Days Gone Remastered Best PC Settings for FPS

There is no separate “Days Gone Remastered” to buy on PC. The remaster arrived as a free update to the 2021 game in late April 2025 (Patch 1.08), so the Steam page still just says Days Gone and everything below applies to it. The sliders that move your frame rate are Lighting, Cloud and Fog, Geometry and Render Scale, and in the best-known measurement Lighting alone was worth about 25%. A horde fight is a different problem: if your FPS collapses there while your GPU sits half idle, graphics sliders are unlikely to bring it back, and the 60-second test further down tells you which problem you have.

Verified against: Bend Studio’s Steam patch notes through Patch 1.13 (July 21, 2025) and its October 15, 2025 branch post; I found no newer announcement when I checked on October 5, 2026. I have not benchmarked the game myself. Every FPS figure here comes from a named outlet, and most of those were measured on the 2021 build, before the remaster update. I flag that each time.

Lone motorcycle rider on a rain-soaked forest road facing a swarming horde in the mist — A horde is dozens to hundreds of Freakers at once. If your frame rate collapses in one while the GPU is not maxed out, graphics presets are unlikely to fix it. AI illustration, not a game capture.

Quick Start: Seven Steps in Order

Confirm you are on the updated build. Steam’s default branch is Patch 1.08 or later. Players who preferred the old look can pick the “Classic” (1.07) beta branch.
Install on an SSD. The Steam page lists an SSD as recommended, and Patches 1.11–1.13 all mention streaming fixes.
Start from the High preset, not Very High. PC Gamer measured High at about 28% faster than Very High on an RTX 3060 Ti at 1440p, and it “genuinely still looked great.”
Drop Lighting to Medium if you need more. It was the single biggest measured lever.
Set Cloud and Fog and Geometry to Low. Each cost roughly 7–9% and showed little visible difference in the same test.
Do not use Nvidia DSR. Bend lists DSR as unsupported, with an infinite loading black screen as the known result. Use the in-game Render Scale instead.
Fight one horde, then run the 60-second test below before you touch anything else. For the general baseline (power plan, drivers, background apps), see our guide on how to optimize PC game settings for FPS.

What the “Remastered” Update Actually Changed on PC

The PC update is about lighting. Bend’s Patch 1.08 notes list a new sky simulation, a significantly darker night, improved screen-space indirect lighting and ambient occlusion, and double shadow-map resolution when Shadow Quality is set to Highest. They also add DualSense support and accessibility options. The notes describe no new graphics options.

Two consequences follow. First, Highest shadows should now cost more than they did in the 2021 benchmarks below. That is my inference from the doubled shadow resolution; I found no measurement of it. Second, the 2021 percentages are a guide to the order of the sliders, not exact current numbers. Post-update Steam reports are mixed: in a community thread from the update’s first day, some players on high-end cards saw no change, while others reported microstutter when running or biking.

The “Remastered” label is mostly a PS5 story. TheGamer quotes Bend’s Kevin McAllister saying the original’s biggest horde “topped out at 500 Freakers” and that “in the remaster, that number can touch 800.” Bend did not say whether that applies to the PC update, and the PC patch notes say nothing about horde size, so I would not assume PC hordes got bigger.

Settings Ranked by Measured Cost

Lighting is the only slider with a double-digit measured cost; Shadow Quality, Cloud and Fog, and Geometry are each worth roughly 7–9%. PC Gamer measured each by pushing one slider from highest to lowest on an RTX 3060 Ti and Ryzen 5 5600X at 1440p. The gains do not simply add up, because each was measured alone.

Setting	Measured FPS gain (lowest, 2021 build)	What you give up	Verdict
Lighting Quality	~25%	Flat, “otherworldly” look at the lowest value	First lever. Try Medium before anything else
Cloud and Fog Quality	~9%	Almost nothing except fog atmosphere	Set to Low
Shadow Quality	~9%	Shadows turn blobby; none at the lowest value	Keep High. Highest is costlier since 1.08 (unmeasured)
Geometry	~7%	Close-up detail on floor clutter	Set to Low
Foliage Draw Distance	No figure given	Trees and undergrowth pop in while riding	Medium. See the CPU note below
Render Scale	Not isolated by PC Gamer	Softer image below 100%	Last resort, and the diagnostic tool

Presets tell the same story. In that test, stepping from Very High to High gained about 28%, and Medium added roughly 10% more but started to look “a little too cartoon-like.” Dropping Geometry and Cloud and Fog together gave “just under 20%” with little visual loss. DSOGaming, testing the same launch build, reached the same shortlist: Lighting Quality and Cloud and Fog are the two to lower.

