While it's apparently entirely possible to win a game of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds without firing a shot, for those of us less committed to pacifism, finding and firing guns is the key to victory. This guide will take you through the most potent firearms on offer, discussing the key points you need to know about each weapon and offering tips on how best to modify them.

Updated August 2017 with new weapons and some adjustments to the previous rankings.

Assault rifles

🌟 SCAR-L: What sets the SCAR above all other assault rifles is the ability to control the recoil when firing, particularly when you have an array of modifications attached. It’s the only AR that can comfortably use automatic fire at medium range.

Groza: A new care package-only assault rifle, the Groza is similar to the AKM, but with a higher rate of fire and slightly different recoil. It's clearly a beast: a tough gun to control from the hip, but aiming down the sights makes a nice straight vertical line and the recoil can be managed. It's worth picking up if you find one, or are brave enough to hit up a supply crate. Have some 7.62 ammo ready.

M16: A great ‘off the shelf’ option that requires fewer modifications than the SCAR to reach its full potential. The M16 is fast and accurate in single shot mode compared to other ARs, while burst fire is best limited to close range. It has just has three attachment slots: magazine, barrel, and optics.

AKM: Does the most damage per bullet, meaning it’s an exceptional tool if you’re able to land multiple headshots, but heavy recoil and a slightly slower rate of fire mean it’s probably the weakest Assault Rifle overall (unmodified), with a poor automatic fire mode—though the best players can take advantage of it's power. For best results stick to single-shot above 20m and always try to land those headshots (it should only take 2 headshots to down an enemy—if you can land them). Only has three modification slots: magazine, barrel, and optics.  

M416: Offers similar levels of modification to the SCAR, with the option to add a tactical stock that is required if you plan on using automatic fire anything above 20 meters. Not quite as stable as the SCAR, but with a faster rate of fire it’s still very viable. A good all-round weapon that doesn’t truly excel at anything.

Recommended assault rifle mods:

Vertical grip/angled grip – The angled grip improves stability to a lesser degree and offers faster aiming down the sight, but you should prioritize the stability boost of a vertical grip to get the most out of your AR.

Compensator, suppressor, flash hider – one of the key choices you need to make. Suppressors are deadly on all assault rifles, severely limiting your opponent’s ability to locate you through directional audio. A compensator steadies recoil which can be vital if you’re planning to fire in full-auto at anything above close range. If you find a suppressor, prioritize it over a compensator unless you have another suppressed weapon. Recent community testing has shown that the flash hider reduces recoil to the same degree as the compensator, while giving the added utility of hiding gun-fire, making it a great pickup.

Extended mag – Simply more useful than a Quickdraw mag. Having those extra bullets at the ready fundamentally means that they're ready to fire, rather than reloading more quickly.

2x 4x or 8x scopes – Assault rifles truly shine with decent optics, the superior magnification of an 8x allows you to focus on headshots.

SMGs

🌟 Vector: A tiny package of doom that incapacitates quickly and is limited only by its short range. There's no weapon I'd rather have in the last moments of most matches, where I'm enclosed in a small area. Nearly always best used in full-auto, firing in bursts to retain accuracy beyond 15m.

UMP: The bridge between SMGs and assault rifles, with the slower rate of fire offset by limited recoil and a better effective range (30-40m) than the Vector. The UMP requires a lot of modifications to reach its full potential. Fire it in full-auto to take people down quickly. Its 9mm ammo should be plentiful.

Uzi: Fast, but wildly inaccurate. With a stock the Uzi becomes far more stable, but it’s still terrible at anything above 15-20 meters.

Recommended SMG mods:

Extended magazine – Absolutely vital to make the Vector and Uzi in particular shine, as the base, magazines are so shallow.

Suppressor – High rate of fire plus near-silence is an insane combo.

Vertical foregrip – Gives a vital boost to both the Vector and the UMP’s effectiveness at range by steadying the recoil.

Uzi stock – If you have your heart set on using an Uzi, be sure to pick this up to improve stability and lessen recoil.

