He Best Sons of the Forest Storylines It won’t save you from the hungry inhabitants of the survival horror game, but choosing the right options will give you a fps boost. The higher frame rates and balanced visuals will finally make your visit to the remote island a little less miserable, as Sons of the Forest’s alpha is understandably rough around the edges of performance.
Before you crash into the sequel to The Forest, we highly recommend checking out the system requirements for Sons of the Forest. The best survival game competitor isn’t particularly demanding, but if you’re looking to increase fps, you’ll want to match Endnight Games’ recommended specs. That said, if you’re not concerned about frame rates or running an older rig, our best configuration suggestions should guide your gaming PC of choice out of performance murky waters.
– Game News test machine: MSI MPG Trident AS 11th gaming PC, with Intel Core i7 11700F, MSI Ventus Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, 32 GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM, MSI B560 motherboard and Windows 11.
The best Sons of the Forest sets
Here are the best Sons of the Forest sets:
- Quality Preset: Custom
- Pull Distance – High
- Ambient Occlusion: Ultra
- Mist Quality: High
- Anisotropic Textures: Enabled
- Shadow Quality: High
- Clouds: High
- Grass: medium
- Water: high
- Parallax Distance: High
- Texture resolution: Full
- Smoothing: Off
- Dynamic resolution: DLSS / FSR 1.0
- DLSS mode: performance (optional)
- Screen Space Reflection: Off
- Micro-shading: activated
- Contact Shadows: Off
- Chromatic Aberration: On
- Film Grain: Off (optional)
- Color Level: Default
Sons of the Forest does not have an in-game benchmark, so we decided to use a specific path to represent typical gameplay. It’s worth remembering that Cannibal Adventure is still in Early Access, so we’ll continue to revise our configuration suggestions as patches and updates roll out.
Children of the Forest Presets
If you’re looking for a starting point, selecting a Sons of the Forest preset will provide a great base. However, scaling things across the board hasn’t yielded the substantial frame boost we’d normally expect, so they’re anything but a performance panacea.
Changing the global setting from Ultra to High gave us a few more frames, but the result is nothing out of the ordinary. It’s true that erratic frame rates and fps drops mean it’s hard to take advantage of minor performance boosts, and that’ll ring especially true if you’re gaming at 4K. Again, if that 60fps sweet spot is out of your reach, it might be worth making the switch.
Changing your preset to medium results in a 6% increase in frames, and frames don’t seem to take much. So if your team is crying out for help, we won’t judge you for taking the plunge. Sadly, the same can’t be said for Low, as while it apparently facilitates a whopping 15% frame rate boost, it’s hard to see the forest from the pixelated trees.
Children of the Forest DLSS
Our Sons of the Forest setup tests use an RTX 3070, which means we can reap the rewards of Nvidia DLSS. Enabling the AI scaler provides a substantial boost when using the Ultra preset, producing the same mid frame rate as Low. Things are still a little jittery, and even the green team’s best graphics card tech couldn’t save us from random crashes, but it’s still going to make a big difference.
Sons of the Forest Grass Quality
One can only imagine that Kermit the Frog would like Sons of the Forest, since its park is full of greenery. If you’re not a big fan of vegetation, you can bring a metaphorical lawnmower to the lawn of the survival game by changing the setting to Low, and you’ll earn a few extra points as spending money. Just keep in mind that the option will effectively clear the forest floor, ultimately making everything less dense.
Sons of the Forest draw distance
Decreasing the draw distance, even a little, will relieve your graphics card, allowing you to spill a few more frames on your screen. Switching from Ultra to High didn’t seem to cloud our long-range vision as much in testing, but other changes could hamper its ability to see invading cannibals.
Sons of the Forest contact the shadows
Contact Shadows equips Sons of the Forest with a layer of visual depth, but removing this setting could increase your average fps by around 5%. Of course, this result can vary depending on specific parts of the forest, so it’s best to keep that in mind when trying to grab images.
Again, future updates are likely to change things, and a Sons of the Forest hotfix patch has already revamped the mechanics of the survival game. We’ll continue to keep an eye on PC performance, to be sure to come back for more setup tips.
Do you plan to fight cannibals on the go? We’ve already tested the Sons of the Forest Steam Deck for compatibility, but might want to wait to buy it specifically for Valve’s handheld.