your GPU’s drivers, you’ll have to first check what GPU you have. To do that, press the Windows key on your keyboard, type dxdiag and press enter.
Click on the ‘Display’ tab on top and you’ll see the name of your GPU. You can use these link to find the newest drivers for your GPU.
Do note that if you’re using an extremely old GPU, chances are that the manufacturers have stopped releasing driver updates for it, so you won’t be able to update its drivers.
Optimize your GPU Settings
NVIDIA and AMD GPUs come with their own software that gives you access to a control pane. In this control pane, you’ll see a whole list of settings that you can tweak to optimize the performance of your GPU. NVIDIA and AMD have their own unique control panels, so we’ll list the best settings for them individually.
NVIDIA Settings
To view the graphics settings of your NVIDIA GPU, open up control panel and click on the ‘Manage 3D Settings’ tab on the left side of the window.
If you only want these specific settings to apply to Biomutant, scroll through the list of programs and click on Biomutant. After doing that, change the settings to ones listed below.
- Disable Image Sharpening.
- Disable Low-Latency Mode.
- Change the Power Management Mode to ‘Performance Mode’.
- Set the value of Max Pre-Rendered Frames to 1.
- Set the Texture Filtering Quality to ‘Performance Mode’.
- Enable Threaded Optimization.
- If your monitor supports it, enable G-Sync.
- Set the Display Mode to ‘Single Display Performance Mode’.
AMD Graphic Settings
Open the Radeon Control Panel and click on the ‘Global Graphics’ option. Here, you’ll see a list of settings. Change these settings to the ones listed below:
- Disable Anisotropic Filtering, Image Sharpening, Frame Rate Target Control,
- Maximum Tessellation Level and OpenGL Triple Buffering.
- Disable all post-processing settings like Radeon Chill, Radeon Boost and Radeon Anti-Lag.
- Enable ‘Surface Format Optimization’.
- Disable ‘Wait for Vertical Refresh’.
- Change the GPU Workload setting to ‘Graphics Mode’.
- Set Shader Cache and Tessellation to AMD Optimized mode.
- Change the Texture Filtering Quality option to ‘Performance Mode’.
Verify Integrity of Game Files
Often times, while you’re downloading a game, a few files might corrupt or not download properly, which can use you a lot of performance issues and/or glitches in the game.
To fix this, you can ‘verify the integrity of game files’ on Steam, which will scan through all the game files and fix the ones that are corrupted or missing.
To verify the integrity of game files for Biomutant, follow these steps:
- Open up Steam and go to your library.
- Right Click on Biomutant and select Properties.
- In this window, click on the Local Files tab to the left.
- Select ‘Verify integrity of game files’.
This will take a few minutes. Once it’s done, re-launch the game and see if your performance got improved.
Close All Background Processes
If you’re not doing it already, you should close all unnecessary background processes/applications while you’re playing Biomutant.
While you’re playing the game, these unnecessary applications will be eating up your CPU’s power for no reason, which can cause your game to lag and/or stutter.
Open up task manager and scroll through the list to see what background applications are using your CPU power. Close all the ones that you don’t need while you’re playing the game. This can include applications like Discord, Spotify, Google Chrome etc.
You should also look into disabling all of your overlays while you’re playing Biomutant. It may not seem like it, but overlays use a surprising amount of CPU and/or GPU power while they’re active.
If you have no use for them while you’re in the game, you should look into disabling all of them to boost the game’s performance. This includes the Origin, NVIDIA/AMD, Discord overlays etc.
Play Biomutant in Fullscreen
An easy way to squeeze out more FPS from Biomutant, or any game for that matter, is to play it in fullscreen mode.
If you set the game’s display mode to fullscreen, the game gains complete control over the screen output, which allows it to utilize all of the power from your CPU and GPU.
You can go to the video settings of Biomutant to change the display mode to fullscreen.
Set Biomutant to High Priority
Setting Biomutant to High Priority in task manager will give you a small, but relatively noticeable increase in its performance. This is because doing this makes your CPU prioritize Biomutant over all the other programs, which allows Biomutant to squeeze out more resources from the CPU.
To set Biomutant to high priority in task manager, follow these steps:
- Launch Biomutant.
- Open Task Manager.
