Struggling with FPS drops and stuttering in Cronos: The New Dawn? Here are the best graphics settings and optimizations to improve performance on RTX 30/40 series GPUs.
Table of Contents
Overview
If you’ve just launched Cronos: The New Dawn and your frame rate tanks harder than the Orphans you fight, you’re not alone. Players with even high-end GPUs like the RTX 4080/5080 are reporting heavy FPS stuttering and poor optimization. The culprit? Unreal Engine 5’s demanding features and some questionable ray tracing defaults.
Here’s how to tweak your settings to stabilize performance without turning the game into a blurry mess.
Best Settings for Performance
1. DLSS > TAA
- Use DLSS (Quality) instead of native TAA.
- TAA causes the image to look overly soft and blurry. DLSS maintains clarity while boosting frames.
2. Disable Ray Tracing
- By default, the game has ray tracing enabled at almost every preset above “Low.”
- Turn RT Off completely — this alone can push your FPS from ~60 up to 80–140 on an RTX 3080.
3. Shadows & Shaders → Medium
- Setting both to Medium looks almost identical to High/Epic but gives a noticeable frame boost.
- Shaders on Epic are a big performance hog for no visual gain.
4. Frame Generation (Optional)
- If you’re on RTX 40/50 cards, enable DLSS Frame Generation.
- It won’t fix stutter caused by asset streaming, but it smooths the drops significantly.
Additional Tweaks
- Texture Quality: Leave on High — dropping it barely helps FPS.
- Foliage & Geometry: Set to Medium; reduces load in bigger outdoor areas.
- V-Sync: Turn off if you’re getting weird frametime spikes.
- Driver Update: Make sure you’re on the latest NVIDIA drivers (UE5 updates often tie into GPU patches).
Why Performance Tanks
UE5 games often bottleneck because of ray tracing overhead and poor CPU-GPU scaling. Even in dark, small environments with minimal physics or AI, the engine can hammer performance due to inefficient lighting calculations. That’s why you see the same FPS on Low vs Epic with RT on.
Bottom Line
- Turn off RT completely.
- Use DLSS Quality over TAA.
- Drop Shadows & Shaders to Medium.
With these changes, you’ll go from unstable 50–60 FPS to a much smoother 80–120 FPS depending on your rig. Until Bloober Team pushes a proper optimization patch, this is the best way to keep Cronos: The New Dawn playable.
