Star Wars Zero Company FPS Drops & Performance Issues: How to Fix Stuttering

Star Wars Zero Company is exactly the kind of game I have been waiting for. A tactical Star Wars game set during the final years of the Clone Wars, built around squad positioning, abilities, cover, and difficult decisions? On paper, that is almost impossible for me to resist.

And when the game works properly, it is genuinely satisfying. Watching your squad move through a battlefield, setting up the perfect flank, using the environment to your advantage, and then watching a carefully planned turn come together feels fantastic.

Unfortunately, the PC version has another kind of tactical challenge: getting the game to run consistently.

A lot of players, including people with hardware that is comfortably above the recommended specifications, have been reporting FPS drops, micro-stuttering, inconsistent frame times, GPU spikes, and strange performance dips. What makes the situation particularly frustrating is that the average FPS number does not always tell the whole story. You can see 60 FPS or more on the counter and still feel the game hitching every few seconds.

I have always believed that stable frame pacing is more important than a big FPS number, especially in a tactical game. You are not playing Star Wars Zero Company like a competitive shooter where 180 FPS is essential. What matters here is that the camera stays smooth when you rotate it, the game does not freeze for a fraction of a second when assets load, and large battles don’t suddenly turn into a slideshow.

So, if you are dealing with Star Wars Zero Company FPS drops or stuttering on PC, these are the settings and fixes I would try first.

Why Is Star Wars Zero Company Stuttering on PC?

The biggest problem seems to be that performance isn’t affected by just one graphical setting.

The game combines detailed environments, dynamic effects, tactical AI, physics, particle effects, shadows, and background asset streaming. When several of these systems are triggered at the same time, frame times can become extremely inconsistent.

That is why simply lowering the resolution doesn’t necessarily solve everything.

In my experience with demanding PC games, there is a huge difference between average FPS and frame-time consistency. A game running at 70 FPS with occasional drops to 15 FPS can feel much worse than a game locked at a stable 45 or 60 FPS.

Star Wars Zero Company appears to have several situations where this becomes particularly obvious.

1. Micro-Stuttering and Asset Streaming

One of the most annoying problems is the occasional hitch when moving around a large tactical map.

The game has to stream environmental assets, animations, effects, textures, and other data while you are playing. When the CPU suddenly has to deal with several background tasks at once, frame times can spike.

This is why you may see something like this:

The important thing is that these problems aren’t always solved by having a faster GPU. CPU workload and asset streaming can become the bottleneck instead.

Tactical Camera Performance Can Be Surprisingly Bad

This is probably the issue that surprised me the most.

Star Wars Zero Company is a tactical game, so naturally you will spend a lot of time zooming the camera out and rotating it around the battlefield. Unfortunately, that camera perspective can dramatically increase the amount of the environment that has to be rendered.

When you zoom out, the game may suddenly have to draw much more of the battlefield, including shadows, particles, environmental details, lighting effects, and other objects.

The result can be a sudden GPU load spike.

You might be sitting comfortably around 60 FPS and then zoom out to get a better view of the battlefield, only to watch performance fall into the 30s.

For a strategy game, that’s especially irritating because the camera is one of your primary tools.

Start With a Stable FPS Cap

If there is one change I would recommend before doing anything complicated, it is this: stop chasing unlimited FPS.

An uncapped frame rate can cause your CPU and GPU to run unnecessarily hard, especially if the game is already struggling with background asset streaming.

For a 60 Hz display, I would start by locking the game to 60 FPS.

If your system cannot maintain 60 FPS consistently, I would rather have a stable 45 or 50 FPS than a constantly fluctuating 35–75 FPS experience.

You can apply the cap through your GPU software or, if available, through the game’s own settings.

For NVIDIA users, the NVIDIA Control Panel can be used to create a specific profile for the game. AMD users can do the same through AMD Software.

The goal is simple: give the CPU and GPU some breathing room instead of forcing them to render as many frames as physically possible.

The Graphics Settings I Would Change First

You don’t need to destroy the visual quality of Star Wars Zero Company to improve performance.

Instead, focus on settings that have a noticeable performance cost without providing an equally noticeable visual improvement.

Shadows: Medium

Shadows are one of the first settings I would lower.

Ultra-quality shadows can be surprisingly expensive, particularly on large tactical maps where many objects are visible simultaneously.

I recommend starting at Medium. If performance improves significantly, you have identified one of your major bottlenecks.

Ray Tracing: Off

If you are struggling with FPS drops, turn ray tracing off completely.

Star Wars Zero Company already has plenty of visual detail without requiring ray-traced effects. If your priority is smooth gameplay, I would spend the GPU budget elsewhere.

For me, this is an easy trade.

I would rather have a stable frame rate and slightly less impressive reflections than beautiful lighting accompanied by constant stuttering.

Volumetric Effects: Medium

Smoke, explosions, dust, and other atmospheric effects can look great, but they can also become expensive when several effects are displayed simultaneously.

Try Medium first.

If your FPS suddenly becomes more consistent during combat, you have found another setting worth keeping lower.

Particle and Alpha Effects: Medium

This is particularly relevant during heavy combat sequences.

When the screen fills with smoke, explosions, blaster fire, and other effects, the GPU has significantly more work to do. Lowering particle quality can help reduce those sudden drops without making the entire game look dramatically worse.

What About DLSS and FSR?

Upscaling is one of the best tools available to PC gamers, but I would be careful with Frame Generation if you are experiencing strange stuttering.

There is a difference between upscaling and frame generation.

DLSS or FSR can render the game internally at a lower resolution and reconstruct the image to your target resolution. This can provide a substantial performance improvement.

Frame Generation, however, creates additional frames between traditionally rendered frames. When the underlying frame rate is unstable, the experience can sometimes feel worse rather than better.