- Click on the Details tab.
- Right click on the .exe file of Biomutant and hover over ‘Set Priority’.
- Click on ‘High’ and then return to the game.
Best Biomutant Settings to Improve FPS
Biomutant has quite a lot of graphical settings that you can play around with to increase the game’s performance. The thing about these settings is that some of them completely tank your FPS if you turn them to high, while some barely have any effect on the game’s performance.
If you try to optimize the settings on your own, it’ll take you a lot of time to figure out the best combination of settings for the most FPS. Luckily for you, we’ve figured out the best settings for Biomutant.
- Anti-Aliasing: Max
- Dynamic Resolution: Off
- Effects Quality: Low
- Foliage Density: Low
- Framerate Limit: Off
- Fur Detail: Default
- Object Detail: Medium
- Post Process Quality: Medium
- Preset: Custom
- Resolution Scale: 100
- Resolution: Native Resolution (Resolution of your Monitor)
- Shadow Quality: Low
- Sharpening Amount: 20
- Texture Quality: Medium
- Vertical Sync: Off
- Window Mode: Fullscreen
- World Draw Distance: Higher
What makes these settings the best is that not only do they give you a massive performance boost, but they do so without completely ruining the game’s visuals.
Shadow Quality
As expected, Shadow Quality is the biggest perpetrator when it comes to tanking FPS. Because of the fact that Biomutant has a large, open world with tons of structures, trees and foliage etc, there are a lot of shadows to be rendered in the game.
Ergo, Shadow Quality can decrease your FPS by up to 30% if you have it cranked up. You can try putting it to medium to get a nice balance of performance and visuals, but if your still not content with the performance, you should turn it all the way down to low.
Effects Quality
In second place comes Effects Quality. It can tank your FPS by up to 15%, which might not be as bad as the effect of Shadow Quality, but it’s still very significant. You should also set this setting to low to get the best performance in the game.
Post Processing Quality
The third worst option for FPS is Post Processing Quality. Although it’s not as bad as Shadow or Effects Quality, it still has a relatively considerable effect on performance. This option has been set to medium to give you a good balance of performance and visuals.
Foliage Density
As the name suggests, the Foliage Density setting governs how much foliage you’ll see in the trees, bushes and grass present in the in-game world. Since there’s so much foliage in the game, increasing its density will have a pretty big effect on performance.
Visually speaking, this setting isn’t all that important as it won’t make your game look that much better if you have it turned up. So, you can turn this setting all the way down to low to get a relatively big boost in FPS while not making your game look janky at all.
Object Detail
With the Object Detail setting, you can change how much detail the game renders in each object present in the in-game world. Surprisingly, this setting doesn’t tank the performance that much, so you don’t have to turn it down all the way to low to get the most FPS.
You can keep Object Detail at medium to get a little boost of FPS while also keeping the game’s visuals quite impressive.
Texture Quality
Texture Quality setting lets you adjust the level of detail in the texture of any surface in the game. As with the Object Detail, this the Textures in Biomutant seem to be very well optimized as this setting doesn’t have much of an effect on performance at all. So, you can turn Texture Quality up to medium without worrying about losing many frames.
Fur Detail
The fur in Biomutant is very detailed and its simulations are quite impressive. Simulating all of the fur in the game in real time takes a lot of processing power, so turning the Fur Detail setting up will give you a noticeable decrease in performance. This why you should turn it down to default to get the most FPS. The fur will still look good anyway.
Anti-Aliasing
In most games, Anti-Aliasing has a significant effect on the game’s performance. The more you crank it up, the more FPS you lose. However in Biomutant, they’ve optimized the anti-aliasing so well that you don’t lose much FPS at all if you turn it up.
World Draw Distance
Same goes for the World Draw Distance setting. You’d think that rendering more of the world in single frame would cost you a lot of your precious frames, but that isn’t the case with Biomutant.
The world rendering seems to be optimized so well that even if you have the World Draw Distance turned up, you won’t notice much of an effect on the game’s performance.
Resolution
If you’re still not content with the performance you’re getting from the settings listed above, you can decrease your resolution to below native to get more FPS. This will make the game look noticeably worse, but if you prefer performance over everything else, turning down your resolution and/or resolution scaling is the way to go.