Sons of The Forest Best Settings Guide [FPS Boost]

Sons of Forest is a great sequel with tons of new gameplay additions and improved graphics. While it’s a decently optimized game to run on mid-tier hardware, new players to the franchise are still confused about how they can boost their game’s performance even further. For that, I’ve come up with the Sons of Forest best settings to help you get the most performance out of your hardware without compromising visuals much. 

Sons of The Forest Best Settings In-Game

First, we’ll optimize the best in-game settings for Sons of Forest as it’ll give you the most performance improvement out of everything else. We’ll go through each setting one by one and suggest the most optimized combination of settings you can use to boost your performance. 

Resolution: Your Native Display Resolution

Set the resolution to your actual display’s resolution to have the best visual experience. You shouldn’t select any resolution lower than what your display can support. Playing at a lower resolution will give you better performance, but tank visuals make them blurry which is a huge disadvantage in a survival game like the Sons of Forest.

Fullscreen: Exclusive Fullscreen

The best display mode to play Sons of Forest is Exclusive Fullscreen. It helps your PC direct resources to your game the best giving you stable and better performance without stuttering or crashing. 

VSYNC: OFF

Using VSYNC in games isn’t recommended as it increases latency and input lag. Best set it to off to improve responsiveness. 

Max FPS: MAX

Crank the Max FPS slider to its maximum value to let the game render the most FPS your PC can push out. This will give you the smoothest gaming experience in Sons of Forest. If you experience any excessive screen tearing, set this to the maximum refresh rate of your display monitor.  

Gamma & Brightness: Your Preference 

Set the gamma and brightness according to your preference. Make sure to always start from the 50% slider and either decrease or increase according to in-game visibility to set the best values possible. 

Quality Preset: Custom

Since we’ll be tweaking every setting to a particular value, Custom is the best option to set in Quality Preset. Other presets to configure the settings to a pre-determined value for consistent visuals across the board. But we don’t want that. 

Draw Distance: Medium

Sons of the Forest features a vast area of wilderness as far as the eye can see. To avoid any pop-ins, texture blurring, or negative performance impact, the medium is the sweet spot for Draw Distance. It’ll help render objects and creatures at a decent enough distance without putting a load on your PC rendering stuff beyond your vision. 

Ambient Occlusion: High

Setting Ambient Occlusion to high from ultra gave us a nice little boost in performance while also being nearly indistinguishable from ultra presets.

Fog Quality: Low

Fog Quality is one of the most taxing settings in Sons of Forest and should be set to Low. It’ll help prevent your game from stuttering or dropping FPS when fighting enemies in a foggy area. So yeah, just saved you from getting mauled by enemies because your PC decided to go on the fritz. 

Anisotropic Textures: ON

Turning on Anisotropic textures gave a really small improvement in performance which wasn’t worth it. It’s best that you keep this ON and we can salvage performance elsewhere. 

Shadow Quality: Medium

Dropping Shadows Quality from ultra to medium will give you a good 5-6 FPS boost as it’s really taxing on your GPU. However, low doesn’t really improve performance at all so medium is the perfect option for shadows. 

Clouds: Low

You’ll be so busy fighting mutants and chopping up wood in the wild that you’ll rarely look up at the sky. Besides, setting clouds to low will give you a decent performance boost without degrading their look and feel too much. 

Grass: Low

Since you’re in the wilderness, there’s a lot of grass as far as the eye can see. So if you drop the Grass Quality to low, you’ll gain a decent amount of FPS without losing any serious details on the foliage.

Water: High

If you lower the Water quality, the water physics takes a fit but FPS doesn’t really improve. Maybe it depends on your hardware configuration but dropping this did nothing for me. So, I’ll be leaving the water quality too high. 

Parallax Distance: High

Parallax Distance doesn’t add or reduce any FPS when set to low or high respectively. So, I might as well leave it at high.

Billboard Quality: Medium

This setting was particularly interesting for me as I hadn’t encountered any billboards in this jungle. After tinkering with it for a bit, it seemed to control the trees in the distance and how clearly they were visible from afar. The best option for Billboard Quality was medium as it rendered trees without any glitchy effects. 

Texture Resolution: Full

There’s no point in dropping Texture Resolution down because it won’t be netting you any performance improvement. On the contrary, it’s seen to reduce performance for players instead of improving it. 

Anti Aliasing: TAA

TAA Anti Aliasing mode looks the most smooth and well-balanced compared to the look and feel of FXAA and SMAA. All Anti Aliasing options have the same performance impact so it all depends on which one looks better to your eyes. 

Dynamic Resolution: DLSS or OFF

If you’re rocking an Nvidia RTX GPU, then you’ll be able to use the DLSS to upscale your resolution and improve performance quite a lot. Sad news for AMD users that Sons of Forest does not yet have AMD FSR 2.0 as it’s rocking the older version, FSR 1.0. FSR looks really bad and acts like a simple dynamic resolution setting than a proper AI upscaler. So, either use the DLSS option or simply turn Dynamic Resolution off. 

DLSS: Balanced

If you selected DLSS in the Dynamic Resolution setting, here you can configure its mode. Balanced is, as the name implies, the most balanced mode to use with DLSS as it gives the best combination of performance and visuals. 