Sniper rifles

🌟 AWM: Immensely powerful. The AWM is the only gun in the game that will one-hit KO against a level 3 helmet. With exceptional range, in the right hands it’s an invaluable tool for taking down well-geared foes. You'll only find it in care packages, along with its .300 Magnum (7.62×67mm) ammo type.

SKS: The second-weakest long gun, fulfilling its role as a marksman rifle rather than a fully-fledged sniper weapon. I tend to prioritize it below assault rifles unless there’s a handy sniper rifle silencer to attach to it, due to the rarity of sniper mods and the selection of solid single-fire assault rifles.

Kar-98k: A fantastic rifle, with decent iron-sights and deadly accuracy. Try to take the extra moment to line up headshots while operating the Kar-98—the slow rate of fire often means you’ll get limited opportunities to shoot and it can be difficult to hit targets that are moving defensively. A single headshot will KO enemies wearing anything below a level 3 helmet. Body shots will require at least two shots, or three against a level 3 vest.

M24: Kind of like the AWM’s little brother—not quite as powerful but still highly effective at distance. If you want to hide in the hills and take potshots, this will be your weapon of choice thanks to its relatively abundant 7.62mm ammunition.

Mk14 EBR: We haven't hit a supply drop with one of these yet, so we can't speak from experience, but here are the details: The Mk14 is a new mid-power marksman rifle with a tripod that increases stability while prone, and a higher bullet velocity than the SKS, Kar98, and M24. The Mk14 EBR and the VSS below are the only marksman rifles with automatic firing modes. We wouldn't say no to one if we came across it.

VSS: The VSS is an unusual weapon. It comes with a permanent scope, and though its subsonic 9mm ammo is weak and tough to put on mark at long distances, the suppression makes it hard for targets to gauge your location. If you’re struggling to find optics and assault rifles, it can give you medium range capability in a pinch, and could come in handy in the late game. 

Recommended sniper mods: 

8x scope, 15x scope – An AWM or M24 with no scope is a curse in disguise—they have no iron-sights. 

Suppressor – Nothing in Battlegrounds is more terrifying than realising a sniper is shooting at you, without being able to tell which direction they’re firing from.

Hit the next page for Pistols, Shotguns, and special weapons.

Pistols

Pistols are not in an especially good place at the moment. They're weak, inaccurate, and have bad iron-sights. If you’re using a pistol during any stage other than the first five minutes of a game, the better option is probably hiding and avoiding combat altogether.

Choose whichever pistol matches ammo types with your other weapons to save inventory space and then hope you never have to shoot it. Beware the awful reload time on the R1895.

Shotguns

🌟 S686: The classic double-barrelled shotgun is probably the most effective tool for extreme close quarters. If you miss both shots you’re probably dead, but the two rounds are enough to finish off even the most heavily armored enemy and can be fired almost simultaneously. With the longest effective range of any shotgun (around 12m) and the fastest time to kill a fully armored enemy, the more modern shotguns pale in comparison.

S12K: The S12K is great if you’re worried about accuracy, with five rounds in a mag and a speedy rate of fire you can comfortably spam it at close ranges. You can't attach a choke, which means it’s less effective than other shotguns at anything beyond close range, while it does slightly less damage per shot. Uses assault rifle modifications (don’t even think about sticking a scope on it though).

S1897: The pump-action shotgun is, like all weapons of this class, incredibly powerful at close range (up-to around seven meters). However, the slow rate of fire can spell your doom if you miss even once, making it unforgiving.

Recommended shotgun mods:

Shotgun choke – gives the S686 or S1897 a much-needed boost to range, making them effective at picking off wounded enemies at distance, or throwing buckshot into cars full of enemies.

Extended mag – Makes room for a couple more cartridges in the S12K.

Melee

The frying pan the only melee option worth taking right now, primarily because it can save your ass.

Special weapons

M249: Another care package only weapon, the huge 100 round clip, strong damage and speedy rate of fire make this a potent tool for car destruction, while at mid-range it can tear exposed targets to pieces. The M249 is even surprisingly effective at long ranges, particularly if you go prone and deploy the tripod (this happens automatically). Try to fire it in bursts or you’ll quickly lose accuracy.

