Far Cry 5 Best PC Settings: Three Options Worth About 28% More FPS (Fog Isn’t One)

The Far Cry 5 settings that cost the most FPS are Environment (about 13%), Water (about 9%) and Shadows (about 6%). Adding up PC Gamer’s individual measurements, dropping all three to Low is worth roughly 28% more frames, and everything else in the menu is worth 5% or less. Volumetric Fog, the setting most guides tell you to cut first, bought only about 3%. This guide ranks every option by what it actually returns, says where the sources disagree, and gives picks by GPU tier. It’s a spoke of our complete PC game settings optimization guide.

Verified against PC Gamer’s April 2018 per-setting tests, Notebookcheck’s April 2018 benchmark table, Steam’s current system requirements and patch 1.07 (June 2018). Those are the most detailed measurements I could find, and I haven’t re-run them myself. Later drivers and hardware will shift the exact percentages, so treat them as a ranking, not a promise.

Quick Start: Best Far Cry 5 Settings in Seven Steps

1. Run the game’s built-in benchmark once at your current settings and write down the average. Far Cry 5 applies setting changes without a restart, so you can re-test after every change (Notebookcheck).
2. Set Volumetric Fog to Low. It’s close to free: about 3% back for a change PC Gamer struggled to see.
3. Set Water to Low. About 9% back, with little visual cost.
4. Set Shadows to Normal, or Low if you need every frame. About 6% back at Low.
5. Touch Environment last, because it’s the most expensive setting and also the most visible one to lose.
6. Leave Texture Filtering, Terrain and Geometry & Vegetation high. Together they’re worth about 7% at Low.
7. Use TAA if you have headroom, or SMAA to claw back about 2.5%.

Which Far Cry 5 Settings Cost the Most FPS?

Environment costs the most, then Water, then Shadows, and the other six options are worth between 1% and 5% each. PC Gamer’s Jarred Walton took a GTX 1080 at 2560×1440 on the Ultra preset (79 FPS with TAA and motion blur on) and lowered one setting at a time. The results are the only per-setting measurements I found for this game.

The takeaway in one sentence: three options carry 28% of the possible gain, and six options together carry less than that.

These gains add up almost exactly the way PC Gamer says they do. My own arithmetic on its numbers: the seven quality settings add about 29.5 FPS, anti-aliasing off adds 4 and motion blur off adds 1, which lands at about 113.5 FPS, within a frame of the Low preset’s 114. That also means the top three alone take you from 79 to roughly 101 FPS. For a broader look at why shadows, reflections and lighting dominate in most games, see our piece on the graphics settings that actually kill your FPS first.

Environment: The Most Expensive Setting in the Menu

Environment is the single most demanding option, worth 13% on the test rig, and PC Gamer’s screenshot comparison suggests it adjusts reflections and ambient occlusion. None of the sources I read documents the setting beyond that, so the description is the reviewer’s reading, not a developer statement. Reflections and ambient occlusion are lighting passes typically computed for every pixel, so their cost climbs with resolution. That’s general rendering behaviour rather than something the sources tested in this game.

The trade-off is visible. PC Gamer notes that with Environment on Low, “water in particular looks much worse.” That’s why I’d cut it last: if you drop Environment to hit a frame target, you lose reflections on the surface you spend half the game looking across.

Gamingscan agrees on the ranking, calling Environment the setting with the “highest influence on the overall FPS” and recommending at least Normal. It gives no test hardware or date, so treat it as qualitative support rather than a second measurement. Normal is untested territory in PC Gamer’s table, so it’s my suggested middle ground, not a measured result.

Water: The Cheapest Frames in the Game

Water on Low returned about 9% on the GTX 1080, and PC Gamer’s verdict is that for boosting framerates “without impacting visuals,” it’s “a good one.” The same review points out that the Environment setting has a far bigger effect on how water looks. So the sensible split is Water on Low and Environment kept at Normal or higher: you pay the visual cost of neither at full price.

