The Finals is built around destruction, and destruction is expensive. A building that comes down mid-fight is not a cutscene: every falling piece has to be updated and drawn on your PC, at the exact moment a cashout is being stolen. That is why the game can hold a high frame rate in an empty arena and fall over in the fights that matter.

This guide covers the destruction side, the lighting options that cost the most, Reflex and upscaling, what Easy Anti-Cheat looks for, Windows, the GPU driver and the network. The 60-second fix comes first.

The 60-second fix before you queue

• Turn on NVIDIA Reflex (On + Boost), or AMD Anti-Lag in the driver.
• Lower the global illumination setting to its cheapest option. It is one of the heaviest settings in the game.
• Use upscaling in Quality mode if your graphics card struggles, rather than dropping everything to low.
• Close the browser and anything recording. Destruction spikes are CPU spikes, and background work makes them deeper.

Why The Finals drops frames

Destruction is CPU work

When walls, floors and buildings break, your PC has to process and draw every piece that moves, on top of the fight itself. Much of that work lands on the processor. A CPU that is also running launchers, browsers and overlays has less room for it, and the drop is bigger.

Lighting is GPU work

The Finals uses advanced global illumination so that light changes as the arena is destroyed. The higher options look impressive and cost a lot of frame time. For competitive play, the cheaper option keeps the picture readable and the frame rate steadier.

Effects stack in cashout fights

Explosives, smoke, gas and fire often meet at the cashout. Effects quality matters most there, and barely at all when you are running between objectives.

In-game settings that actually matter

Setting	Recommended	Why
NVIDIA Reflex	On + Boost	Shortens the render queue.
Global illumination	The cheapest option	One of the heaviest settings in the game.
Upscaling (DLSS, FSR, XeSS)	Quality mode if the GPU is the limit	A cleaner image than lowering resolution yourself.
Frame generation	Off for competitive play	Raises the number, adds delay.
V-Sync and motion blur	Off	Delay and lost detail.
Effects and volumetric quality	Low or medium	Smoke and explosions cost the most in fights.
Texture quality	Within your VRAM	Memory, not frame time, until VRAM runs out.

Easy Anti-Cheat, and what is safe to change

The Finals uses Easy Anti-Cheat. It looks for programs that read or change the game's memory, inject code into it or modify its files. Windows power settings, driver options, network adapter settings and background services are ordinary configuration, a different category entirely.

Nobody can honestly promise a tool is invisible to an anti-cheat, so we do not. RIP Tweaks changes Windows and driver settings and does not touch the game's memory or files. More in is RIP Tweaks safe and will it get you banned.

Testing in the right place

An empty practice arena tells you very little about The Finals, because the expensive moments are destruction and crowded cashouts. Judge any change across a few real matches, and look at what happens to your frame times when a building comes down, not at the average while you walk around.

Windows is the real bottleneck

The Finals simulates destruction while you play, so a building coming down is a CPU spike, and anything else on the CPU makes that spike worse.

• Power plan and core parking. On a balanced plan the CPU drops its clocks and parks cores whenever it thinks it is idle, and waking them costs time at exactly the wrong moment.
• Background apps. Launchers, overlays, RGB tools and updaters each wake up on their own schedule. One is nothing. Twenty of them are a stutter every few seconds.
• Timer and scheduling. A coarse system timer makes the game wait longer for its turn, which shows up as uneven frame pacing rather than lower average FPS.
• Storage. A nearly full drive slows every asset load, and that is felt as a hitch the first time something new appears.

All of it can be done by hand if you know which services are safe to touch and how to undo them. We wrote that route up in how to increase FPS on Windows 11.

What RIP Tweaks does for The Finals

RIP Tweaks finds The Finals on its own when it is installed through Steam. If it is missing from the Games page, use Add Game and point it at the game's program file. Clicking the game opens a launch panel with two modes.

• Balanced (free) quiets background apps and applies GPU Priority, I/O Priority and Purge RAM Cache before the game starts. It touches nothing risky.
• Performance (Premium) adds Disable Segment Heap and Unbind CPU 0, which keeps the game off the processor core Windows uses most, and can close Explorer for the session. Your taskbar comes back when you stop.

Those settings are tied to the game's program file only, not to your whole PC, and you can untick any of them before you launch. With an NVIDIA card you can also apply the general high performance driver profile to The Finals from the same panel. There is no The Finals specific profile, and we would rather say so than pretend. The system wide tweaks for power, timers, network and input apply to every game, with a restore point created first.

What it does not do: it does not change The Finals's own settings, read the game's memory or touch its files. The in-game section above is still yours to set, and the Games page guide explains the rest.

GPU control panel

NVIDIA: set Power Management Mode to Prefer Maximum Performance for The Finals and leave Vertical Sync off. Low Latency Mode does not matter while Reflex is on in game, because Reflex takes over the render queue.

AMD: turn on Anti-Lag in the Adrenalin profile for the game, and leave Radeon Chill and Wait for Vertical Refresh off.

Then update the driver, and do it cleanly. A driver installed on top of years of older ones carries their leftovers with it, and a fresh driver also means The Finals rebuilds its shader cache, so expect the first match after an update to stutter once.

Ping, packet loss and the server

The server has to agree with every player about what has been destroyed, so a clean connection matters for more than hit registration.

• Use a cable instead of Wi-Fi.
• Choose the closest region.
• Stop downloads and streaming on other devices while you play.
• Turn off network adapter power saving.

More in how to lower ping in games.

Seeing whether any of it worked

Steam's built-in frame counter or the NVIDIA app or AMD Adrenalin overlay shows the frame rate during a cashout fight. Watch your 1% lows across a few matches before and after a change, not your average, and change one thing at a time.

For a proper recording, free tools such as PresentMon or CapFrameX log every frame and calculate the 1% and 0.1% lows for you. If a change did not move the lows, it did not help, however much the average went up.

The checklist

• Reflex On + Boost, frame generation off, V-Sync off
• Global illumination on its cheapest option
• Upscaling in Quality mode if the GPU is the limit
• Effects and volumetrics lowered, motion blur off
• High performance power plan, background apps closed
• Driver clean installed, Prefer Maximum Performance for The Finals
• Wired connection, closest region
• Frame times measured during destruction, in real matches

Frequently asked questions

Why does The Finals lag when buildings collapse?

Every falling piece has to be processed and drawn on your PC at once. Keep the CPU free of background work and lower effects; the spike will shrink even if it does not vanish.

Which graphics setting costs the most?

Global illumination is one of the heaviest. Its cheapest option keeps the arena readable and frees a lot of GPU time.

Can tweaking Windows get me banned in The Finals?

Windows and driver settings are ordinary configuration and not what Easy Anti-Cheat looks for. RIP Tweaks does not touch the game's memory or files.

Should I use frame generation?

Not for competitive play. It raises the frame counter and adds delay to your inputs.