Flintlock The Siege of Dawn PC optimization guide: Best settings for optimal performance

Developer A44 Games' latest title, Flintlock The Siege of Dawn, offers a unique take on the traditional "souls-like" gameplay. With a more linear and action-focused approach to progression, the game bridges the gap between a more traditional souls-like and an action game. While Flintlock excels at delivering a unique combat experience, it's riddled with technical issues on PC.

This isn't particularly surprising considering the game is built using Unreal Engine 4, which is known to have issues in most games. And much like any other Unreal Engine 4 title with support for DirectX12, the biggest issue Flintlock The Sige of Dawn has is stuttering and occasional framerate spikes.

For an action game as fast-paced as Flintlock, a sudden drop in framerate or occasional stuttering can often come in the way of a player's enjoyment and immersion. Thankfully, most of these issues can be fixed with some minor tweaks to the in-game settings. Here's a comprehensive optimization guide for Flintlock The Siege of Dawn's PC port.

Best settings for Flintlock The Siege of Dawn on PC

Much like any other Unreal Engine 4 game, Flintlock The Siege of Dawn gets more demanding on the GPU's VRAM with higher resolutions. At 1080p, the game runs perfectly fine with an 8 gigabyte GPU, even a low-end one at that. However, if you try to push the resolution to 1440p, the framerate drops to almost 30-40% compared to 1080p.

On top of the resolution, the "Effects Quality" setting is another option that massively affects performance. Surprisingly enough the "Shadow Quality" and 'Post-processing" seem to have very little effect on performance, at least on mid-range GPUs.

Lastly, "Texture Quality" is another setting that might affect your performance, but only if you're VRAM-limited. If you have 8GB or more VRAM to spare, go with the "Best" preset as reducing this setting to lower presets won't have any effect on performance. However, if you're on a 6GB or lower GPU, stick with the "Medium" preset.

That being said, here are the optimized settings for Flintlock The Siege of Dawn on PC:

Texture Quality: Best (for 8GB VRAM GPUs, "Medium" or "High" for 6GB VRAM GPUs)
Anti-aliasing: High (If you're not using "Super-sampling," else disabled)
Shadow Quality: High
View Distance: High
Foliage Distance: High
Post-processing: High
Effects Quality: Medium

I tested these settings on two different GPUs - RTX 4070 and RX 6600. Both these GPUs were paired with a Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and 16GB of DDR4 RAM, alongside the game being installed on a Gen-4 NMVe drive. And using these settings, with DLSS/FSR enabled, I was able to maintain a steady 60fps.

Additionally, Flintlock The Siege of Dawn supports both Nvidia's DLSS3 and AMD's FSR3 alongside Frame-generation. Given the use of FXAA and TAA in the game's default anti-aliasing settings, which can make certain scenes a tad bit blurry, I highly recommend using DLAA or FSR3 Quality with Textures set to "Best" for the optimal experience.