If you’re GPU-bound at a resolution you want to keep, that’s when an upgrade earns its money — I’ll flag the only change I made and reproduce the rest verbatim. Here is the edited article:

Set Mirror Quality to Mid, Mirror Resolution to Low, and Reflection Quality to Mid before you touch anything else. Those three sliders are where most of your frames are going in Assetto Corsa Competizione, and almost nobody mentions them because they’re buried under the settings everyone argues about instead. Drop them, run a night race at Spa with a full grid, and watch your 1% lows climb out of the gutter. That’s the fix for maybe 70% of people who type this search in at midnight wondering why a game from 2019 runs like it’s mining crypto in the background.

Now the caveat, because I’m not going to pretend a slider fixes a hardware problem. If you’re on a GTX 1060 or a laptop 3050 trying to hold 60fps at 1440p with rain and 30 cars, no config on earth saves you. ACC is built on Unreal Engine 4, and Kunos made choices that punish weak GPUs harder than iRacing or rFactor 2 ever will. But before you go buy a graphics card, spend twenty minutes with the settings below. I’ve watched people upgrade from a perfectly good RTX 4060 because they never turned Mirror Resolution down, and that’s just money set on fire.

Why ACC runs the way it does

The engine matters here. iRacing and rF2 use older, lighter renderers that lean on your CPU and stay flat. ACC uses UE4 with dynamic time of day, volumetric-ish clouds, wet track reflections, and a lighting model that recalculates constantly as the sun moves. When people say “ACC runs bad,” what they mean is that it runs variably bad. You’ll cruise at 110fps in a dry afternoon practice session, then the race starts, it’s 6pm with clouds rolling in, and you’re at 48fps into T1 with 25 cars on screen. The average framerate number in benchmarks lies to you. What you care about is the worst-case: night, rain, full grid, lap one. Tune for that or don’t bother.

The second thing to understand is that ACC has two bottlenecks and they hit at different moments. GPU load spikes with visual complexity (reflections, shadows, mirrors, resolution). CPU load spikes with car count, and it’s worst at race starts when the physics and AI are all screaming at once. A faster GPU does nothing for a race-start stutter caused by a grid of 30 opponents on an older CPU. Knowing which one is killing you is half the battle, and most people never check.

The settings that actually cost you frames

Here’s the honest ranking, roughly in order of frames-per-dollar-of-visual-quality. I’ll flag the ones worth keeping.

Mirror Quality and Mirror Resolution. The single biggest hidden cost in the game. ACC renders your mirrors as extra viewports, and at High resolution it’s basically drawing the scene multiple times. Mid quality with Low resolution looks totally fine at racing speed and can hand you 15-25% more frames on its own. You are not inspecting the reflection of the car behind you for texture detail. You want to know it’s there and roughly how close.

Reflection Quality. This controls how the car body and wet track reflect the world, and how often those reflections update. Static is ugly and disorienting on a moving car. Mid is the sweet spot. High and Max update reflections far more aggressively and cost a fortune for something you notice for about half a second. Leave it at Mid unless you’re screenshot-hunting.

Shadows. Big hit, and unlike mirrors, shadows you actually see. Medium is the floor before things start looking like a PS3 game. If you’re desperate, drop to Low and add a touch of contrast, but I’d sacrifice mirror and reflection quality first, twice over, before I gave up shadow detail. Contact Shadows can go off with almost no visual loss and a small gain.

Resolution Scale. This is the nuclear option in both directions. Below 100% the whole image goes soft and shimmery because ACC’s temporal AA needs pixels to work with. Above 100% (say 110-120%) you’re supersampling, which cleans the image up beautifully and destroys your framerate. If you’re GPU-limited, sit at exactly 100% and fix your frames elsewhere. Don’t run 90% thinking you’re clever; the visual cost is worse than turning three other sliders down.

View Distance and Foliage. View Distance you can pull back to around 60-70% without noticing on most tracks. Foliage is a bigger deal at green tracks like the Nordschleife or Mount Panorama and near-free at, say, Misano. Set it by track, not globally, if you care.

Anti-Aliasing. ACC uses temporal AA and there’s no DLSS, whatever a random forum post from 2021 told you. Kunos never added it. You get TAA and the resolution scale slider, and that’s your lot. TAA on, resolution at 100%, and a light Sharpening filter (I run it around 30-40%) gets rid of the vaseline-smeared look TAA is famous for. That sharpen slider is one of the most underused settings in the game.

Effects, Materials, Post Processing. Middling cost, keep them at High or Medium. Post Processing controls bloom and the dirty-sun effect; drop it to Medium if you find the lens flare annoying in low sun, which, driving into a sunset at Barcelona, you will.

