Introduction
Clair Obscur Expedition 33 is one of the most visually stunning RPGs of 2025, and for good reason. Built on Unreal Engine 5 by Sandfall Interactive, a debut studio formed largely by former Ubisoft developers, the game delivers breathtaking environments, cinematic lighting, and particle-heavy combat sequences that push modern hardware to its limits.
The good news is that unlike many UE5 titles, Expedition 33 is surprisingly well-optimized at its core. With the right PC settings, you can achieve smooth, high-FPS gameplay without gutting the visuals that make this game so special. Whether you are running a budget GPU or a high-end rig, this guide covers everything you need to get the best possible experience.
If you want to learn more about the studio behind this game, check out our deep dive on Clair Obscur Expedition 33’s developer approach and what makes Sandfall Interactive’s design philosophy so unique.
System Requirements
Before touching any settings, you need to know where your hardware stands.
Minimum Requirements (1080p, 30 FPS, Low Settings)
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K / AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
- RAM: 8 GB
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB / AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT 6 GB / Intel Arc A380 6 GB
- Storage: 55 GB SSD (required — HDD is not supported)
- DirectX: Version 12
Recommended Requirements (1080p, 60 FPS, High Settings)
- OS: Windows 11 64-bit
- CPU: Intel Core i7-12700K / AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
- RAM: 16 GB
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB / AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT 16 GB
- Storage: 55 GB SSD
- DirectX: Version 12
The biggest takeaway here is that the game is almost entirely GPU-bound. Your CPU matters relatively little — even a six-core processor from 2017 meets the minimum bar. If you have at least 6 GB of VRAM, you can run this game. The question is how well.
General Graphics Settings
Before diving into the advanced rendering options, start with these foundational settings. You will find them under the General tab in the Graphics menu.
Display Mode: Set this to Fullscreen (not Borderless Windowed). Fullscreen mode gives your GPU exclusive access to your monitor, reducing latency and improving frame pacing. Borderless Windowed is convenient but costs a small but real performance penalty.
Resolution: Set to your native monitor resolution. Do not run at a lower resolution here — upscaling handles that job more efficiently through the dedicated upscaling tools.
Frame Rate Cap: Set a cap slightly above your monitor’s refresh rate — for a 60Hz monitor, cap at 60 FPS. Uncapped frames waste GPU resources and cause unnecessary heat and power consumption without any visible benefit.
V-Sync: Turn off V-Sync. It introduces input lag and frame pacing issues. If you experience screen tearing, use your GPU driver’s Fast Sync (Nvidia) or Enhanced Sync (AMD) instead.
Motion Blur: Off. Motion blur adds a distracting smear during movement and combat without any performance benefit. Most players prefer a cleaner image.
Film Grain: Off. Film grain reduces perceived image sharpness and offers no FPS gain. Disabling it makes the visuals cleaner and crisper.
Chromatic Aberration: Off. This edge-fringing effect is purely stylistic and slightly blurs the image. Disabling it is a free visual improvement.
Vignette: Off. The darkened screen edges are a cinematic artistic choice, but most players prefer the full image for gameplay purposes.
Camera Shake and Camera Movement: If you are prone to motion sickness or experience eye strain during combat, disable both of these under the Accessibility tab. They have no impact on performance but make a significant difference in comfort.
Best Rendering Settings for Maximum FPS
The Rendering tab is where most of your performance gains come from. This is the most important section of the guide. The settings below are optimized to deliver the best balance between visual quality and frame rate across mid-range and high-end hardware.
Anti-Aliasing: High The Epic preset produces very similar results to High but at a 4% performance cost. High is the sweet spot — good image stability with minimal overhead.
Shadows: High This is the single most impactful setting in the game. Epic-quality shadows reduce frame rates by up to 15% due to the game’s use of Unreal Engine 5’s Virtual Shadow Maps. High reduces shadow map resolution slightly but delivers a major performance improvement of around 8%. Medium drastically reduces shadow and penumbra quality and is not recommended unless you are on very low-end hardware. Avoid Low — shadows become blurry blobs that hurt immersion.