Crossbow: A weapon for people who want to share clips of themselves pulling off clutch shots. With damage second only to the AWM, the crossbow combines with poor range and a slow projectile travel time to give you a weapon that is extremely limited in usefulness, but extremely satisfying to kill with. The bolts fall to the ground quickly after a few dozen meters. 

It is wonderfully stealthy, though. A quiver attachment slightly improves the dreadful reload time. 

Tommy Gun: Something of a novelty weapon right now. The Tommy-gun is hard to control and doesn’t do much damage, but the fast-rate of fire and 100-round drum mag means it’s exceptional for shooting vehicles. The fact that it’s limited to care package drops means you’ll probably be quite angry if you risked everything for this underwhelming antique. If you have a Vector or UMP with all the mods they’re simply more reliable weapons for killing people quickly.

Inspired by Brendan Greene's recent Mod Hall of Fame inductee Battle Royale, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds has impressed since arriving in Early Access two months ago. Besides doubling its playerbase and hitting two million sales inside its first four weeks, it also raised over $220,000 for charity shortly thereafter. 

The MMO-meet-survival game has now revealed the patch notes for its second monthly update—which will hit stable servers on Thursday, May 25 at 1am PST/9am BST and everything else in between.  

Similar to previous updates, the latest list of tweaks and adjustments is fairly extensive. It can be viewed in its entirety over here, however highlights include the addition of the VSS suppressed sniper rifle with a built-in 4X scope. Found only in care packages, it takes 9mm ammo. 

In addition to a new, sidecar-less motorcycle, the update also introduces air control of motorbikes, which prompted PlayerUnknown himself to post this earlier today:

God willing, Battlegrounds will become a 100-person extreme sports survival game. We look forward to your forward and backflips.

Balance-wise, the update reduces the Vector and Winchester's power, while slightly increasing the AKM's bullet damage. As for stock attachments, a cheek pad can now be added to the SKS sniper rifle, a tactical stock can now be implemented to the M416 Vector, and modified recoils can now be applied to the AKM, SCAR, M16 and HK416. A new scope rendering method has also been introduced, allowing for greater aiming precision and showcased here. 

Again, a number UI and rendering issues, as well as a host of bug fixes have been ironed out in PUBG's second Early Access update. Speaking directly to lag issues and the quality of its servers, however, the game's creators note the following: 

"I have seen a lot of speculation about the cause of the lag some of you experience. One of the more popular theories is that we run our games on potato quality servers. I would like to put this theory to bed by telling you our servers run on the highest possible spec machines that AWS [Amazon Web Services] offer. 

"We are currently in the middle of profiling the servers to attempt to track down the cause of the lag, but as I have said before, this will take us time to complete, so I ask for your patience while we work to improve server performance for all players. 

"While [the] next monthly update will be focused on improving server performance, the optimisation process won't stop there, and we will continue to improve performance of the servers all the way through Early Access."

Playerunknown Battlegrounds' second update goes live on Thursday, May 25.

PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale—the Arma 3 mod that inspired the runaway hit Playerunknown's Battlegrounds—has been inducted into ModDb's Mod Hall of Fame.

We've covered Battlegrounds' success pretty extensively since its launch in March, but it's the stories how players take to its ever-haunting map and the ways in which they approach it that make the game most interesting. 

Speaking to ModDB, Arma developer Bohemia suggests its games have always been built with "creativity in mind" and this is reflected in the variety of ways players play. 

PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale creator Brendan Greene—AKA Player Unknown himself—explains what drew him to the Arma modding scene. "This was the first game that excited me as a player in many years," Greene tells ModDB. "Through this discovery, Green explored how the ARMA series worked as a platform for other game modes and gameplay experiences, and that the community strongly supported them.

"There is no other moddable game available that allows you the same control Arma provides its modding community,” he elaborates. “Alongside this, there is a passionate community that is constantly creating new maps, weapons and other assets for use. Battle Royale makes use of both maps and weapons from the community and would be nothing without their work and support."

PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale's entry into The Mod Hall of Fame sees it join the likes of DayZ, Nehrim: At Fate's Edge, The Stanley Parable, the Defense of the Ancients, and Counter-Strike. The full list of inductees can be viewed over here. 