That split is my inference from the review’s two statements, not a combination anyone benchmarked, so test it in the built-in benchmark. If you want to see how a setting like this fits a bigger tuning order, our PC optimization guide covers the general method.

Shadows: Low Still Looks Decent

Shadows on Low gave about 6% (79 to 84 FPS), and PC Gamer says shadows still look decent at Low, which explains the modest return. The setting mostly affects soft-shadow quality and how far detailed shadows reach. For a GPU-limited player, Normal is a safe compromise; Low is for when you need the last few frames. Gamingscan suggests at least Normal and rates the influence as “high”, a stronger claim than the measured 6%, so I’d trust the measured number.

Volumetric Fog: Why the Popular Advice Gets It Backwards

Volumetric Fog on Low returned only about 3% (79 to 81 FPS), and PC Gamer says “it’s difficult to tell what has changed in the screenshots.” The setting covers fog and light shafts, which is why it’s the obvious guess for the costliest effect in a game full of misty valleys. The measurement says otherwise: it ranks sixth of nine options.

One source disagrees. A June 2026 guide from Evetech’s EveZone claims fog and shadows are “the heaviest settings on the shared-memory APU” on Steam Deck, but it doesn’t disclose any test method, so I can’t weigh it against a documented benchmark. A shared-memory chip could behave differently from a desktop GTX 1080, and nobody has published numbers either way. If you’re on a handheld or laptop iGPU, the built-in benchmark settles it in two minutes: change only fog, re-run, compare.

My take: set fog to Low if you want the 3%, because the sources agree it costs little visually. Don’t expect it to rescue a slideshow.

Geometry & Vegetation, Textures and Terrain: Leave Them Alone

Geometry and Vegetation returned 4% at Low, Texture Filtering 2% and Terrain 1%, so lowering them barely helps. Geometry & Vegetation controls level of detail and how many branches trees carry. Gamingscan labels it “high influence”, while PC Gamer’s measurement is 4%, another case where the data beats the label.

Terrain is a texture-size setting, and memory isn’t the constraint it once was. Notebookcheck measured about 2.7 GB of VRAM at 1080p Ultra and roughly 4 GB at 4K, and PC Gamer reports about 4 GB at 4K Ultra. Steam’s recommended spec lists a GTX 970 with 4 GB of VRAM. Lowering texture options to save memory only matters on 2 GB cards like the minimum-spec GTX 670.

Do the Presets Matter?

The presets help most on weaker GPUs. On PC Gamer’s GTX 1080 at 1440p, High was 11% faster than Ultra (88 FPS), Normal 25% (99) and Low 44% (114). Notebookcheck’s table shows the same pattern at 1080p, with bigger jumps on slower cards:

The weaker the GPU, the more the presets return, and a fast card at 1080p gains little, probably because something other than the GPU is limiting it. The sources don’t test that directly, but PCGamingWiki lists CPU-bottleneck fixes for this game, so the next section covers it. Notebookcheck’s own verdict is that you’ll find “hardly any noticeable differences” between detail levels without a magnifying glass.

The engine explains some of the flat scaling. Far Cry 5 runs on Dunia 2, which Wikipedia describes as a modified version of CryEngine, and on Direct3D 11 according to PCGamingWiki. PC Gamer called the menu “somewhat limited” with performance scaling that is “pretty narrow as well”: going from Ultra to the lowest settings only nets about 50%, so no single toggle will rescue a weak card.

GPU-Bound or CPU-Bound? A Two-Minute Decision Tree

Lowering settings only helps when the graphics card is the limit. Run the built-in benchmark, then lower Render Scale (or the resolution) and run it again:

• FPS jumps: you’re GPU-bound. Work down the list in this order: Volumetric Fog, Water, Shadows, then Environment.
• FPS barely moves: you’re CPU-bound, and no graphics setting will fix it. PCGamingWiki’s documented workarounds are to set the FarCry5.exe process priority to High and to lock the in-game frame cap to the highest rate your system can sustain, or 60.
• FPS is fine but frame pacing stutters: PCGamingWiki suggests Dynamic Resolution set to a 30 FPS target and Windows Game Mode. Dynamic Resolution arrived in patch 1.07 in June 2018, alongside a fix for FPS dropping below 30 in certain locations.