Global Illumination: High The game uses Lumen Global Illumination, UE5’s real-time lighting system. Epic produces the most detailed ambient shadows, including on fine geometry like foliage and cracks, but it runs about 4% slower than High. High removes shadow detail from finer geometry but maintains the core lighting quality. Medium reduces GI intensity and range, while Low appears to disable Lumen entirely in favor of a much simpler distance field ambient occlusion system.
Reflections: High Set to High for a good reflection quality without the overhead of Epic. This particularly affects water surfaces, metallic armor, and glossy floors throughout the game.
Post-Processing: Medium Post-processing covers bloom, lens flares, and depth of field effects. Medium retains most of the cinematic quality while saving a meaningful amount of GPU budget.
Textures: High or Epic Texture quality has a relatively small impact on FPS but a large impact on VRAM. At 4K on Epic, the game uses up to 10 GB of VRAM. At 1440p it uses around 9 GB, and at 1080p around 8 GB. Lowering texture quality can reduce VRAM usage by 1–2 GB, which matters significantly for GPUs with 8 GB or less. If you have 10–12 GB of VRAM, keep textures at Epic or High. If you have 6–8 GB, set textures to Medium.
Visual Effects: High Visual effects govern the particle systems during combat — spells, explosions, and ability activations. This is where UE5 particle complexity is most visible in Expedition 33. High gives excellent quality. Epic adds marginal improvement at a noticeable cost during heavy combat scenes.
Foliage: Medium Foliage density and quality have a notable impact on GPU performance outdoors. Medium reduces foliage draw distance slightly but makes a meaningful FPS difference, especially in the game’s open landscape areas.
Shading: High Shading quality affects how surfaces respond to lighting. High is an excellent balance. Epic adds very minor improvements that are hard to notice during gameplay.
Upscaling Settings: DLSS, XeSS, and TSR
Upscaling is one of the most powerful performance tools in Expedition 33 and should be used on almost every system.
The game supports three upscaling technologies: NVIDIA DLSS 3.7, Intel XeSS 2, and Epic’s Temporal Super Resolution (TSR).
NVIDIA GPU owners: Use DLSS. It produces the best image quality among the three options. Quality mode runs about 13% faster than native rendering. Performance mode pushes that to around 40% faster. For most 1080p and 1440p gaming, DLSS Quality is the recommended sweet spot. You can also update to DLSS 4 manually using guides available online, which improves image stability further.
AMD GPU owners: Use XeSS 2. It delivers solid upscaling quality across AMD hardware and is a significant upgrade over the original XeSS. Balanced or Quality mode is recommended.
All other GPUs / Intel Arc: Use TSR (Temporal Super Resolution). This is Epic’s native UE5 upscaler and requires no specific hardware. Quality or Balanced mode provides a clean image with a solid FPS gain.
Upscaling also helps with VRAM — enabling it can shave several hundred megabytes off memory usage, which matters on GPUs with limited VRAM.
Windows & System-Level Optimizations
Getting the best performance from Expedition 33 is not just about in-game settings. These Windows and driver-level tweaks can make a real difference.
Enable Resizable BAR (ReBAR): This BIOS setting allows the CPU to access the GPU’s full VRAM at once instead of in chunks. Most modern GPUs and motherboards support it. Check your BIOS settings and enable it if available. It can improve GPU performance in UE5 games noticeably.
Enable Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS): Found in Windows Settings > Display > Graphics Settings, HAGS allows the GPU to manage its own memory more efficiently and reduces CPU overhead. Enable it for a small but consistent performance improvement.
Windows Power Plan: Set to High Performance. This prevents your CPU from throttling during intense combat sequences.
GPU Power Management Mode: In your Nvidia or AMD control panel, set power management mode to Prefer Maximum Performance. This stops the GPU from downclocking at unexpected moments.
Enable Game Mode: Windows Game Mode prioritizes system resources for the active game and reduces background process interference. It is found in Windows Settings > Gaming > Game Mode.