Twitch would have you think that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a game of 500-meter headshots, guardian-angel frying pans, and running people over with ugly Soviet cars. It's true that these 'loud' moments are a big part of Battlegrounds' appeal, as its 100-person scale and Battle Royale format produces ambushes, calamity, and climaxes of adrenaline.

But amid all that gunfighting, Battlegrounds does something subtler, but no less powerful: As you play, its spaces form a uniquely meaningful network of associations and memories for each of its players. It's a competitive, violent FPS full of exploding cars and laugh-out-loud funny highlights, but it's also a game of people, and the ghosts they leave behind.

It’s a source of surprising depth, and plays a huge part in giving Battlegrounds’ action the emotional weight and substance that gets its players invested and keeps them coming back.

Every match starts the same way: An airplane stuffed with players sets off on a random course over the island of Erangel. Players dive out of the plane, descend through the air, and pop parachutes to glide to the ground below.

It’s a clever way to start a game. Immediately, Erangel is established as a traversable space. During the plane ride and the descent, players can see the entire island stretching out beneath. The smooth transition of skydiving downward further emphasizes the spatiality of this island: There’s no loading screen, just the rush of wind and the earth rising up to meet you. 

If players were to, say, spawn in at ground level, their understanding of the territory as a continuous space would be restricted to the abstraction of the map and distantly-seen landmarks. Take Skyrim: It's massive, and you can spot landmarks from a great distance, but only being able to trudge through it or fast travel means that the player's relationship to the map is mediated primarily through the overworld map, and therefore lessened. You never feel the map in Skyrim because you're either walking through it at a constant rate, seeing it from eye-level, or teleporting across it. 

Contrast this to the first time you took a gryphon ride in WoW, or flew in an airplane, or the excitement around the first photos of the Earth from space in 1966—having territory radically contextualized concretizes that territory as a single cohesive landscape. In Battlegrounds, all of this makes the map feel much more actual and static, and it lends a constancy to landmarks that's necessary for memories to become solid and rooted, and makes players feel the distances they travel from town to town or hill to hill.

This entrance is also a simple reminder of the other players populating this world. About a hundred people participate in each of Battlegrounds' matches—an enormous number by the standards of most multiplayer games. But down on Erangel, they're all trying to hide from or kill one another, spread out over the island. You rarely encounter more than a dozen other players during a game, and if it weren't for the "Players Alive" counter fixed to the screen it’d be easy to forget that you share the island with 99 others.

But in the airplane, you’re shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone else. You can look them in the eye, or watch the seats empty as other players take their dives. Even after you’ve jumped, you fall alongside your enemies. You're pulled tightly together in the plane, then sprinkled out like salt across the island, then reunited as the circle tightens, forcing everyone back into a small radius. It’s a tableau that encourages players to reflect on the others that they’re sharing this world with. 

Unlike DayZ or another survival game, Battlegrounds introduces you to everyone you're about to fight. Faced with the sight of the other people falling alongside you, it’s natural to wonder about which of those people you’ll fight and kill over the next half-hour—and which of them might kill you.

Part soldier, part sleuth 

Lethality is essential to how Battlegrounds invests its spaces with meaning. Danger, whether real or suspected, is tangible, and feelings of security are rare and flimsy. To survive, players are taught to reverse engineer stories from cues in their environment. At the beginning of each match, Erangel is in a pristine state, staged for combat by some unseen god. Every door is closed, all vehicles point eastward, and all items and equipment are sequestered to loot spawns defined by the game. 

This means that an abandoned frying pan or northward-facing motorcycle is a definite sign of another player’s passage. In a game where being caught off-guard means being killed before you have time to react, the advantage conferred by noticing a single open door can be momentous. It might signal that an entire section of the map is unsafe, and immediately provokes thoughts as to who used that door, how long ago they left, and where they might be now.

Death creates useful information too. When someone is killed, they leave a squat wooden box behind. This holds the dead player’s items, and it remains where they died for the remainder of the match.

