How to Fix Low FPS in The Relic: First Guardian – Performance Boost Guide

There’s something incredibly satisfying about The Relic: First Guardian. It mixes brutal combat with exploration in a way that constantly rewards curiosity, and every new area in Arsiltus feels like it hides another challenge worth overcoming. Unfortunately, that excitement can disappear fast when the game starts dropping frames during boss fights or stuttering every time you enter a new zone.

After spending time with the game and comparing notes with other PC players across gaming communities, I noticed a pattern. Most performance problems aren’t caused by one major issue—they’re usually a combination of graphics settings, Windows configuration, outdated drivers, and background software fighting for your hardware. The good news is that you don’t necessarily need a brand-new PC to get a much smoother experience.

This guide covers the tweaks that actually make a difference without turning the game into a blurry mess.

The Relic First Guardian Campaign Length: How Many Hours to Beat?

Check Whether Your PC Meets the Requirements

Before changing dozens of settings, make sure your hardware isn’t the real bottleneck. Even the best optimization tricks can’t compensate for components that fall well below the game’s intended specifications.

One thing I can’t stress enough is storage speed. If you’re still running modern games from a mechanical hard drive, you’re making life much harder than it needs to be. In games filled with detailed environments, large bosses, and high-resolution textures, an SSD dramatically reduces loading hiccups and asset streaming stutters.

Simply moving the game to an SSD can make exploration feel much more consistent, even if your average FPS doesn’t increase dramatically.

Start With the Graphics Settings That Matter Most

Not every graphics option affects performance equally. Some settings look impressive while quietly eating 20% of your GPU power, while others barely change visual quality at all.

I usually avoid lowering everything to Low. Instead, I prefer finding the sweet spot where the game still looks gorgeous but runs consistently.

My recommended setup looks like this:

• Display Mode: Exclusive Fullscreen
• Resolution: Native monitor resolution
• DLSS / FSR / XeSS: Enable Quality mode whenever available
• Shadow Quality: Medium
• Volumetric Fog: Low
• Ambient Occlusion: Medium
• Anti-Aliasing: Low or Medium
• Motion Blur: Disabled
• V-Sync: Off

If you’re playing at 1440p or 4K, don’t immediately assume your graphics card isn’t strong enough. Upscaling technologies like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS have become incredibly good. In many cases, I honestly struggle to notice the visual difference while gaining 15 to 30 additional FPS.

Shadows are another major performance killer. Lowering them from Ultra to Medium often produces a noticeable frame-rate boost while barely affecting the overall atmosphere.

Use Upscaling Instead of Sacrificing Everything

One mistake I see a lot of players make is dropping every setting to Low before enabling upscaling.

Personally, I’d rather keep better textures and lighting while letting DLSS or FSR handle some of the rendering workload. Modern upscaling is significantly better than it was just a few years ago, especially during combat where you’re focused on dodging attacks rather than inspecting distant rocks.

If your GPU supports it:

• DLSS: Best choice for NVIDIA RTX cards.
• FSR: Excellent option for AMD cards and many NVIDIA GPUs.
• XeSS: Worth testing on Intel Arc hardware.

Balanced mode is usually a great compromise if Quality mode isn’t giving you enough performance.

Optimize Your GPU Driver Settings

The graphics driver controls much more than people realize. A few minutes inside your GPU control panel can smooth out inconsistent frame times and reduce annoying input delay.

NVIDIA Users

These are the settings I normally change first:

• Power Management Mode: Prefer Maximum Performance
• Low Latency Mode: On or Ultra
• Texture Filtering Quality: High Performance
• Vertical Sync: Off

Setting the GPU to maximum performance prevents aggressive clock-speed reductions that sometimes happen during less demanding scenes. Those sudden changes can actually create stutters once heavy combat begins.

AMD Users

Inside AMD Adrenalin, I recommend:

• Enable Radeon Anti-Lag
• Disable Radeon Chill
• Set Texture Filtering Quality to Performance

Radeon Chill is useful for saving power, but fast-paced action RPGs aren’t where I want my frame rate changing dynamically.

Windows Can Hurt Performance More Than You Think

Even powerful gaming PCs sometimes waste resources on background features that most players never notice.

Turning on Game Mode in Windows is quick and worth doing. It encourages Windows to prioritize the active game instead of constantly juggling resources with background tasks.

Another useful adjustment is assigning the game to High Performance in Windows Graphics Settings. This makes sure laptops and systems with multiple GPUs don’t accidentally choose a lower-power graphics processor.

One tweak that’s surprisingly effective is disabling Fullscreen Optimizations for the game’s executable. Some DirectX 12 games simply behave better with this feature turned off, producing more stable frame pacing.

Close Programs You Don’t Need

This sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many applications quietly consume memory while you’re gaming.

Browsers are usually the biggest offenders. A handful of Chrome tabs can easily occupy several gigabytes of RAM before you even launch a game.

Before starting a long session, I normally close:

• Web browsers
• RGB control software I don’t need
• Cloud sync utilities
• Secondary game launchers
• Video recording software
• Unnecessary monitoring applications

Overlay software deserves special mention.

Steam Overlay, Discord Overlay, hardware monitoring overlays, and RGB monitoring utilities all hook into the game. Individually they’re harmless, but together they can introduce annoying micro-stutters that become especially noticeable during difficult boss fights.

If you’re chasing smooth gameplay, it’s worth disabling overlays temporarily to see if performance improves.

Keep Drivers and System Software Updated

Launch-day drivers exist for a reason.

GPU manufacturers spend weeks working alongside developers before major releases, and many of the early driver updates specifically target performance optimization for newly released games.

It’s always worth checking for:

• Latest NVIDIA Game Ready Driver
• Latest AMD Adrenalin Driver
• Intel graphics updates
• Motherboard chipset drivers
• BIOS updates when recommended by the manufacturer

Modern motherboard firmware can improve support for technologies like Resizable BAR (ReBAR), allowing the CPU to communicate more efficiently with the graphics card. Depending on your system, that alone can produce measurable performance improvements.

If You’re Still Getting Low FPS

If none of these tweaks completely solve the issue, don’t immediately blame your hardware.

New PC releases often launch with optimization problems that developers address over the following weeks. Shader compilation issues, memory leaks, and CPU scheduling bugs are far more common than many people realize.

If your performance gradually gets worse after playing for several hours, try restarting the game occasionally. Long sessions can sometimes increase RAM usage, especially in large worlds filled with unique assets and frequent loading transitions.

It’s also worth checking community forums after every major update. I’ve found excellent optimization suggestions from other players that never appeared in official patch notes.

Final Thoughts

I genuinely enjoy The Relic: First Guardian, and when everything is running properly, its combat feels responsive, satisfying, and rewarding. That makes inconsistent performance even more frustrating because timing is such an important part of surviving difficult encounters.

Fortunately, most PC players can gain a noticeable improvement by combining smarter graphics settings, updated drivers, Windows optimizations, and cleaner background processes. You don’t have to reduce every option to its lowest value just to reach stable frame rates. A few carefully chosen adjustments usually deliver the best balance between visual quality and performance, letting you focus on exploring Arsiltus instead of constantly watching your FPS counter.