TL;DR: If you're having FPS problems, the tips below managed to get me to 80+ stable FPS on Shoreline with my gaming laptop, where I previously got 30 with horrendous drops to 10 FPS all the time.
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I have a laptop with the following specs:
GTX 1060 Ti
32 GB DDR4 RAM
i7-7700HQ CPU
For ages, I've had really awful problems with the FPS in Tarkov. Constant stuttering, constant FPS drops, and terrible FPS on the outdoor maps.
Since the last patch my FPS dropped to 30 on Shoreline even with absolute minimum settings and 15 FPS when aiming down a scope (!). With that kind of lag scopes were basically useless to me.
MSI Afterburner was logging my GPU and CPU temperatures at nearly 100 degrees Celsius too, so it was thermal throttling on top of all of that. It was insane.
Usually whenever I posted about this, I'd get a bunch of people saying "LEL IT'S CUZ ITZ A LAPTOPPE LEL" but I knew this was clueless nonsense because all my other games were fine and some of them are graphically more intensive.
Since making some changes (detailed below) I am now getting a stable 80 FPS on Shoreline of all maps (limited at 80, so it could go higher actually) and only dropping 10 FPS down to 70 when aiming through long magnification scopes. I'm also getting max temperatures of 75 deg C instead of nearly 100.
It's like a different game!
What did I change?
1. I got a cooling pad.
This knocked 20 degrees off of the CPU and GPU temperatures at all times. I got a cheap budget one, but it's really brilliant for keeping the components significantly cooler under load. On it's own, it obviously did nothing to fix the FPS drop insanity in Tarkov specifically but it's good for just giving you more space for increasing temps.
2. I turned the graphics settings UP.
MSI Afterburner informed me that for some insane reason Tarkov was only using 30% of my CPU and 30% of my GPU on top of lagging to absolute dogs**t and cooking my computer. This was with awful settings too, and I was beyond confused by this.
After a ton of loading offline mode and checking FPS for 40 mins each time, I used these settings:
Native resolution (1920×1080…you can decrease this to 1280×720 for even better performance and cooler temperatures at the cost of ugliness).
Texture Quality: High + streaming
Shadows Quality: High
Object LOD Quality: 2
Overall Visibility: 400
Shadow Visibility: 40
AA: FXAA
HBAO: Medium
SSR: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: Off
Sharpness: 1.5 (doesn't really matter, personal preference).
3. I undervolted my CPU.
Given that Tarkov was using 30% of my total processing power, it seemed mad that it was also superheating my Goddamn CPU to 100 degrees and throttling it to death.
I looked up an online guide and used Intel XTU to undervolt my i7 by 0.100 V. This immediately saves me 20 degrees of heat when playing Tarkov with absolutely no noticeable performance hit – quite the opposite actually.
NOTE: Do not just undervolt your CPU by 0.100 V, every CPU is different. Make sure you look up appropriate measures for your CPU, and be aware that if Tarkov is using 100% of your CPU already this will make your problem worse, not better.
4. I maximised my Performance in power settings.
This sounds like a stupidly obvious thing, but I had to actually lower my "performance over power consumption" settings in Windows due to how Tarkov was previously overheating my computer.
Once I'd fixed these stupid problems with the undervolting, turning up the graphics settings and adding the cooling pad, the CPU and GPU were 30 degrees cooler. This allowed me to turn performance back up to maximum in the Windows settings for the Power Options.
All in all, this gives me great FPS, better graphics AND my computer is no longer hot enough to cook bacon on.
Hope this helps someone đŸ™‚