These boxes serve as treasure chests, gravestones, and fonts of information for enterprising players. If you’re careful and perceptive, you can parse a story out from this scene by examining which boxes are looted, what items they had, or which ragdolls have already despawned. Crack the code, and you might get the drop on whoever survived this fight. But you’re exposed, the circle’s closing in, and you can hear the sound of a car engine approaching—do you have the time to crack this code?

Every match, each of those hundred players might experience a number of these brief, geographically-specific micro-narratives. But for each player, they feel sparse and momentous—episodes in a single linear, continuous story that begins with a plane ride and ends with death or victory.  

This means that memories have a chance to breathe, to become anchored in a place without being overwritten. A Counter-Strike player that gets caught in an intense firefight at Bombsite A will likely be back there the next round, and the round after that. She could have another version of that same fight five more times before she logs off for the night. Her experiences run together, and become hard to tell apart. Even in other games with large maps, like entries in the Battlefield series, short respawn timers and fast vehicles mean that you’re likely to see a lot of the map in a given round. If you die, you’re a few seconds away from jumping back in at a spawn point or on your squad, and hurtling yourself back into the meat grinder. If you want to be elsewhere on the map, all you have to do is die.

In Battlegrounds, on the other hand, there’s no way to supernaturally jump through space. Wherever you are on the map, there’s an organic story as to how you got there: You’re in Yasnaya because you dropped outside of Mylta Power, stole a motorbike, drove it north until you crashed it, and crouched-ran through a wheat field while laying cover with smokes. And when you die, that’s the culmination of that story. You were gunned down in a place that 20 minutes of decisions led you to: one tiny corner of this enormous map, a place you might have passed by a few times but never really thought much about. But now you’re going to think about it, as the camera pans away from your body, as you load back into the lobby, and as you wait for the next game to start. And the next time you pass by that space, you’ll remember what happened there, and you’ll feel a little of what you felt then.

The more time a player spends with Battlegrounds, the more this meaning occupies the space—the sense of Erangel as a concrete world, the way that even minor interactions are weighted with tension and history, and the gradual accumulation of memories linked to landmarks. What was originally a blank slate becomes a web of memories, affects, and fears, uniquely tailored to each person.

A huge amount of Battlegrounds' depth comes from this. Its gunplay is fun; executing novel strategies is exhilarating; battling alongside friends is a wonderful way to spend some time with people you care about. But what keeps me coming back, more than anything, is how much meaning Battlegrounds’ spaces give its gameplay. They make every action important, make every choice into a story. They make Erangel feel like an actual place—and if you spend enough time in a place, it starts to feel like home.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds may not be the most popular game in town these days, but PUBG remains a hot commodity, with more than a million people playing it daily according to Steam. Over the past year, Bluehole has added three new maps, the latest being the snow-covered landscape of Vikendi.

Performance has changed for the better since Early Access, and the 144fps framerate cap is now a thing of the past. With new maps and engine updates, we felt it was a good time to update all of our benchmarks.

Provided you're not trying to run at ultra-high resolutions and maximum quality, PUBG's system requirements aren't too bad. The minimum GPU recommendation is a GeForce GTX 660 2GB or Radeon HD 7850 2GB, but you can get by with less—just not at a smooth 60fps. CPU requirements are even more modest, with Core i3-4340 / AMD FX-6300 listed as the minimum. In testing, all of the current CPUs and GPUs can deliver playable performance, though you'll want to tune things for your hardware. If you're in any doubt, check out our best graphics card guide for more.

Quickly running through the features checklist, Battlegrounds has plenty of graphics options, and it checks most of the right boxes. Resolution support is good, and aspect ratio support works properly in my testing, with a change in the FOV on ultrawide displays. There's also an FOV slider, but that only affects the FOV if you're playing in first-person perspective.

Some items have been fixed over the past year, like the removal of the framerate cap. Modding support remains the only missing item, and that's officially out—not that there aren't plenty of unauthorized hack mods floating around, though PUBG has been quite active about banning cheater accounts.

Fine tuning PUBG settings

I tested performance with the various presets, along with each setting set to minimum, and compared that with the ultra preset. The RX 580 8GB and GTX 1060 6GB end up performing quite similarly in most cases.

