PUBG Best Settings for Low-End PC 2025

PUBG is one of the most CPU-heavy games in the battle royale genre. It is also, frankly, one of the worse-optimized games you will encounter at this price point. Compared to Fortnite or Warzone, PUBG extracts fewer FPS from the same hardware. That is just the reality of its Unreal Engine 4 implementation.

The good news: with the right settings, GTX 1050 Ti class hardware can achieve stable, consistent 60 FPS on most maps. The key word is stable -- uncapped PUBG with bad frame pacing actually feels worse to play than locked 60 FPS with smooth delivery. This guide covers both the settings and the reasoning behind each choice.

The Exact Settings

Setting	Recommended Value	Why
Screen Scale	100	Never reduce this. Reduces render resolution, makes spotting enemies at range much harder.
Anti-Aliasing	Low	Medium and above have poor cost-to-quality ratio in PUBG.
Post-Processing	Very Low	Biggest single GPU gain. Covers motion blur, ambient occlusion, bloom, and screen effects. Huge FPS boost.
Shadows	Very Low	High shadow quality is expensive and provides zero competitive advantage.
Textures	Medium	Low makes enemy player models look flat and harder to distinguish at range. Medium is the competitive floor.
Effects	Low	Explosion and fire effects look worse but performance gain is meaningful.
Foliage	Very Low	Counter-intuitively improves competitive visibility by reducing grass that enemies can hide in. Also good FPS gain.
View Distance	Medium	Do not set this to Low. Low view distance hides enemies in the mid and far range -- a genuine competitive disadvantage.
Motion Blur	Off	Always off. Hurts visibility and costs performance.
Display Mode	Fullscreen	Exclusive fullscreen reduces input latency compared to borderless window.
FPS Limit	60 (in-game limiter)	See the section below on why this matters so much.

Post-Processing Very Low -- The Biggest Single Gain

If you only change one setting in PUBG, make it Post-Processing: Very Low. This single setting disables or heavily reduces motion blur, ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections, and the bloom/lens effects that PUBG applies in bright outdoor areas. On GTX 1050 Ti hardware, going from High to Very Low on Post-Processing alone can yield 15-20% more FPS. It also improves image clarity for spotting enemies since AO and bloom can wash out distant player models.

View Distance -- The Competitive Trap

Many optimization guides tell you to set View Distance to Low. This is bad advice for a game where you need to spot enemies 200-400 meters away. PUBG's Low view distance setting aggressively culls distant objects, and player models are included in this culling at Low. You can be looking directly at a prone enemy at 300m and simply not see them because they have not rendered yet.

Set View Distance to Medium minimum. The FPS cost over Low is modest, and the competitive benefit is real. This is the one setting where you genuinely trade FPS for gameplay quality and it is worth it.

Why PUBG Feels Worse Than It Looks

Even after optimizing settings, many players notice that PUBG feels stuttery and inconsistent even when the FPS counter shows 60+. The culprit is frame pacing.

Frame pacing refers to how evenly frames are delivered over time. A game delivering 60 FPS with perfect pacing displays one frame every 16.67ms. PUBG with uncapped FPS often delivers frames unevenly -- you might get 80 FPS but with frames arriving at 5ms, 5ms, 27ms, 10ms, 23ms intervals. Your brain perceives this as worse smoothness than a perfectly-paced 60 FPS would feel, even though the raw number is higher.

API Choice -- Try Vulkan on AMD

PUBG supports both DirectX 11 and Vulkan. The performance difference depends on your hardware:

• AMD GPUs (RX 570, RX 580): Vulkan typically gives a 10-15% FPS improvement and better CPU overhead. Strongly recommended.
• NVIDIA GPUs (GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060): Results are mixed. Some systems gain 5-10%, others see no improvement or slight regressions. Test both and use whichever gives higher average FPS with fewer stutters on your specific system.

To switch: in PUBG settings, go to Graphics, scroll to the bottom and find API. Select Vulkan. The game will restart. Play a few matches and compare.

System-Level Tips

• Disable Discord overlay: Discord's in-game overlay hooks into the render pipeline and causes frame time spikes. Right-click the Discord tray icon, go to Settings > Game Overlay and turn it off.
• Close all browser tabs before launching PUBG. Chrome with 10 tabs can consume 1.5-2GB of RAM and significant CPU resources. Close it entirely.
• Set Windows power plan to High Performance: Control Panel > Power Options > High Performance. This prevents CPU clock throttling during gameplay.
• PUBG is hungry for CPU cores. If you are on a dual-core CPU (Core i3, Pentium), the game will struggle regardless of GPU. PUBG wants at least 4 cores to deliver stable 60 FPS.

Expected FPS with These Settings -- 1080p

GPU	Average FPS	Result
GTX 1050 Ti	55-65	Great
Quadro P1000	60-70	Great
GTX 1060 6GB	75-90	Great
RX 570 4GB	65-75	Great
Quadro P620	35-45	Good

Final Checklist

• Post-Processing: Very Low
• Foliage: Very Low
• Shadows: Very Low
• View Distance: Medium (never Low)
• Textures: Medium
• Screen Scale: 100 (never lower)
• FPS cap: 60 in-game
• Discord overlay: disabled
• Background apps: closed
• API: test Vulkan vs DX11, use whichever is faster on your system