Valheim – How to Get Great FPS

So I’ve been playing Valheim for a bit now and have messed with the graphics settings to try and get the best performance. I’m going to go through each setting and the possible FPS gain you can get, with this info you can pick for yourself what you want or just copy down settings. I am not testing on super high-end hardware so a lot of users should see similar results. This IS NOT fact it is more of an experiment.

Findings / Settings Part 1 – (Control Groups and Explanation)

Note: Credit goes to techNOlogics

Explanation

This is what my settings are at and what I will use to get a benchmark for every graphical setting change. Along with that, I’m running the game at 1920×1080 at 75hz. VSync is indeed off we will get to that later.

Control Group Settings

Slider Options

• Vegetation Quality: High
• Particle Lights: High
• Draw Distance/Level of Detail: High
• Shadow Quality: High

On/Off Options

• Bloom: On
• SSAO: On
• Sun Shafts: On
• Motion Blur: Off
• Tessellation: On
• Soft Particles: On
• Depth of Field: On
• Anti-Aliasing: On
• Chromatic Aberration: On
• VSync: Off

Findings / Settings Part 2 – (Data)

Slider Options

(Mileage May Vary)

Vegetation Quality

• Low: +15 FPS
• Medium: +13 FPS
• High: Control Variable

Particle Lights

• Low: +12 FPS
• Medium: +9 FPS
• High: Control Variable

Draw Distance/Level of Detail

• Low: +16 FPS
• Medium: +14 FPS
• High: Control Variable
• Very High: -3 FPS

Shadow Quality

• Low: +26 FPS
• Medium: +21 FPS
• High: Control Variable

On/Off Options

(Mileage May Vary)

Bloom

• On: Control Variable
• Off: +18 FPS

SSAO

• On: Control Variable
• Off: +14 FPS

Sun Shafts

• On: Control Variable
• Off: N/A – For some reason this changed so much and I could not get an avg. FPS

Motion Blur

• On: None
• Off: Control Variable

Tessellation

• On: Control Variable
• Off: None

Soft Particles

• On: Control Variable
• Off: None

Depth of Field

• On: Control Variable
• Off: +4 FPS

Anti-Aliasing

• On: Control Variable
• Off: +2 FPS

Chromatic Aberration

• On: Control Variable
• Off: +2 FPS

Findings / Settings Part 3 – (VSync)

Why VSync Is Not Needed or When You Need It

Unless you are experiencing screen tearing and just can’t handle it I would recommend not to use VSync. As with any game, it will kill your FPS. In short, VSync caps your FPS to your monitor’s refresh rate (or half of that if your GPU can’t keep up). So I’m running at 75hz so with VSync on I get either 75 FPS or around 37 FPS (in theory). For me, I don’t notice or have much screen tearing at all so I have VSync turned off. If you notice screen tearing feel free to turn it on!