Start from the published requirements
The official minimum is Windows 10 64-bit with 12 GB of RAM, an Intel i7-4770 or Ryzen 5 1400, a GTX 1060 or RX 580, and DirectX 12. The recommended configuration is 16 GB of RAM, an i7-9700 or Ryzen 5 3600, and an RTX 2070 or RX 5700 XT. An SSD is described as strongly recommended rather than required, and that recommendation is worth taking more literally than usual — a fair share of the stutter people report on otherwise capable machines is storage-bound rather than GPU-bound.
The 12 GB minimum is the line most people are actually near. If you are on 16 GB with a browser, a voice client and an overlay running, the game is competing for memory with everything else, and closing the browser before a session fixes more problems than any in-game setting will.
Everything below separates two very different classes of advice. The requirements above and the settings in the next section come from the developers. The workarounds later in the article come from players and are labelled as such — they are not endorsed by anyone at the studio, and some of them involve turning off Windows security features.
The developer's own performance settings
On 3 August the developers posted a short list of settings to change if the game runs poorly, and it is the most reliable performance advice available because it comes from the people who built the renderer. Five items: turn ray tracing off, switch DLSS to FSR, turn NVIDIA Smooth Motion off, lower the overall image quality preset, and cap your frame rate at 60 or 120.
Ray tracing is the first thing to try and usually the largest single change. The reason it is worth doing even on a card that nominally supports it is that this game's worst frame behaviour is not a low average — it is a spike at the wrong moment, and lighting cost is the community's prime suspect for those spikes alongside global illumination. A steady 70 frames beats an average of 110 that drops to 30 while another hunter is closing on you.
The frame cap deserves the same reframing. Capping is not about the number on screen; it is about giving the renderer headroom so a sudden load does not push it off a cliff. Pick 60 if you are near the minimum specification and 120 if you are comfortably above it, and set the cap in the game rather than in a third-party overlay so it applies during loading and shader work as well.
The DLSS-to-FSR instruction is the one that surprises NVIDIA owners, since it means using the vendor-neutral upscaler on a card that has the vendor's own. Take it at face value — it was given specifically as a fix for this build, not as general advice.
Where the frame spikes actually happen
Players consistently report that frame problems concentrate in three-versus-three player fights rather than in ordinary exploration or monster combat, and that this holds even on hardware well past the recommended tier. That is a community observation across many reports rather than an acknowledged issue, but the pattern is consistent enough to plan around.
The practical response is to set your settings for the worst moment rather than the average one. Load into a busy area, and if the frame rate is comfortable there but you have never tested it under player pressure, you have not tested it. Dropping one preset step is cheap insurance for the thirty seconds of a raid that actually decide whether you keep your loot.
If your hardware is genuinely marginal, weight your decisions towards runs you can complete quickly. Planning a short loop with a known exit matters more when a stutter can cost you a fight, and a run built around one objective has fewer chances to be ruined by a spike than a forty-minute sweep does.
Servers and the build your account downloads
Servers run in five countries: China, the United States, Germany, Singapore and Brazil. There is no Oceania server, and the developers were running a community vote on the subject from 4 August, so the situation there may change.
Server selection happens inside the game, on the map selection screen — you pick your region at the same moment you pick where you are raiding. That is worth knowing because a lot of players go looking for it in the settings menu and conclude it does not exist. Check it before you queue on the region maps, especially if you have been playing with friends elsewhere.
There is one hard restriction. Accounts registered in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands download the North American build, and that build can only reach North American servers. This is a build-level restriction tied to the account's registration region, not a setting, and the other regions are not visible from inside it. Community workarounds that switch which build you download circulate widely; they are not developer-endorsed, this site does not publish them, and using one puts you outside the supported configuration for a game that permanently bans accounts and devices for other categories of rule-breaking. If you and a friend are on opposite sides of that line, the honest answer today is that you cannot play together.
Cross-platform matchmaking is supported, and both PS5 and Xbox controllers work. One account note that catches people out: Steam Family Sharing is supported, but a cheating ban applies to both the borrower and the lender, so lending your library to someone you do not trust puts your own account at risk.
Crashes, and the one workaround players have found
Some players — concentrated on AMD systems — report a blue screen with KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE during the shader pre-compilation step at startup, before the game reaches a menu. This is not on any official issue list. The developers acknowledged on 5 August that they were reviewing crash dumps for it, which is confirmation that they are looking, not confirmation of a cause.
The workaround players report as effective is disabling Windows hardware-enforced stack protection, sometimes described as memory integrity, in the Windows Security settings. This is unofficial, it is not a fix from the developers, and it matters that you understand what it is: a Windows kernel security feature that exists to block a class of exploit. Turning it off to run a game is a trade, and the sensible version of that trade is to turn it back on when you are done playing rather than to leave it off permanently. If you are not comfortable with that, the supported option is to wait for a client patch and report the crash through the in-game reporting system so your dump reaches the pile they are reading.
Two lower-risk things to try first, since they cost nothing: let the shader pre-compilation step finish completely without alt-tabbing away from it, and verify the game files after any crash during that step. A partially completed shader cache is a common source of startup instability in any engine, and it is the cheapest thing to rule out.
What is already fixed, and what is still coming
The launch known-issue list is stale, and a lot of the troubleshooting advice circulating still repeats it. Twelve issues were published on the day before launch; the 30 July update closed all twelve of them along with three more, and shipped a small balance pass touching the Withered Knight's Polearm and Shield only. If you are reading a troubleshooting post written in that first week, check its date before you follow it — most of what it describes no longer happens.
One update is outstanding. A post on 1 August said a client update was coming the following week to address reported issues and improve build stability, and that it would also switch on Dried Flower Knot drops and open the Mist Lord in Einherjar Mode. That update had not shipped as of 5 August. If your issue is stability rather than configuration, that patch is the thing to watch for.
Between here and there, the reasonable posture is to report what you hit and to reduce what a crash can cost you. Do not carry gear you would be upset to lose on an evening when the client is misbehaving, and use zero-risk camp activity — Scavenger Squad expeditions in particular — to keep making progress on a night when raiding is not working. The camp planner shows what each building level unlocks.
What to do next
Make the developer's five settings changes first and test them in a real fight rather than in the menu; that resolves the majority of performance complaints on its own. Then check your server region on the map selection screen before your next session, because latency masquerading as lag is a common misdiagnosis.
If crashes have already cost you a run or two, rebuild with a kit you can afford to lose using the loadout planner, and read Path of Glory ranked before you opt into the ladder on an unstable client — a failed extraction is the only thing that takes points away, and no exception has been published for a run that ends because the game closed.