A starting config that just works

If you want numbers to type in and go race, here’s what I’d run for a mid-range card at 1440p aiming for a locked 90-120fps even in the ugly conditions:

Cap your framerate. Seriously. Set a frame limit in-game or through your driver a few frames below what your monitor can do, or below whatever your worst-case scenario holds, so the game isn’t constantly lurching between 140 and 55. A steady 90 feels far better to drive than a spiky 120. Consistency is what your hands actually read through the wheel, and ACC’s variability is exactly what makes it feel bad even when the average is fine.

Triples and VR: a different, harder problem

Everything above assumes a single screen. Run triple monitors and you’ve tripled the horizontal resolution the GPU is pushing, and ACC does not scale gracefully. Triple 1440p in ACC is genuinely demanding, more than most people expect, and you’ll want to be conservative with mirrors (you have real side vision anyway on triples, so you can crank the in-car mirror resolution right down and lean on your peripheral screens).

VR is the brutal one. ACC in VR is one of the hardest things you can ask a PC to do in this hobby, harder than iRacing or Automobilista 2 in VR by a clear margin. The r/simracing and ACC Discord threads about VR performance are a graveyard of people with high-end cards still fighting reprojection. If you’re serious about ACC in a headset, you need a RTX 4070 Ti Super or a RTX 4080 as a realistic floor, you’ll be living in the resolution and pixel-density settings, and you should turn mirrors down hard because the headset already shows you a wide view. Anyone telling you a 4060 does ACC VR comfortably is either very tolerant of jank or running an empty track in daylight.

When it’s genuinely your GPU

So how do you tell a settings problem from a hardware problem? Open the performance overlay (RTSS, or your driver’s built-in one) and watch GPU utilization during a bad moment. Pinned at 97-99% with low frames means you’re GPU-bound and a faster card helps. GPU sitting at 70% while frames tank at the race start means it’s your CPU choking on the grid, and no graphics card fixes that. This distinction saves people hundreds of dollars and it takes ninety seconds to check.

If you’re GPU-bound at a resolution you want to keep, that’s when an upgrade earns its money. For 1080p high-refresh, a RTX 4060 is plenty and I wouldn’t spend more. For 1440p with the config above holding steady in the rain, a RTX 4070 Super is the card I’d point most people at; it’s the sensible middle of the range and it’ll do triples-lite too. Above that you’re paying for VR or triple 1440p ultra, and the jump from a 4070 Super to a 4080 is real but it is not cheap, and for a single 1440p monitor it’s overkill you’ll never see.

One more thing people forget: driver and Windows fullscreen. Make sure ACC is running in actual exclusive-ish fullscreen and that Windows Game Mode isn’t fighting it. And update your GPU driver, but don’t expect miracles. The “new driver doubled my ACC FPS” posts are almost always someone who also changed five settings at once.

FAQ

Does ACC support DLSS or FSR? No native DLSS. Kunos never implemented it. You get TAA plus the resolution scale slider, and that’s the whole toolkit. FSR can be forced at a driver level on some setups but it looks rough in a game this shimmery, and I wouldn’t rely on it. Plan your settings around the tools the game actually ships with.

Why does my FPS drop so hard at night and in the rain? Because both add expensive lighting work on top of the normal scene. Night means dozens of dynamic light sources (headlights, brake lights, track lighting) all casting and reflecting. Rain adds wet reflections across the whole track surface. Stack them with a full grid and you’ve hit ACC’s worst case simultaneously. Tune your settings for that scenario, not for a sunny hotlap, and cap your frames so the transition doesn’t feel like a gut punch.

Is 32GB of RAM needed for ACC? 16GB runs it fine. ACC isn’t especially memory-hungry compared to modern AAA games. If you’re multitasking heavily (Discord, a stream, SimHub, a browser full of setup tabs) then 32GB gives you breathing room, but don’t buy RAM expecting an FPS jump. It won’t come. Your money does more in the GPU or a faster CPU for grid-related stutter.

Before you spend anything

Do this first: turn Mirror Resolution to Low, Reflection Quality to Mid, cap your framerate, and run one wet night race with a full grid. If that gets you a steady, drivable framerate, you’re done, and you just saved several hundred dollars. If your GPU is pinned at 99% and it’s still ugly, check that you actually want the resolution you’re running at before you shop. And if the stutter only ever happens on lap one at the race start while your GPU sits half-idle, don’t look at graphics cards at all. That’s your CPU, and that’s a different night’s worth of research.