The global preset is the easiest place to start tuning performance, but you'll probably want to tweak things to find a better balance. Going from the ultra preset to high will boost performance about 30 percent, the medium preset runs 45-55 percent faster than ultra, the low preset will boost performance 65-75 percent faster, and the minimum very low preset runs nearly twice as fast.

Most competitive players will run with the very low preset, to maximize frame rates. If you're hoping to tweak the individual settings to better tune performance, I did some testing to see how much each setting affects framerates using the ultra preset as the baseline. I then dropped each setting down to the minimum (very low) setting and to measure the impact.

Screen Scale: The range is 70-120, and this represents undersampling/oversampling of the image. It's like tweaking your resolution by small amounts, but I recommend leaving this at the default 100 setting and changing your resolution instead. Using 70 can improve performance by around 45 percent.

Anti-Aliasing: Surprisingly not a major factor, but this is because Unreal Engine requires the use of post-processing techniques to do AA. If you want better AA, you could set screen scale to 120 to get a moderate form of super-sampling. Going from ultra quality AA to very low quality AA has a negligible impact on performance.

Post-Processing: A generic label for a whole bunch of stuff that can be done after rendering is complete. This has a relatively large impact on performance—going from ultra to very low improves framerates by 10-15 percent.

Shadows: This setting affects ambient occlusion and other forms of shadow rendering, and going from ultra to very low improves performance by 15-25 percent depending on your GPU.

Textures: Only a minor impact on performance, provided you have enough VRAM. Dropping from ultra to very low increases framerates by 3-5 percent.

Effects: This setting relates to things like explosions, among other elements. THis is the single most demanding setting in the game. Dropping to very low improves performance by up to 25 percent.

Foliage: Given all the trees and grass, you might expect this to have a larger impact on performance, but I only saw a 1 percent difference after setting it to very low.

View Distance: This appears to have a greater impact on CPU performance than on graphics performance, so if your CPU is up to snuff you can safely set it to ultra. Even on a Core i3 system, dropping to very low only made a 3 percent difference in framerates.

Motion Blur: There's a reason this is off by default, right? Spotting enemies while moving around is more difficult with motion blur enabled. But if you like the effect, turning it on causes about a 3 percent drop in framerates.

Sharpen: Sort of the reverse of motion blur, this is also off by default. Enabling it had no measurable impact on performance.

If you're looking to be more competitive, turning post-processing, shadows, effects, and motion blur to minimum can improve framerates by around 75 percent. That can make it easier to spot enemies as well, though it won't necessarily help you aim any better.

MSI provided all of the hardware for this testing, mostly consisting of its Gaming/Gaming X graphics cards. These cards are designed to be fast but quiet, though the RX Vega cards are reference models and the RX 560 is an Aero model.

My main test system uses MSI's Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC with a Core i7-8700K as the weapon of choice, with 16GB of DDR4-3200 CL14 memory from G.Skill. I also tested performance with Ryzen processors on MSI's X370 Gaming Pro Carbon. The game is run from a Samsung 850 Pro SSD for all desktop GPUs.

MSI also provided three of its gaming notebooks for testing, the GS63VR with GTX 1060 6GB, GE63VR with GTX 1070, and GT73VR with GTX 1080. The GS63VR has a 4Kp60 display, the GE63VR has a 1080p120 G-Sync display, and the GT73VR has a 1080p120 G-Sync display. For the laptops, I installed the game to the secondary HDD storage.

PUBG Vikendi GPU benchmarks

For the benchmarks, I've tested 1080p at the very low, medium, and ultra presets, along with 1440p and 4k at ultra. Some people will want to run at minimum graphics quality to try and gain a competitive advantage. It looks ugly, but it may be easier to spot people hiding in the grass or shadows. Performance should be very similar to the very low results. I've also tested 720p very low on integrated graphics solutions.

Starting at 1080p very low, which is close to what most competitive streamers use, the CPU limits performance to around 200fps, with minimums well below that mark. AMD GPUs appear to have an even lower maximum level of performance, as the Vega cards both fall behind the GTX 1070.

