Permafrost Wiki

Permafrost Best Settings: Performance and Stability

Updated:

Quick answer: start at the Medium preset, lower shadows first, enable upscaling (DLSS/FSR Quality) if your card offers it, and keep frame generation off if you're experiencing crashes. On RTX cards, FSR was disabled by the developers in the launch hotfixes.

Applies to: Early Access, October 2026 builds. Two launch-day hotfixes (Oct 9) and a crash patch (Oct 10) already changed the stability picture — update first.

A sane baseline

  1. Preset: Medium. The gap from Medium to High costs more than it looks in a UE5 winter world full of snow physics and volumetric fog.
  2. Shadows and lighting: first to cut. The biggest fps-per-quality wins.
  3. V-Sync: toggle it if you see stutter or tearing; otherwise leave as-is.
  4. Keep 16 GB RAM free of background hogs — browsers eat the minimum spec alive.

Upscaling and frame generation (read carefully)

  • DLSS: enable where your RTX card offers it; Quality mode is the sweet spot.
  • FSR: the developers disabled FSR on RTX 20/30/40/50 cards in the launch hotfixes after crash reports — if the option is missing on an RTX card, that's why. On AMD cards, FSR Quality is the equivalent play.
  • Frame generation / multi-frame generation: the single most crash-implicated feature in Early Access. If you see "GPU crash dump triggered", turn this off first; if your game is stable, it's free fps.

The -dx11 fallback

Steam → right-click Permafrost → Properties → Launch Options → -dx11. DirectX 11 is slower than DX12 but has been the reliable workaround for launch crashes on some systems. Use it as a diagnostic: if DX11 is stable and DX12 isn't, your issue is driver/API-level — see the GPU crash guide.

Known Early Access performance quirks

  • Frame drops after opening the settings menu — restart the game (known issue).
  • Controller: partial controller support only, and controller crafting is currently unavailable (known issue).
  • Overlays (Discord, GeForce, Steam) cost stability while testing — disable them when diagnosing.

FAQ

What fps will my card get? We don't publish unmeasured fps numbers. The honest check: compare your GPU to the official requirements — GTX 1060 6GB is the floor, RTX 3070 Ti the recommended tier.

Best settings for a laptop? Medium preset + upscaling + shadows down; laptop GPUs run hot, so cap fps if the chassis throttles.

Related: System requirements · GPU crash fixes

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