FOV also costs a little. The PC version adds a slider up to 100° vertical per PCGamingWiki, and PC Gamer notes that a wider view is “likely to knock your fps down a tad” because the game has more to render. Temporal anti-aliasing is always on, so there is no AA setting to trade away.

Same forest road with dense undergrowth on the left and bare ground on the right — AI illustration, not a game capture: Foliage Draw Distance sets how close you must be before undergrowth is drawn, so lowering it mostly shows up as pop-in while riding.

What to Expect From Your GPU

A GTX 1650 Super class card holds about 60 FPS average at 1080p on maximum settings, and anything stronger has real headroom. These are PC Gamer’s own runs of a repeatable mission segment at maximum settings in 2021, so treat them as a floor for a tuned post-update setup rather than a promise:

Hardware (PC Gamer, 2021, max settings)	1080p average	Other figures
GTX 1650 Super + Core i5-10400F	~60 FPS (45 FPS 1% low)	4K: 22 FPS average
GTX 1660 Ti laptop	72 FPS (45 FPS 1% low)	—
RTX 3070 laptop	110 FPS (68 FPS 1% low)	—
RTX 3060 Ti + Ryzen 5 5600X	124 FPS	1440p: 88 FPS; 4K: 51 FPS
RTX 3080 + Ryzen 9 5900X	just shy of 180 FPS	4K: 82 FPS

Steam’s own system requirements list a GTX 780 or R9 290 as the minimum and a GTX 1060 6 GB or RX 580 8 GB as recommended, with 16 GB of RAM. If you are on that tier, our GTX 1650 and 1660 settings guide covers the general tuning, and Lighting at Medium is your biggest game-specific gain.

Why Horde Fights Behave Differently

A horde is dozens to hundreds of enemies that each have to be moved, animated and pathed before the GPU draws a single one. Pre-launch figures from a PlayStation Access video, reported by GamingBolt in 2019, put the world’s hordes at 50 to 500 Freakers, with kills that persist. That load is simulation work, and simulation work does not shrink when you lower a graphics preset. We saw the same pattern in fixing a CPU-bound population stutter: once the simulation is the limit, the settings menu stops being the lever.

But “hordes are CPU-bound” is an inference, not a documented fact, and the evidence is mixed. Here is what actually exists:

Claim	Evidence	How solid
Horde drops can happen with the GPU not maxed out	A May 2021 Steam thread: Ryzen 5 5600X + RTX 2080 Ti, locked 120–143 FPS dropping to as low as 40, CPU about 30%, GPU 60–70%	One user report on the 2021 build
Those drops ignore resolution	Same poster: “exactly the same” drops at 480p windowed	One user report
The game uses few threads and likes clock speed	DSOGaming: mainly 4–6 threads. PCGH: core count matters little, clock speed a lot. GameGPU, April 2025: “up to 8 threads”	Measured, two outlets on 2021 build plus one on 1.08
A big enemy crowd does not need a big CPU	DSOGaming’s CPU test scene was the first large enemy encounter; a simulated dual-core with Hyper-Threading stayed above 90 FPS at 1080p, max settings	Measured, 2021 build, i9-9900K rig
Weak CPUs hit a horde wall	SteamDeckHQ (2022): hordes maxed out the Steam Deck’s CPU; the reviewer lowered shadows and foliage distance first to relieve it	Reviewer’s observation, no measurement
Bend says where the horde cost lands	I found no such statement	Not documented

The honest summary: on a reasonably modern CPU, a horde should not be catastrophic, and PC Games Hardware had to cut Render Scale to 10% (128×72 pixels at 720p) to expose any CPU limit at all. Yet individual players clearly see drops that behave like a CPU or engine limit. The drawing below is the idea behind it: a few busy threads cap the frame rate while overall CPU use still reads as modest.

Processor diagram comparing light load on all cores with four fully busy cores — Concept drawing, not a measurement: a few busy cores can cap the frame rate while overall CPU use still looks modest (about a third here).

The 60-Second Horde Test

This is a rule of thumb I am proposing, built on the same trick PCGH used: lower the resolution and see whether the frame rate follows. It is not an official Bend diagnostic. You need an overlay that shows FPS and GPU usage (Steam’s FPS counter plus your GPU vendor’s overlay or MSI Afterburner).

Start a horde fight at your normal settings and note your FPS and GPU usage during the worst moment.
Drop Render Scale to about 50% and repeat the same encounter.
Compare using the table below.

