Best Avowed PC Settings 2026: FPS and Performance

Quick Start: 5 Moves That Add the Most FPS

Avowed is a Unreal Engine 5 game and its Epic preset pushes hardware hard. These five changes take about two minutes and recover the majority of lost frames:

1. Pre-compile shaders on first launch — Avowed compiles shaders automatically before the main menu. Let it finish. Skipping it causes mid-game hitching that settings changes cannot fix.
2. Drop Global Illumination to High — the single largest FPS lever in Avowed. GI drives Lumen’s software ray-marching cost; Medium recovers even more with minor lighting changes in dense interiors.
3. Drop Shadow Quality to High — the second-biggest GPU drain. Epic shadow resolution adds fine detail you rarely notice during combat.
4. Enable DLSS 4 (NVIDIA) or FSR 3 (AMD) at Quality mode — DLSS Quality is 57% faster than native rendering at matched output resolution. FSR 3 Quality matches it closely on AMD hardware.
5. Turn off Ray Tracing if you own an RTX 3060 Ti or older card — RT adds hardware-accelerated Lumen at a 15% FPS cost that mid-range GPUs cannot absorb without upscaling assistance.

These five changes alone can move a 42 FPS Epic experience to a locked 60 FPS at 1080p on an RTX 4070-class GPU, according to PCGamesN’s benchmark testing. The rest of this guide covers every setting in detail and includes a GPU tier table for your hardware.

Avowed PC System Requirements

An SSD is not optional — the game explicitly requires one. Installing on a hard drive causes world-streaming pauses that appear as performance issues even when your GPU is well above minimum spec. Avowed also benefits noticeably from CPUs with 8 or more threads; if you’re on a 4-core CPU, enabling Hyper-Threading or SMT in BIOS is worth the 30-second detour before adjusting in-game settings.

For a full breakdown of how individual settings affect GPU load, our game settings explained guide covers the mechanics behind each graphics option.

Settings FPS Impact: Ranked by Performance Gain

Not all settings are equal. This table ranks Avowed’s graphics options by how much FPS you recover by dropping from Epic to High — the most useful single-step change for most settings.

Dropping Shadow Quality and Draw Distance from Epic to High, plus setting GI to Medium, averages around 72 FPS on mid-to-high-end systems at 1080p — roughly a 70% improvement over the full Epic preset — with minimal visible difference during normal gameplay, per PC Gamer’s performance analysis.

Ray Tracing and Lumen: The Counter-Intuitive Trade-off

Avowed uses Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen system for global illumination and reflections by default — even with Ray Tracing set to Off. Lumen runs in software mode when RT is disabled, ray-marching the scene in screen space. When you enable Ray Tracing in settings, you switch Lumen to hardware mode, which traces rays using dedicated RT cores on NVIDIA or RDNA 3+ hardware.

The counter-intuitive result: hardware RT is 10–12% slower than software Lumen in Avowed, not faster. The visual improvement is real — hardware RT correctly lights areas outside the camera’s view — but it’s subtle for an RPG at normal play distances. On an RTX 5090, the cost is just 5–7 FPS. On an RTX 4070, it drops from 62 fps to 38 fps at 1080p.

There’s a secondary twist: software Lumen uses approximately 11 GB of VRAM at 4K Epic because its caching systems require large screen-space buffers. Hardware RT is actually more VRAM-efficient, according to DSO Gaming’s GPU analysis. So if you’re on 8 GB VRAM and seeing VRAM pressure, enabling RT at medium-low settings can sometimes reduce memory usage — though the FPS cost makes this rarely worth it unless VRAM is the binding constraint.

Recommendation: keep Ray Tracing Off on anything below an RTX 4080 or RX 7900 XT. The visual delta does not justify the frame rate loss on those GPUs.

Upscaling: DLSS 4, FSR 3, and What to Pick

Avowed ships with DLSS 3.5 and FSR 3 — no XeSS. The first thing NVIDIA GPU owners should do is upgrade to DLSS 4 via the NVIDIA App’s Override function (requires driver 572.16 or later), which replaces the older Transformer SR model and provides noticeably sharper output, especially during camera movement.