Bloom: OFF

Bloom is a strictly aesthetic graphical effect that has little to no effect on performance. I don’t really like it so I usually turn Bloom off, but you might want to try it before deciding. 

Screen Space Reflection: OFF

Turning off Screen Space Reflection will have a noticeable impact on visual quality but also give you a nice boost in performance. It might be a worthwhile trade-off for some while some players might prefer it enabled. Depending on your hardware, it’s up to you to make this decision. 

Motion Blur: OFF

Motion Blur looks weird in Sons of Forest and I prefer it off rather than on. However, it’s also up to your preference as it doesn’t have any impact on performance. 

Micro Shadowing: OFF

Turning Micro Shaodwing off will give you a minor boost in performance without impacting visuals much.

Contact Shadows: OFF

Contact Shadows is also one of the most taxing settings in the game that can upright give you a 5-6 FPS boost in performance. It also doesn’t have much noticeable change in visuals so disabling it is a no-brainer. 

Chromatic Aberration: OFF

Chromatic Aberration implementation in Sons of Forest is really bad and it’s not really worth turning it on. However, turning it off won’t give you any performance boost, however, it will save your game from looking weird. 

Film Grain: OFF

Film Grain is an option that shouldn’t exist in games (in my opinion). It’s an awful effect that ruins the texture quality in games by adding a grainy filter on the screen. You best turn it off. 

Color Grade: Default

Color Grade is a combination of filters that can help you get the perfect screenshots for Sons of Forest. Leave it at default if you want to enjoy the game in its original colors. 

These were Sons of the Forest’s best settings that’ll help optimize your game and strike the best balance between visuals and performance. After using these settings, you can increase or decrease each setting depending on whether you have a better PC or a slower one. Now let’s get over to step 2 which includes optimizing GPU settings. 

Configuring Sons of Forest’s Best GPU Settings

After you’re done using optimized settings for Sons of Forest, it’s time to tweak your GPU settings to get an additional boost. Here are some of the best GPU settings you should use for Sons of Forest. 

Best Nvidia Settings for Sons of Forest

Use the following Sons of Forest best Nvidia settings in the Nvidia Control Panel:

If you want to optimize your Nvidia GPU’s performance even further and learn about the settings, here’s our best Nvidia settings guide to get you started.

AMD Best Settings for Sons of Forest

Let’s start configuring the AMD Radeon panel with the Sons of Forest’s best AMD settings. Use the following settings to help you get an additional boost in performance in Sons of Forest. 

Interested in configuring your Radeon panel further to optimize gaming performance? Check out our best AMD settings guide to get a detailed look at each setting.

Bonus Windows Optimizations Tweaks

After configuring your in-game and GPU settings with Sons of Forest’s best settings, it’s time to optimize your Windows. We’ll list some of the best tweaks that’ll help you improve the game’s performance as well as the performance of your PC. 

• Update your Windows 10/11
• Update Your GPU Drivers
• Turn On Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling In Win Settings > Display > Graphics > Default Graphics Settings
• Enable Game Mode
• Eliminate Unwanted Background Processes

Bonus Tip 1: Use Exclusive Fullscreen Launch Options

The game can sometimes change display mode on the fly and you won’t know when it did it. Playing on any other mode other than exclusive fullscreen will make you lose performance. The best way to make the game stick to exclusive fullscreen is by setting launch options in Steam. Here’s how you can do it:

1. First, open Steam through the taskbar in the bottom right or by looking it up in Windows Search. 
2. Once Steam opens, locate Sons of the Forest in your game library, right-click on it, and select properties. 

3. As properties open up, in the General tab, look for the launch options section and paste the following lines here:
   -window-mode exclusive -screen-fullscreen
4. Once you’re done, close the tab and start up the game.

After adding this launch parameter, the game will always launch in exclusive fullscreen mode giving you the best gameplay experience possible. 

Bonus Tip 2: Update Sons of Forest DLSS Version

For players that are playing the game on an RTX GPU, you can actually update the DLSS version of the game. The current version of DLSS doesn’t look as sharp and works the best as the latest one. So we’ll be updating it with the most recent one. Here’s how you can do it too: 

1. First, download the latest DLSS file from TechPowerUp: 

2. Once you have the .dll file for the latest DLSS version, go to steam > locate Sons of Forest > Right-Click and select its properties > go to local files tab > click on locate local files.

3. Once you open up the game’s local files, all you need to do is copy the latest DLSS version DLL file and replace it with the one already in the Sons of Forest install directory. 

And that’s about it, after updating the Sons of Forest DLSS version, boot up the game, select DLSS, and enjoy the game at its best visuals and performance. 

Wrapping Up The Guide

And there you have it, these were all Sons of Forest’s best settings and tweaks you need to use to get the most performance out of your PC. Sons of Forest isn’t a really heavy game, to begin with, but if you’re chasing those higher FPS numbers, these tweaks are sure to get you there.

If I’ve helped you get more performance out of your game or I’ve missed something, be sure to let me know in the comments below. Until then, have fun on your survival journey in the wilderness.