Conan Exiles Enhanced Low FPS Fix: Base Lag and Stutter

Low FPS in Conan Exiles Enhanced comes from two separate costs: Unreal Engine 5’s lighting (Lumen global illumination and Virtual Shadow Maps), which makes the whole game heavier than the old version, and your base itself, where every building piece, light source and thrall adds work in every frame. Lower Global Illumination and Shadows, turn on DLSS or another upscaler, and trim decorative lights around your base, and most PCs recover a playable frame rate.

This is one game in our survival and base-building series. The shared mechanism — why placed objects cost CPU time in every survival game — is explained in why base building tanks FPS in survival games.

Why Conan Exiles Enhanced runs slower

Conan Exiles Enhanced launched on 5 May 2026 as a free Unreal Engine 5 rebuild of the Steam version, developed with Inflexion Games. It swapped the old Unreal Engine 4 renderer for Lumen global illumination, Nanite geometry and Virtual Shadow Maps. Independent benchmarks of the Enhanced version found it heavily GPU-bound in the open world, using about 7 GB of VRAM at 1080p and 9–10 GB at 4K on Ultra.

Bases add a second, different cost on top. Conan Exiles has always slowed down around big builds, because each wall, foundation, chest, crafting station, placeable and thrall is an object the game has to track and draw. In Enhanced, light sources became the expensive part: every torch, brazier and lantern now feeds dynamic global illumination and shadows. A torch-lit great hall that ran fine in the old version can drop the frame rate sharply in the new one.

Quick check: open an overlay (MSI Afterburner / RTSS) and watch GPU usage.

GPU usage	Where you are	What it means	Best lever
95–100%	Anywhere	GPU-bound — the UE5 renderer is the limit	Global Illumination, Shadows, DLSS/upscaling
95–100%	Only in your base	Lights and shadows in the base are the limit	Remove decorative lights, lower Shadows
Well below 95%, FPS still low	In a large base or busy server area	CPU-bound — objects and thralls are the limit	Fewer placeables and thralls; graphics settings won’t help much

Fix 1 — The settings worth lowering

Start from the Medium preset and change these individually. The first two are the big ones in the UE5 version. Exact labels can shift between patches, so match each row to the closest option in the Graphics menu.

Setting	Set to	Why
Global Illumination (Lumen)	Low or Medium	Lumen is the heaviest system in Enhanced, especially at night and in caves or torch-lit interiors
Shadows	Medium	Virtual Shadow Maps are expensive, and every light source around a base casts them
View Distance	Medium	Draws less of distant bases and terrain at once
Foliage	Medium	Dense vegetation is costly in forest and jungle areas
Motion Blur	Off	Small FPS gain, and clearer motion
Field of View	80–90	A wider view means more of the scene to draw

Change one setting at a time in the same spot, ideally inside your own base, and keep the ones that move your FPS.

Fix 2 — Turn on DLSS or upscaling

Conan Exiles Enhanced supports DLSS Super Resolution, DLSS Frame Generation, DLSS Multi Frame Generation and NVIDIA Reflex on RTX cards. Upscaling is the single biggest gain available in a GPU-bound UE5 game:

• DLSS Quality at 1440p or 4K, DLSS Balanced if you still need more.
• Frame generation raises the displayed frame rate but not responsiveness. Use it when your base frame rate is already around 60 FPS, not to rescue 30.
• Reflex On reduces input delay whenever the GPU is the bottleneck.

On AMD and Intel cards, use the game’s own resolution-scaling or upscaling option at around 75–80% render resolution rather than dropping every setting to Low. See DLSS vs FSR vs XeSS for how the upscalers compare.

Fix 3 — Build a leaner base

These are the same levers that apply in every base-builder, and in Enhanced the lighting one matters most:

• Cut decorative light sources. Replace clusters of torches and braziers with fewer, well-placed lights. Each one adds dynamic lighting and shadow work.
• Consolidate storage and placeables. Dozens of small chests and trophies cost more than a few large containers.
• Keep thrall and pet counts reasonable inside the base. Each follower runs AI and animation every frame, which lands on the CPU.
• Avoid over-building foundations under terrain and redundant wall layers you never see.

The base-building FPS explainer covers why object count, not texture detail, sets the ceiling.

Fix 4 — Tell FPS lag apart from server lag

Symptom	Your FPS counter	Likely cause
Low, choppy frame rate	Low	Your PC — work Fixes 1–3
Rubber-banding, thralls or doors reacting late	Normal	Server tick rate or your connection
Fine for hours, then gradually worse	Drifting down	Long-session buildup — see why FPS drops after hours of gameplay

If you host a private or rented server, a server that can’t keep up — too many players, too many large bases, too little CPU — makes everyone rubber-band regardless of their graphics settings. Survival game server lag explains how to diagnose that side.

Fix 5 — Your hardware and the Legacy option

Funcom’s recommended spec for Enhanced is an AMD Ryzen 7 5600X or Intel Core i7-11700F, 16 GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA RTX 3060 or AMD RX 6700, on Windows 11 with about 115 GB free. An SSD is required: from a hard drive, world streaming causes long hitches as you move between areas.

If your PC sits well below that, the old Unreal Engine 4 version is still available on Steam. Open Conan Exiles Enhanced → Properties → Game Versions & Betas and select Conan Exiles Legacy. The trade-offs are real: Legacy gets no further updates, has no official servers or Bazaar, and Siptah structures don’t transfer between versions. It is still the right choice for a private or unofficial Legacy server on older hardware.

Fix 6 — The Windows layer

• Update your GPU driver. NVIDIA shipped a Game Ready driver for the Enhanced launch. If stutter started right after a driver update, a clean install with DDU usually fixes it.
• Cap your frame rate a few FPS below your refresh rate to smooth frame pacing. See how to cap your FPS correctly.
• Stutter after a patch is usually shader compilation and settles after a play session. If it doesn’t, clearing the shader cache forces a clean rebuild.

For steadier frame times on top of a cap, the timer resolution guide covers the Windows scheduling layer underneath.

The short version

1. Lower Global Illumination and Shadows first. They are the heaviest UE5 systems.
2. Turn on DLSS (or render scaling on AMD/Intel) before dropping everything to Low.
3. Cut decorative lights and clutter around your base.
4. Check GPU usage to see whether the problem is your GPU, your base, or the server.
5. On older hardware, Conan Exiles Legacy is still one Steam setting away.

More in the series: why base building tanks FPS · survival game server lag · why FPS drops after hours of gameplay · Valheim low FPS fix · V Rising low FPS fix · 7 Days to Die low FPS fix