Performance uplift over native rendering at matched resolution:

DLSS 4 edges out FSR 3 in retention of fine RT lighting detail, but FSR 3 is competitive at Quality mode for geometry and foliage. AMD users on RX 6000 series and above get a solid experience with FSR 3 Quality. For a deeper comparison of both technologies, see our DLSS vs FSR guide.

Frame Generation: DLSS Frame Gen is available natively (RTX 40-series and above). FSR 3 Frame Generation requires a community mod (OptiScaler) — it more than doubles framerates but introduces waterfall and transparent-surface artifacts. Stick to native FSR 3 SR for a clean experience.

GPU Tier Recommendations

Note that Avowed’s FPS drops sharply with resolution — from 96 FPS at 1080p Epic down to 69 FPS at 1440p and just 39 FPS at 4K, all on the same hardware. Upscaling from 1440p to 4K with DLSS Quality returns you to the 4K visual experience without the 4K performance penalty.

Windows and System Tweaks

These OS-level changes complement your in-game settings. Combined, they’re worth 5–12% additional FPS on most systems:

• Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) — On: Required for DLSS Frame Generation to function; also reduces CPU scheduling overhead for the GPU queue. Enable in Windows Settings > Display > Graphics > Change Default GPU Settings.
• Resizable BAR — On: Check BIOS for the option (SAM on AMD platforms). Avowed sees a moderate uplift when the CPU has full access to GPU VRAM.
• Power Plan — High Performance or Ultimate Performance: The Balanced plan throttles CPU frequencies under Avowed’s uneven load pattern. High Performance eliminates that throttling.
• Background apps — close Discord overlay, browser, streaming software: Discord’s overlay alone costs 8–20 FPS in UE5 titles due to GPU hook overhead. Use Discord’s in-game overlay disable or the Push-to-Talk only mode.
• XMP/EXPO — On: RAM running below its rated speed is a real bottleneck in Avowed; the game benefits from more than 8 CPU threads and fast memory bandwidth.

For GPU-specific driver-level optimizations, our NVIDIA Control Panel settings guide covers the full panel setup. The general OS and hardware stack that unlocks the most performance across all games is covered in our PC optimization guide.

FAQ

Does Avowed support ray tracing?

Yes — enabling Ray Tracing in settings switches Lumen from software to hardware mode, adding accurate off-screen lighting and sharper reflections. The cost is 10–12% lower FPS versus software Lumen on most hardware, making it worthwhile only on RTX 4080 / RX 7900 XT and above at 1440p or higher.

Why does enabling Ray Tracing use less VRAM than leaving it off?

Software Lumen (the default, RT off) maintains large screen-space caching buffers that consume up to 11 GB VRAM at 4K. Hardware RT uses dedicated ray-tracing acceleration paths that bypass those buffers, resulting in lower VRAM usage. This makes Avowed unusual — most games use more VRAM with RT on, not less.

Is Avowed CPU-bound or GPU-bound?

GPU-bound in most scenarios. However, Avowed uses 8+ CPU threads efficiently, so older 4-core CPUs can become a CPU bottleneck in dense NPC areas and populated cities. Enable SMT/Hyper-Threading and close background processes if you see GPU utilization dropping below 95% during outdoor traversal.

Can I enable FSR 3 Frame Generation without mods?

Not natively — Avowed’s built-in FSR 3 implementation includes Super Resolution but not Frame Generation. A community tool (OptiScaler) adds FSR 3 FG and more than doubles framerates in testing, but it introduces visible artifacts on water surfaces. DLSS Frame Generation is available natively on RTX 40-series cards.

Sources

• Best Avowed settings for max fps — PCGamesN
• Avowed Benchmarks & PC Performance Analysis — DSO Gaming
• Avowed PC performance analysis — PC Gamer