Ghost of Tsushima PC optimization guide: Best settings for optimal performance

Ghost of Tsushima on PC is easily one of the best ports from Nixxes Software, right alongside their previous offerings like Marvel's Spider-Man, Horizon Forbidden West, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. While the PC port of Sucker Punch Productions' open-world samurai game is quite good, it's also pretty demanding, especially on the GPU front.

Being one of the most visually impressive games on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, it's not surprising that some players might find it a bit troublesome to get Ghost of Tsushima running on their PCs at a stable framerate, without compromising the visuals.

Thankfully, similar to other PlayStation PC ports from Nixxes, Ghost of Tsushima offers plenty of graphics and display options to tweak and experiment with in order to get the best balance between performance and visuals. Here's a comprehensive optimization guide for Ghost of Tsushima PC, including the best settings to use for optimal performance.

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Optimized settings for Ghost of Tsushima on PC

Ghost of Tsushima on PC is not as demanding as something like The Last of Us Part 1, or Dragon's Dogma 2. However, it still boasts some fairly hefty system requirements with an RTX 2060 being recommended for 1080 medium settings for 60fps. Thankfully, the game is pretty well optimized on PC and there are also plenty of options for you to tweak.

Recommended display settings (Image via Sony Interactive Entertainment)

During my time testing the game on a Ryzen 5 5600X, RTX 4070, 16GB DDR4 RAM system, with the game being installed on a Gen-4 NVMe SSD, I found a few settings that impacted performance the most. I also tested the game on another PC with the same CPU and memory configuration but with an RX6600 GPU.

The same settings that I found were impacting performance on the RTX 4070 PC, also affected the RX6600 system. These settings are - Texture Quality, Shadow Quality, Level of Detail, and Ambient Occlusion. Do note that there seems to be a bug in the game right now with Frame-generation that can cause crashes.

Until the bug is fixed, I recommend not using Frame-generation. That being said, here are the optimized settings I used to get a stable 60+fps at native 1080p, with TAA on RX6600 and DLAA on RTX 4070:

• Preset: Custom
• Motion Blur Strength: Default
• Field of View: Default
• Texture Quality: High (Go with Medium if you have less than 8GB VRAM)
• Texture Filtering: 16x Anisotropic
• Shadow Quality: Medium
• Level of Detail: High
• Terrain Detail: High
• Volumetric Fog: Medium
• Depth of Field: High
• Screen Space Reflections: High
• Screen Space Shadows: High
• Ambient Occlusion: SSAO Performance
• Bloom: On
• Vignette: Off
• Water Caustics: On

Recommended graphics settings (Image via Sony Interactive Entertainment)

I also highly recommend using the Exclusive Fullscreen option over Borderless or Fullscreen. Unless you're frequently using "alt-tab" to switch between multiple apps, there's no point in using Borderless.