For budget GPUs, the GTX 1050 and above manage 60fps averages, but the RX 560 comes up short. The integrated graphics solutions also fail to break 30fps at 1080p, though the Ryzen 5 2400G and its Vega 11 GPU do manage reasonable performance at 720p. Intel's HD Graphics 630 meanwhile still only averages 23fps at minimum settings, though resolution scaling might help a bit.

1080p medium drops performance on the mainstream cards by about 20-25 percent, though the faster GPUs are still closer to CPU limits. AMD GPUs still underperform a bit, though the RX 590 does come out ahead of both 1060 cards. The RX 570 4GB and above all break 60fps, but with occasional dips below that mark.

Moving up to 1080p ultra drops performance by 35-40 percent relative to medium quality. Most mainstream and above cards are playable, though you'd have to adjust a few settings on the GTX 1060 and RX 570/580 to hit 60+ fps. The GTX 1070 and above average well above 60fps, but the RTX 2070 and above are needed to get minimums above 60.

1440p ultra continues the downward trend in performance, and now only the GTX 1080 and above average 60fps, while the RTX 2080 Ti is the only GPU to keep minimums above 60. The Vega cards move up the charts a bit, likely thanks to their higher memory bandwidth. Alternatively, dropping the settings a few notches will get most of the midrange and above GPUs above 60fps.

4k ultra is still brutal, with only the RTX 2080 Ti breaking 60fps, but still with dips below that. For competitive reasons, playing at 4k isn't generally recommended. Even with the fastest PC around, you'd be better dropping to 1440p.

PUBG Vikendi CPU performance

What about the CPU side of things—how many cores does Battlegrounds need to run properly? I've used the RTX 2080 for all of these tests in order to create the biggest difference in CPU results you're likely to see. (Yes, the RTX 2080 Ti would increase the gap even a bit more, but that's a bit excessive for most gamers.)

At the very low preset, the fastest CPU is about 40 percent faster than the slowest CPU. 1080p medium reduces the margin to 30 percent, and at 1080p ultra it's a 20 percent difference. At 1440p ultra and above, it's mostly a tie between all the CPUs, though minimums do show a bit more variance.

So CPU performance does help, but only with an extremely fast CPU. Of course, if you're doing other things while playing PUBG (like livestreaming), you'd want a more potent CPU than the i3-8100.

PUBG Vikendi notebook performance

Shifting gears to notebook testing, the mobile CPUs aren't able to keep the GPUs fully fed with data at 1080p low and 1080p medium. The result is that the GTX 1060 desktop GPU is able to outperform even the GT73VR, particularly when it comes to minimum fps. Once we move to 1080p ultra, the mobile 1080 is at least able to move into third place, but in games that are less CPU limited I've seen the GT73VR outperform even the desktop 1080.

I suspect the newer 6-core mobile CPUs would help eliminate the performance deficit, but the desktop chips still clock 20-30 percent higher at stock. If you have a higher resolution mobile display, you could probably play at 1440p high or medium and still get good performance, but frequent dips in framerate remain a problem.

PUBG closing thoughts

The past year of updates has made benchmarking PUBG a bit less of a pain in the ass, thankfully. With the replay feature, it's now possible to run the exact same test sequence on each GPU and CPU, which is what I've done for these updated results. Of course, the replays do expire each time a significant update to the engine comes along, which is relatively frequent, but I was able to get all of the testing done within a period of several days.

With multiple maps now available, I've checked performance on all of them. In general, it doesn't matter which map you're on, as performance is generally similar. There are of course areas within each map that are more demanding, but overall framerates are relatively consistent across the various landscapes.

Thanks again to MSI for providing the hardware. All the updated testing was done with the latest Nvidia and AMD drivers in late December 2018, Nvidia 417.35 and AMD 18.12.3. (RTX 2060 was tested with its launch drivers in January.) While previously Nvidia GPUs held a clear advantage, things are far closer these days, and really you can play on just about any decent graphics card with the right settings.

For competitive players looking for optimal performance, the best results typically come with everything at minimum quality except for view distance. Or you could turn down just post-processing, shadows, and effects and get close to the same performance.

