Your gears are metal. Your cyborg arm is crying out in phantom pain. You ve got a great PC port loaded up on Steam. That s it: you re ready for Metal Gear Solid 5. Aren t you?
Sure, you could start playing Metal Gear Solid 5 right now. Or maybe you re already 30 hours deep, and pleased with how well MGS5 performs on two year-old PC hardware. But if you love to tweak every setting for the best possible performance, there are a few things you can do to make Metal Gear Solid 5 look even better. Or, if you re running on weaker or older hardware, we ll tell you what to tweak for better performance. If that's the advice you're after, go ahead and skip to page two right now.
Amping up the graphics
MGS5 runs well. Really well. So well, that if you have a new-ish graphics card like a GTX 970, running it at 1080p, 60fps won t even max out your card s performance. Let s push it to the limit.
Downsample with Nvidia GeForce Experience
You can use that leftover GPU muscle to up your image quality by downsampling: running the game at a higher resolution, then crunching it down to your monitor res.
Our go-to utility GeDoSaTo is out, as it only works for DX9 games, currently. But Nvidia card owners can easily downsample through the GeForce Experience software by enabling Nvidia s DSR. Go to the Games tab, select MGS5, and click the little wrench icon next to Optimize. Set DSR to your desired resolution—for our 1080p screen Nvidia suggested 2715x1527—and hit apply.
Boot up the game and check out performance. If your framerate suffers, you can always dial back to native resolution... or overclock your graphics card for more juice.
Downsample with the AMD Control Panel
To use AMD s Virtual Super Resolution downsampling with a compatible GPU, open the AMD Control Panel and navigate to the My Digital Flat Panels > Properties page. Select your monitor and check the Enable virtual super resolution button and hit apply.
Now right-click on your desktop and open up the resolution menu in the control panel. You should be able to select a higher resolution to downsample from. Apply that resolution. When you boot up MGS5, make sure it s set to that same resolution. Enjoy your downsampled image!
Enable HBAO+ in the Nvidia Control Panel
Ambient occlusion adds shadowing around the edges of 3D objects, and generally adds a great sense of depth and solidity to game worlds. MGS5 has high and extra high ambient occlusion options, but you can inject an even better ambient occlusion solution through the Nvidia Control Panel, if you have an Nvidia graphics card. It s Nvidia s HBAO+.
Nvidia has some comparison widgets of HBAO+ compared to no ambient occlusion and the game s extra high setting.
No AO vs. HBAO+: look at how flatter and more plasticky the world looks with no AO.
Extra high AO vs. HBAO+: Notice how the HBAO+ shadows are overall a bit lighter and much cleaner. The lift cart near the left side of the screen is the most obvious example, where extra high goes overboard.
To enable HBAO+, open the Nvidia Control Panel and go to the Manage 3D settings page. Switch to the Program settings tab to apply settings specifically for Metal Gear. You ll probably need to click the add button next to the drop-down box to add MGS5 to this list. Once it s there, highlight the Ambient Occlusion box and change the setting to Quality before hitting save.
Remember to update to Nvidia s WHQL driver for MGS5 if you haven t already done so. Now boot up the game and go into its graphic settings. Make sure to disable ambient occlusion in-game so that the Nvidia Control Panel setting applies properly.
Keep in mind this will give you an even greater performance hit than the extra high setting, which may drop your framerate below 60 fps.
On the next page: a few tweaks to improve performance in MGS5.
Improving performance for that rock solid 60
If your hardware is a few years old, or if you re perhaps struggling to maintain a perfect 60 fps at 1440p, some settings are worth tweaking more than others. Here are two settings you should change in Metal Gear's graphics options menu to see the biggest performance difference.
Effects
As Nvidia points out in its extensive performance guide, the Extra High Effects setting can cause the framerate to tank at higher resolutions like 1440p and especially 4K. At 1080p, this setting may not dramatically affect your framerate, so it s worth trying it at extra high from the start. But if your framerate tends to take a nosedive when explosions stop popping off and the sky is filled with smoke, turn this setting down to High for much better performance.
Post-processing
You likely don t want to turn post-processing settings down below the High threshold, as that s required for anti-aliasing and depth of field to work, even if DoF is enabled separately. Extra High again will significantly lower performance to improve the post-processing effects.
Smoothing out frame timing
Even if your game is able to keep up a solid 60 fps, the way those frames are rendered could still be uneven thanks to poor frame timing. You can read more about frame timing in our Witcher 3 guide The Alchemy of Smoothness, and we re going to offer the same advice here that we did then: use RivaTuner to ensure the smoothest possible performance.
Download RTSS RivaTuner and add the MGS5 executable if it s not automatically detected. Install it and run the program; it ll show up in your system tray. Open it up and click on the wrench in the top-right corner, and make sure to set compatibility to 64-bit, and that Enable 64-bit applications is checked. Then click OK.
The executable we care about is named mgsvtpp.exe and you can find it in your Steam install directory. Add it to RTSS by clicking the + icon in the bottom-left corner. Change the Framerate limit box from 0 to 60, assuming you have a 60Hz monitor, and hit enter.
Now boot up Metal Gear. In the graphics options, disable V-Sync and the automatic framerate limit. This will ensure RTSS applies its own framerate limiter to the game. Run in borderless fullscreen and marvel at how smoothly you can Fulton bears into the atmosphere.
What s still to come?
Mods. At least, we hope so—Ground Zeroes had some light modding that improved anti-aliasing and made some other graphical tweaks. Metal Gear Solid V is still too fresh for those changes to have arrived yet, and some small changes to the engine since Ground Zeroes means the technology isn t totally identical. But that shouldn t stop modders from working their magic in the weeks to come.