GPU Drivers: Keep your drivers updated but do not blindly install the newest release. Some early driver versions for 50-series Nvidia cards caused crashes and black screens in Expedition 33. If you experience instability after a driver update, roll back to the previous stable version. If you are on a 50-series card experiencing crashes, try disabling DLSS or switching to TSR as a first diagnostic step.
Recommended Settings by Hardware Tier
Low-End (GTX 1060 / RX 5600 XT / 8 GB RAM) Use the Low preset as a starting point. Enable XeSS or TSR on Performance mode. Set Textures to Medium to stay within VRAM limits. Set Shadows to Medium or High. Expect 30–45 FPS at 1080p. The game is playable but will require compromises on visual quality.
Mid-Range (RTX 3060 / RX 6700 XT / 16 GB RAM) Use the settings in this guide as written. With DLSS Quality or XeSS Balanced enabled, an RTX 3060 can average around 60 FPS at 1080p. An RTX 3060 Ti will push comfortably past that.
High-End (RTX 4070 / RX 7800 XT / 16–32 GB RAM) Use the recommended rendering settings with DLSS Quality. You can push to 1440p with consistent 60+ FPS. Testing on an RTX 4070 showed an average of 66.6 FPS with 1% lows of 47.5 FPS at the optimized settings.
Ultra (RTX 4080 / 4090 / RX 7900 XTX) You can run Epic preset at 1440p or push to 4K with DLSS Performance mode. At 4K Epic on an RTX 4090, the game averages around 53 FPS with DLAA. Enabling DLSS Performance at 4K will push that into the 70–80 FPS range.
Performance by Resolution Overview
To give a clear picture of what to expect without upscaling on the Epic preset:
- 1080p Epic: ~83 FPS average (high-end GPU)
- 1440p Epic: ~64 FPS average
- 4K Epic: ~53 FPS average
These numbers drop significantly on mid-range hardware, which is why upscaling is so valuable in this game. Using DLSS or XeSS effectively moves the performance of each resolution tier up by one level.
Common Issues and Fixes
Stuttering during combat: This is a known issue related to shader compilation and UE5 streaming. Running the game at least once through a combat-heavy area before your first proper session lets shaders pre-compile. Several community mods on Nexus Mods and the Steam Workshop also address this by optimizing CPU and GPU streaming behavior. The “Optimized Tweaks COE33” mod in particular is well-regarded for reducing stutter without sacrificing visual quality.
30 FPS cap during cutscenes: Expedition 33 originally capped cutscenes at 30 FPS. A fix mod available on Nexus Mods removes this cap and also addresses ultrawide monitor issues. This is highly recommended if you play on a high-refresh monitor.
Black screens and crashes on Nvidia 50-series: Update to the latest stable Nvidia driver. If crashes persist, disable DLSS and test with TSR. This was primarily a driver-level issue and has been largely resolved in recent driver releases.
VRAM overload artifacts: If you see texture pop-in or rendering artifacts, your GPU is hitting its VRAM ceiling. Lower Textures to Medium and disable any upscaling quality above Balanced to reduce memory usage.
A Note on the Game’s Controversial Elements
While Expedition 33 has been widely celebrated for its artistic vision and storytelling, it has not been without controversy. The game attracted significant debate around the use of AI-generated assets during development. If you want to understand that discussion in full context, our article on the Clair Obscur Expedition 33 AI controversy explained breaks down exactly what was alleged, what Sandfall Interactive said in response, and why it matters for the broader conversation around AI in game development.
Final Thoughts
Clair Obscur Expedition 33 is one of the best-optimized UE5 games released to date. A mid-range GPU from the last few years can run it at a smooth 60 FPS with the right settings, and high-end hardware can push it to genuinely stunning visual fidelity.
The key adjustments that matter most are: dropping Shadows from Epic to High, enabling upscaling (DLSS, XeSS, or TSR), setting Textures according to your VRAM budget, and applying the Windows-level tweaks for HAGS and ReBAR. Those five changes alone will transform the performance of most systems without meaningfully changing how good the game looks.
Apply these settings, spend a few minutes in Training or an early area to allow shaders to compile, and you will be ready to experience Expedition 33 the way it was meant to be played.