Best Far Cry 5 Settings by Hardware

Match your settings to your GPU class rather than copying one preset. PC Gamer found you need roughly a GTX 970 or R9 390 to hold 60 FPS at 1080p Low, and a GTX 1070 or Vega 56 for 60 FPS at 1440p Ultra. The picks below are my recommendations built on the measured rankings above, not separately benchmarked profiles.

The pattern across hardware: stronger cards should trim only Water, Shadows and fog, while weak cards must lower resolution before touching any single setting. If your only GPU is integrated, you’ll get more from our list of games that run well on integrated graphics than from any Far Cry 5 setting. On Steam Deck, Valve’s compatibility report rates the game Playable and flags illegible interface text, mismatched controller glyphs and an unclean exit. Evetech’s claim of 40-50 FPS at 800p Medium comes with no disclosed method, so verify it yourself.

Anti-Aliasing, Motion Blur and Render Scale

TAA gives the best image, SMAA misses some jagged edges, and turning AA off returns about 5%. PC Gamer measured SMAA at about 2.5% faster than TAA, so it’s the sensible fallback rather than switching AA off. Motion blur is worth 1%, so that’s pure preference. PCGamingWiki notes that supersampling (SSAA) is available through the Render Scale setting, a costly way to sharpen the image that only suits cards with headroom.

FAQ

Does lowering Volumetric Fog increase FPS in Far Cry 5?

Barely. PC Gamer measured about 3% on a GTX 1080 at 1440p (79 to 81 FPS), and called the visual change hard to spot. It’s fine to set to Low, but Environment, Water and Shadows return far more.

What does the Environment setting do in Far Cry 5?

It appears to control reflections and ambient occlusion, based on PC Gamer’s screenshot comparison, and it’s the most FPS-expensive option at about 13%. None of the sources I read documents it in more detail, so treat that description as a reviewer’s observation.

Is Far Cry 5 CPU or GPU heavy?

Mostly GPU-heavy: Notebookcheck says the game needs computing power “particularly from the graphics card”. But PCGamingWiki documents CPU-bottleneck FPS drops, and fast GPUs at 1080p gain little from lower settings, so test with the built-in benchmark before assuming.

What’s the best graphics preset for Far Cry 5?

High is the best value for most players: PC Gamer found almost no visible difference between Ultra, High and Normal, with Low the only preset with a clearly visible drop, mainly from the Environment setting.

Figures reflect PC Gamer’s April 2018 GTX 1080 tests and Notebookcheck’s April 2018 benchmarks, with patch 1.07 (June 2018) as the latest PC update I verified. Values may change with updates and drivers, so verify in-game.

Sources

1. Jarred Walton. Far Cry 5 performance analysis and settings guide (2 April 2018). PC Gamer
2. Florian Glaser. Far Cry 5 Laptop and Desktop Benchmarks (11 April 2018). Notebookcheck
3. Gamingscan. Best Settings For Far Cry 5. Gamingscan
4. Evetech EveZone. Far Cry 5 handheld settings and playable framerate on the Steam Deck (21 June 2026). Evetech
5. Wikipedia. Far Cry 5 (engine and release details). Wikipedia
6. DSOGaming. Far Cry 5 patch 1.07 available (notes dated 16 June 2018). DSOGaming
7. PCGamingWiki. Far Cry 5 (video settings and fixes). PCGamingWiki
8. Ubisoft / Valve. Far Cry 5 system requirements and Steam Deck compatibility report. Steam

Game names, trademarks and any imagery referencing them are the property of their respective publishers and are used here for editorial and identification purposes. Illustrations in this article are AI-generated and are not captures from the game.

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.