Fix low FPS

At a glance

Start with the driver

Vulkan 1.3 is delivered by your graphics driver, not by Windows, so an old driver is both the most common cause of poor performance and the easiest to rule out. Get the current one from your GPU maker's own site or app.

Do this before changing anything else. A driver update has fixed more reports than every other item on this page put together.

Then the build and the chip

Install the newest Vesper build. Early emulation improves unevenly, and a title that ran badly a month ago may have been addressed since.

Then check the title's chip on the dashboard. If it sits in Test, poor performance is the expected result and no configuration will change that — see Rise of the Ronin for what Test honestly means.

Then your machine

1. Move the game to an SSD, ideally NVMe. Streaming open worlds suffer most on a slow disk.
2. Close overlays, capture tools, and browser tabs. They compete for the same CPU and GPU.
3. Set Windows to its high-performance power plan, which matters especially on laptops.
4. Run at your display's native resolution and refresh rate rather than a scaled mode.
5. Check your RAM. Moving from 8 GB to 16 GB is the single most noticeable upgrade for long titles.

The part we will not dress up

Sometimes the answer is that the emulator is not fast enough yet for that title on that hardware. Vesper is early software, emulation is demanding, and we publish no resolution or frame-rate targets precisely because we cannot stand behind them.

If you have a current driver, the latest build, a Stable chip, and a machine at the recommended spec, and it still runs poorly, that is useful information rather than a misconfiguration. The honest expectation is that it improves with future builds.