Dune: Awakening has finally launched, and even after a lengthy development cycle and a variety of alphas and betas, the PC performance isn’t where many players would like it to be. Even if you have a top-of-the-line machine with modern hardware that costs an arm and a leg, you’re likely seeing FPS dips, stuttering, and crashes while playing on PC.

While there’s not much you can do about the crashes aside from updating your drivers, you can mitigate the stutters and improve your overall FPS by adjusting specific graphics settings. To see what those settings are in Dune: Awakening, check out the guide below.

Best PC settings for Dune: Awakening

First and foremost, before you attempt to play Dune: Awakening on PC, you want to ensure that you at least meet the minimum requirements outlined by the developers. If one or more of your PC parts don’t meet those requirements, you’re going to have an incredibly difficult time on Arrakis, if you can even get the game to boot at all.

If you’ve ensured your PC meets the requirements to play, launch the game and navigate to the settings menu. Here, choose the “Graphics” tab and then start going through all of the settings from top to bottom. You’ll notice that the game has auto-detected the settings for you already based on the hardware configuration of your PC.

However, if you run those settings, you’re going to wind up with a solid amount of stuttering and FPS dips as soon as you enter the world. To make sure that doesn’t happen, take a look at our recommended settings below:

Display Settings

• Field of View: 110
• Motion Blur: Off
• Vsync: Off
• Frame Rate Cap: Capped to your monitor’s highest refresh rate

Graphics Settings

• Resolution: The desired resolution for your monitor (1920 x 1080 ensures the best performance)
• Window Mode: Fullscreen
• Upscaling Quality: Medium
• Upscaling Method: DLSS, if using an Nvidia GPU
• Frame Generation Method: Nvidia DLSS FG 2X, if using an Nvidia GPU (FSR if using AMD)
• Override Upscaling Preset: On
• Resolution Scale: 58
• Nvidia Reflex: Enabled + Boost
• DLSS Upscaling Quality: Performance
• Shadows: Low
• Virtual Shadow Maps: Off
• GI Quality: Medium
• Enable Lumen: Off
• Reflections Quality: Low
• Low End Laptop Mode: Off
• Limit Process CPU Usage: Off
• View Distance: High
• Post Processing: Low
• Effects Quality: Medium
• Texture Quality: Medium or High, depending on your hardware
• Foliage Quality: Medium or High, depending on your hardware

Out of all of these settings, you’ll want to make sure that you have enabled some sort of upscaling, as Dune: Awakening runs much better when you have DLSS or FSR turned on. Additionally, if you have a compatible GPU, you should also enable Frame Generation. While this does add a slight input delay, it’s hardly noticeable in an MMORPG and more than makes up for that with dozens of extra frames.

You also want to make sure you’re capping your FPS to your monitor’s highest refresh rate. Capping your FPS allows your PC to run rampant with frames and can be a major factor in the stuttering you can experience. To go along with that, ensure Vysnc is turned off, as that will make your game run much smoother overall.

The rest of the settings are fairly basic. You want shadows to be as low as possible, any type of reflection doesn’t need to be turned up too high, and textures can remain slightly higher than other settings if you want your game to look decent. Of course, if you don’t care about graphics or you want to squeeze every bit of FPS out of your PC, then turn every setting to its lowest value and see how far that gets you.

Other ways to improve FPS and remove stutters

If you want to take things a step further when it comes to PC performance, there are additional settings you can change in Dune: Awakening. However, these settings are out of the game and are instead done through the Nvidia Control Panel. If you’re an AMD user, you don’t have access to most of these tools, but you can still check your GPU software for ways to improve performance.

As for all Nvidia users, open or download the Nvidia Control Panel program. From here, follow the steps below to make Dune: Awakening run as smoothly and efficiently as possible:

• In Nvidia Control Panel, go to “Manage 3D Settings”
• Then, click “Program Settings” and hit “Add” at the top of the menu
• A box will pop up, and from here, click “Browse.” This brings up the File Explorer and you need to find the location of the .exe file for Dune: Awakening (look in the Steam folder on the drive folder you downloaded the game on)
• Once you’ve found the .exe file, select it and add it to Nvidia Control Panel
• You can now scroll down the program settings for the game and make a few changes:
  • Power Management Mode: Prefer maximum performance
  • Texture Filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
  • Texture Filtering – Quality: High performance
• Exit Nvidia Control Panel once those changes have been applied and relaunch Dune: Awakening

Using the optimal settings and the Nvidia Control Panel adjustments, your game should be much smoother and feature far fewer stutters. However, the developers at Funcom will ultimately need to release some patches in Dune: Awakening that further fix the PC performance so you can go back to using higher settings without such a big performance hit.

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