What you see	What it likely means	What to do
FPS rises a lot and GPU usage was already near 100%	GPU-bound. The settings menu can fix this	Use the settings table above: Lighting, then Cloud and Fog, then Geometry
FPS barely changes and GPU usage falls well below 100%	Limited by the CPU or the engine, not pixels	Presets will help little. Try the checks below
Average FPS is fine but you get brief hitches	Frame-time spikes: streaming, storage or driver	Confirm SSD install, update the game and driver, then see the checks below

If the Test Points at the CPU or Engine

None of these is confirmed by Bend. They are single-player reports and one mechanism, ordered from least to most speculative:

Check fullscreen mode and V-Sync. A 2024 Steam thread has one player fixing stutter by switching from the default windowed mode to fullscreen, and another by turning off in-game V-Sync and capping at the driver. Our V-Sync guide explains the trade-offs.
Try lowering Shadow Quality and Foliage Draw Distance. The logic is that fewer shadow-casting and drawn objects mean fewer draw calls, and PCGH notes that this engine (Unreal Engine 4 on DirectX 11) can lose a lot of CPU time to driver overhead on AMD cards. SteamDeckHQ did exactly this. Nobody has measured the gain, so test it with the same horde.
Look at CPU affinity. One 2021 thread found the game limited to the first three cores by default on that player’s system. Task Manager → Details → Set affinity shows it in seconds. Treat it as rare.
Roll back a driver that started the problem. Players in a 2022 thread blamed specific driver versions, and one player reported an odd fix from setting Windows sound output to 44.1 kHz. Both are single reports.

Settings by Player Type

If you are…	Do this	Why
On a GTX 1060 / RX 580 class card	High preset, Lighting Medium, Cloud and Fog Low, Geometry Low	Lighting was the biggest measured lever, and this tier is the game’s recommended spec
On an RTX 3060 Ti class card at 1440p	Very High or High; keep Shadow Quality High unless you chase 120 FPS	88 FPS average at 1440p max in 2021, so you have headroom and the horde test matters more than sliders
On a fast GPU with horde-only drops	Leave graphics alone, run the 60-second test, then the CPU checks	A faster GPU cannot fix a limit that is not on the GPU
On a Steam Deck	Treat 2022 builds as a starting point only: SteamDeckHQ ran 1280×720, Lighting and Geometry High, Foliage and Shadows Medium, 30 FPS cap	Measured before Patch 1.08, and the reviewer found hordes were the CPU limit
Chasing the best look	Very High, Shadow Quality Highest, Cloud and Fog High	The 1.08 lighting and shadow work is the point of the update. Accept the cost

Upscaling, Frame Generation and the Frame Cap

Days Gone has no DLSS, FSR or ray tracing option that I could find. PC Gamer noted the PC port had no DLSS or ray tracing at launch, and none of Bend’s 1.12 or 1.13 notes (or the 1.08–1.11 notes) list an upscaler or frame generation. Render Scale above 100% gives supersampling, per PCGamingWiki, and below 100% it is your only built-in resolution lever.

If you add driver-level or third-party frame generation, use the base-FPS rule from our guide on when to turn on frame generation. There is one extra catch for horde fights: frame generation interpolates between frames your GPU already rendered, so it can make a CPU-limited horde look smoother on the counter without making the game respond faster.

For capping, PCGH found the game’s own limiter behaved cleanly in a short test, while DSOGaming reported fluctuating game speed on a bike below 60 FPS and suggested staying above 70. PCGamingWiki flags that speed issue as disputed. The practical advice is to use the in-game limiter rather than V-Sync and keep your frame rate comfortably above 60.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Days Gone Remastered a separate download on PC?

No. The remaster arrived as Patch 1.08 for the existing game, and the Broken Road DLC (Horde Assault, Permadeath, Speedrun mode) is a separate paid add-on, per Bend’s update posts. If you own Days Gone on Steam you already have the updated graphics.

Should I set Shadow Quality to Highest after the update?

Only if you have GPU headroom. Patch 1.08 doubled the shadow-map resolution at Highest, and in 2021 shadows were already worth about 9% on a mid-range card. If your GPU was maxed out before the update, High is the safer pick; if the horde test shows a CPU limit, try High anyway, since shadows are one of the suspected draw-call costs.

Why does my FPS only drop in hordes?

Because the cost of a horde is the number of moving enemies, not the number of pixels. If the 60-second test shows no change at 50% Render Scale, the limit is not your GPU, which is why the same slider that fixes open-road FPS does nothing in a fight. The exact cause is unconfirmed by Bend.

Will a faster GPU fix horde stutter?

Probably not if the test points away from the GPU. A faster CPU clock, a clean fullscreen setup and the checks above are better bets, and PCGH found clock speed mattered more than core count.

Is the Classic (1.07) branch faster?

I found no measured comparison. Bend offers it as a look-and-feature choice, warns that it will not support players swapping between branches, and recommends backing up your saves first.

Sources

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.