Back 4 Blood Optimization Guide – Fix Stuttering, FPS drops and Lag

Back 4 Blood stuttering fps drops lag – This guide will show you how to optimize Back 4 Blood on PC, and get rid of performance issues like stuttering, fps drops and lag.

Back 4 Blood Optimization Guide – Fix Stuttering, FPS drops and Lag

Recommended System Requirements for Back 4 Blood

At the moment, the devs have not revealed any info about the minimum system requirements for the game. Their official website has only the recommended specs listed. Check them out and compare it with your hardware specifications:

The recommended requirements are quite alright if you ask me. I mean, this is 2021, and games are starting to get demanding. An i3 8100 and GTX 1050 ti might just not cut it. With that being said, if Back 4 Blood really runs smoothly, without any fps drops or stuttering, on the hardware listed above. I would say that the game is well-optimized, for the most part.

Graphics drivers for Back 4 Blood

GPU drivers, specifically optimized for Back 4 Blood, are not yet available.

Update (10/11/2021)

A new Nvidia driver, optimized for Back 4 Blood, is now available. The version is 471.68. You can download it from this link. You can also check for updates via Nvidia GFE.

Update (10/12/2021)

A new Nvidia driver, optimized for Back 4 Blood, is now available. The version is 496.13. You can download it from this link. You can also check for updates via Nvidia GFE.

A new AMD driver, optimized for Back 4 Blood, is now available. The version is Adrenalin 21.10.2 Optional. You can download it from this link. You can also check for updates via AMD Auto-Detect.

Turn off Nvidia Instant Replay or Windows Background Recording

If you do not have a powerful processor, then I would suggest that you turn off features like Nvidia Instant Replay or the Windows Background Recording. These both do the same job and might cause unnecessary stuttering in demanding titles.

To turn off Nvidia Instant Replay:

1. Press Alt+Z [You obviously have Nvidia in-game overlay enabled if you are using instant replay]
2. Click on the Instant Replay block
3. Turn it off from there

To turn off Background Recording:

1. Go to your Windows 10 settings menu
2. Select Gaming
3. Select Captures from the left
4. Turn of Background Recording from there

Terminate useless heavy applications running in the background

If you have heavy applications running in the background, then there is a chance that those stutters are being caused due to some applications eating up a lot of resources. Just open your Task Manager, select the Processes tab and click on CPU. Make sure the arrow beside it is facing downwards.

Doing this will pull the resource hungry applications on top. Look for the processes that are useless, and yet they are consuming a hefty chunk of the CPU. Right click on them and click on “End Task”.

Tweak Settings

This is the first thing you should do as soon as to start the game and get access to the Settings menu. This is something that I do personally, and I highly recommend that every PC game should do this. I know a lot of people still don’t pay attention to the settings in games. But trust me, they should. This is the easiest method to squeeze out a few extra FPS and performance from any gaming title.

There is a huge chance that there isn’t any issue with your game at all. And the lag is being caused by the Settings of the game, set too High.

• Window Mode: Fullscreen
• Screen Resolution: 1920×1080
• Anti-Aliasing: TAA
  
• Motion Blur: Off
• Chromatic Aberration: Off
• Adaptive FX Quality: On
• Field of View: 100
• VSync: Off
• Limit FPS: Off
• Post Processing Quality: High
• Texture Quality: Medium
• Effects Quality: Medium
• Shadow Quality: Medium
• Foliage Quality: High
• HDR: Off
• Graphics API: DirectX 12
• Sharpening: FidelityFX

If you want an extremely detailed guide on these settings, then I would suggest that you follow my Settings Guide. You will definitely find what you are looking for.

Update (10/13/2021)

The final version has different settings from the beta. You can find the list of updated settings by click on the “Settings Guide” link above.

Tip for Gaming Laptop Users

If you are using a laptop that has a dedicated Nvidia GPU, then make sure that your laptop is using the dedicated GPU and not the integrated one.

To do that, just open Nvidia Control Panel, click on Manage 3D Settings and set ‘Preferred graphics processor’ to ‘High-performance Nvidia processor’. Restart your system.

Limit your FPS

Apparently, Back 4 Blood is causing high GPU usage for many people. As the result, GPUs are overheating for a lot of users. If your GPU overheats, it will start throttling. As a result, you will experience heavy stutters. If you check my video, where I am running Back 4 Blood on a Ryzen 5 5600x and RTX 2060, you will notice that the GPU usage is constantly hovering around 99%:

Though the developers have recommended only a GTX 970 for the game, it is making the RTX 2060 run quite hot, actually. I went ahead and capped my fps to 100 later and the usage dropped to 70%, causing my GPU temperature to drop to 70s.

Just use any application to track your GPU temperature. You can use Nvidia Performance Overlay, if you use GeForce Experience. Play the game for 30 minutes with ‘Limit FPS’ set to ‘Off’ and see what temperature your GPU is running at. If it is running too hot, then it is best to cap the FPS at 60 (Maybe a bit higher on a 144hz monitor). It is better to be safe than sorry.

Nvidia and AMD Control Panel tweaks

Nvidia GPU users, tweak the following settings:

• Image Sharpening : Off
• Threaded Optimization : On
• Power Management : Prefer Maximum Performance
• Low Latency Mode : Off
• Vertical sync : Off
• Texture filtering – Quality : Performance

AMD users can also do something similar on their control panels:

• Disable Radeon Anti-Lag, Boost, Anisotropic Filtering and Frame Rate Target Control
• Turn off Image Sharpening, Morphological Filtering, V-sync, Maximum Tessellation Level, OpenGL Triple Buffering and Radeon Chill.
• Set Tessellation Mode and Shader Cache to “AMD Optimized” and Anti-Aliasing Mode and Anti-aliasing Method to “Use Application settings” and “Multi-sampling” respectively
• Set Texture Filtering Quality to “Performance” and GPU Workload “Graphics”
• Finally, just enable Surface Format Optimization.

Turn off Overlays please

Disable every single overlay that you have on right now. Overlays from applications like Discord, Nvidia GeForce Experience, Steam, etc., are known to cause issues in games. So disable all of them.

I am going to write another separate article, specifically highlighting the lag that is present in the game. Now, when I say ‘lag’, I mean connection lag and not fps lag. Until then, follow the steps given below:

• Do a quick internet speed test and make sure that everything is fine from your end
• To make sure that you are not getting losses, press Windows + R on your keyboard, paste this inside the box: ping google.com -t
• Press enter and see whether you are getting any ‘request timed out‘ or not. If you are, then your connection is definitely not stable
• Also, make sure that your latency is not too high (the number after ‘time=’)
• Close browsers or applications running in the background that might be eating up a lot of bandwidth (If you want to know how to find them, let me know in the comment section)

If you are using Discord and while playing this game. Do this:

1. Launch Discord
2. Go to User Setting
3. Click on Voice & Video from the left sidebar
4. Scroll down to Advanced section
5. Disable “Enable Quality of Service High Packet Priority”
6. Restart Discord

Try these for now and let me know in the comment section below whether your issues got fixed or not.

If you think this guide has helped you, then let us know in the comment section below. And for more Back 4 Blood guides, keep an eye on Frondtech. We will be covering every single technical issue of the game on the launch day. Good luck!

That’s all folks!

Last Updated on April 12, 2022

Shoaib

Shoaib, 30, is a simple guy who loves to play video games, and enjoys new cuisines sporadically. He has been gaming since he was 7 years old, and with an experience of 22 years, under his belt, there is not a single AAA game in this world, that he hasn’t played. Despite being a MBA Graduate he decided to follow his passion. And because of his love for gaming, Frondtech came into existence.