If you are seeing:

• Ghosting around characters
• Strange trails during movement
• Inconsistent camera motion
• Sudden frame-time spikes
• Visual artifacts during combat

I would turn Frame Generation off temporarily.

Then try standard DLSS or FSR on Quality mode.

If Quality doesn’t provide enough performance, Balanced is the next setting I would test.

Personally, I would always prefer a clean, consistent native-rendered frame over an inflated FPS counter that feels worse when I actually move the camera.

Update Your Graphics Driver

This sounds obvious, but it is worth doing properly.

Graphics driver updates often contain game-specific optimizations, shader fixes, and compatibility improvements. If you are using an older driver, you may be missing fixes specifically designed for newer releases.

For Star Wars Zero Company, check the latest driver available for your NVIDIA or AMD GPU before spending an afternoon changing Windows settings.

If your driver installation has become messy over time, a clean installation can also help.

For persistent issues, some PC enthusiasts use Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) to remove existing display-driver remnants before installing a fresh driver.

I would consider this a more advanced step rather than the first thing everyone should do.

Disable Unnecessary Overlays

This is another fix I regularly recommend because overlays can create problems that are difficult to diagnose.

If you are experiencing random stutters, temporarily disable:

• Steam Overlay
• Discord Overlay
• NVIDIA overlay
• EA in-game overlay
• Other hardware monitoring or recording overlays

You don’t necessarily have to keep every overlay disabled forever. The easiest approach is to turn them off, test the game, and see whether anything changes.

If the stuttering disappears, enable them one at a time until you find the culprit.

That’s much better than changing ten different graphics settings simultaneously and then having no idea which one actually fixed the problem.

Check Background Programs

Star Wars Zero Company can already put considerable pressure on your CPU, especially when the game is processing AI routines, environmental systems, and asset streaming.

So before launching the game, take a quick look at what’s running in the background.

Cloud synchronization, large downloads, browser tabs, recording software, antivirus scans, backup applications, and hardware monitoring utilities can all consume CPU, memory, storage bandwidth, or other resources.

You don’t need to turn your PC into a completely isolated gaming machine. Just make sure nothing obvious is consuming resources in the background.

I would especially avoid running a large file transfer or backup operation while trying to diagnose stuttering.

Don’t Blindly Change Windows Processor Settings

There is an old Windows optimization trick that recommends opening msconfig, going to Boot > Advanced Options, and manually selecting the maximum number of processors.

You will still see this recommendation in many PC gaming guides.

Personally, I would not make this one of your first fixes.

Modern versions of Windows are generally capable of managing available CPU cores and threads themselves. Manually changing processor-count settings can create confusion and does not automatically make a game faster.

If Star Wars Zero Company is CPU-limited, I would first concentrate on:

1. Lowering the frame-rate target.
2. Closing unnecessary background applications.
3. Checking CPU temperatures and clock speeds.
4. Updating chipset and GPU drivers.
5. Monitoring CPU/GPU utilization while the stutter occurs.

The important thing is to find the actual bottleneck instead of applying random Windows tweaks.

Verify Your Game Files

If performance suddenly became much worse after an update, or if certain maps consistently cause unusual behavior, verifying the installation is worth trying.

On Steam:

Library → STAR WARS Zero Company → Properties → Installed Files → Verify integrity of game files

Steam will scan the installation and replace corrupted or missing files where necessary.

This isn’t a magic FPS boost, but it can eliminate corrupted installation data as a possible cause of crashes, loading problems, and unusual behavior.

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My Recommended Starting Preset

If I were setting up Star Wars Zero Company on a new PC today, I wouldn’t immediately start with everything on Ultra.

I’d begin with a balanced configuration:

Then I would increase individual settings one at a time.

That’s important.

If you change 15 settings at once, you don’t know which setting actually affected performance. Changing them individually takes longer, but it gives you a much better understanding of what your particular PC dislikes.

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The Best Fix May Simply Be Stability

One thing I have learned from playing demanding PC games is that higher settings aren’t always better.

Star Wars Zero Company is a tactical game. You spend a lot of time thinking, positioning units, studying the battlefield, and planning your next move. There is very little benefit to pushing the GPU to its absolute limit if the result is inconsistent frame pacing.

I’d happily play this game at a locked 60 FPS with Medium shadows and ray tracing disabled if it means the camera stays smooth.

That’s a much better experience than running Ultra settings, watching the FPS counter occasionally hit triple digits, and then getting a brutal stutter every time the game loads another section of the battlefield.

Final Thoughts

Star Wars Zero Company has a lot going for it, and I genuinely want to see the PC version receive the optimization work it deserves. The tactical gameplay is the star of the show, not benchmark numbers.

The good news is that many of the current Star Wars Zero Company performance issues can be reduced through sensible configuration changes.

Start with the basics: update your GPU drivers, cap the frame rate, lower shadows, disable ray tracing, reduce volumetric and particle effects, and test the game with Frame Generation disabled. If that doesn’t solve the problem, move on to overlays, background applications, file verification, and deeper hardware monitoring.

Most importantly, don’t assume that because you own a powerful GPU, the game should automatically run perfectly. Modern PC games are complicated pieces of software, and a title can be GPU-heavy, CPU-limited, or affected by asset streaming depending on what is happening on screen.

For me, the ideal Star Wars Zero Company setup isn’t the one that produces the highest possible FPS number.

It’s the one that makes every camera movement, tactical decision, explosion, and squad command feel consistent.

And until the developers continue polishing the game’s PC performance, a few minutes spent tuning those settings can make the difference between fighting the Empire and fighting your frame rate.

How I Boosted Star Wars Zero Company to 240+ FPS on a SUPER WEAK PC! ✅ (Boost FPS & Fix Lag)