Best settings in Escape from Tarkov

For hardcore FPS gamers, settings are important because one too-shadowy corner or some less-than-optimal graphics performance could mean life or death. In Escape from Tarkov, there are recommendations across the internet on how to make the best settings for the game. Here’s ours, so hopefully, you can knock off the enemy’s helmet before they ever see yours.

Related: Best helmets in Escape from Tarkov

Where to change settings in Escape from Tarkov?

Though it may sound a little obvious, the best place to play with the graphics, game settings, etc., is the Settings menu. How do you get there? Well, open Escape from Tarkov, and in the first menu, you can go to that all-important Settings tab. From there, you can play will all the different settings to your heart’s content.

The best graphics settings in Escape from Tarkov

Once in the Settings tab, the first place you should probably go is the graphics sub-bar. You should take particular note of a few things — screen settings, picture quality, and visibility, among an assortment of smaller graphic notes.

When it comes to screen settings, the situation is fairly simple. Make sure that:

• Screen Resolution: your monitor’s native resolution
• Aspect Ratio: your monitor’s native resolution
• Fullscreen mode
• VSync: Off

The quality of your graphics is also very important, so take these steps to optimize your Tarkov view:

• Texture quality: High
• Shadows quality: Low
• Object LOD quality: 2
• Overall visibility: 400, but can scale up to 1,000 depending on if you’re dealing with close combat or long-range sniping
• Antialiasing: TAA High Quality. Adjust based on your own graphics card’s power
• Resampling: 1x off
• HBAO: Off
• SSR: Off
• Anisotropic Filtering: Off
• The six boxes below: All off except high-quality color

Volume settings

From chat to in-game noise, there are a lot of other settings that gamers can be finicky about and can make or break immersion and focus, so check these out before leaving the menu:

• Overall volume: 100
• Interface volume: 20-30
• Chat volume: 10, but using a different platform is recommended if chatting with friends
• Music volume: 0-10
• Hideout volume: 0-10

Game settings

Once you’re back in the generalized Settings screen, go instead to the Game tab to do a bit more optimization. You can play with the tools in this tab as much as you want, but there are a few things all players should change:

• Auto RAM Cleaner: On
• Only use physical cores: On
• Head Bobbing: 0.2
• FOV: 60-75 (or higher, if you prefer)

There are a few notes for specific video cards and processors, though. If you have an NVIDIA graphics card and are dealing with performance issues, you should uncheck Enable NVIDIA Highlights. Also, if you have a processor with hyper-threading or SMT, check the setting Use only the physical cores.

Other optimizations

Depending on what graphics card you’re using, you can go into the card’s interface and optimize your graphics from there. Whether you’re using NVIDIA or AMD, change the settings to focus on increased performance for its Escape From Tarkov. This setting change will make all your flying bullets from your amazing guns even sharper. 

Also, many pros encourage players to disable things like OneDrive and Windows Update Delivery Optimization. You can also take some extra steps to optimize common gaming tools like Discord and Google Chrome by turning off hardware acceleration.