Bluehole continues to add to Battlegrounds, but Unreal Engine is pretty well tuned at this point. We likely won't see massive changes in performance going forward, and the game runs well on a large variety of hardware. The Vikendi map on the other hand is new enough that further tweaks to the level could improve performance, particularly when it comes to minimum fps.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is one of the hottest multiplayer games right now. While it's still in Early Access, with over two million copies sold, people are constantly queuing up to take another stab at being the last man standing. Whether you like to go in hard and fast, or prefer the stealthy (aka cowardly) approach, the game is a constant adrenaline rush.

Being Early Access means that performance is likely to improve over time. Or maybe not—just look at Ark: Survival Evolved for a game that continues to punish moderate PCs. But at least during the past two months, there have been clear improvements in framerates and plenty of patches. If you're a fan of competitive games like Overwatch or Counterstrike, you should know upfront that Battlegrounds is far more demanding of your hardware. It uses Unreal Engine 4, which has a good reputation for image quality, but it can also tax even the best systems.

One thing you don't want to do is to show up running on integrated graphics, and even many budget GPUs are struggling with the current release. CPU performance can also play a lesser role, particularly with minimum frame rates, but as usual having a fast GPU should be your first priority.

Quickly running through the features checklist, even at this early stage Battlegrounds has plenty of graphics options, and it checks most of the right boxes. Resolution support is good, though modifying FOV is no longer allowed. The devs have said they'll add an FOV slider in a future update, but until that happens everyone is locked in to the same FOV setting.

About the only other areas that are slightly questionable are the modding potential and controller support. Game controllers are supported, but last I checked, you were stuck with keyboard and mouse or the game controller—which means most people will want to unplug the controller before launching. (This should get fixed with a future update.) On the modding front, the developers have said they'll support it at some point in the future, but we'll have to wait and see.

In terms of graphics settings, there's an overall preset, which configures the seven individual items to the selected level—very low, low, medium, high, and ultra. There's also a motion blur option, which thankfully defaults to off in all cases. If you want more information on how the various settings affect performance, head to the bottom where I'll dig into more details.

For the benchmarks, I've used my standard choice of 1080p medium as the baseline, and then supplemented that with 1080p, 1440p, and 4K ultra. Of course, there's a catch with games like Battlegrounds: some people will want to run at minimum graphics quality, except for the view distance, to try and gain a competitive advantage. It looks ugly, but it's easier to spot people hiding in the grass or shadows.

MSI provided all of the hardware for this testing, mostly consisting of its Gaming/Gaming X graphics cards. These cards are designed to be fast but quiet, and the fans will shut off completely when the graphics card isn't being used. Our main test system is MSI's Aegis Ti3, a custom case and motherboard with an overclocked 4.8GHz i7-7700K, 64GB DDR4-2400 RAM, and a pair of 512GB Plextor M8Pe M.2 NVMe solid-state drives in RAID0. There's a 3TB hard drive as well, custom lighting, and more.

MSI also provided three of its gaming notebooks for testing, the GS63VR with GTX 1060 6GB, GT62VR with GTX 1070, and GT73VR with GTX 1080. The GS63VR has a 4Kp60 display, the GT62VR has a 1080p60 G-Sync display, and the GT73VR has a 1080p120 G-Sync display. For testing higher resolutions on the GT-series notebooks, I used Nvidia's DSR technology.

For CPU testing, MSI has provided several different motherboards. I have the X99A Gaming Pro Carbon for Haswell-E/Broadwell-E testing, Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon for additional Kaby Lake CPU testing, X370 Gaming Pro Carbon for high-end Ryzen 7 builds, and B350 Tomahawk for budget-friends Ryzen 5 builds.

Let's hit the benchmarks

Skydiving into our benchmarks, 1080p medium immediately shows how CPU bound PUBG can get. The Nvidia 1080 Ti, 1080, and 1070 all land at the top of the chart, but the 1080 Ti actually falls below both the 1070 and 1080. This is likely an issue with drivers and/or game optimizations, and it should get corrected at some point, but it's still a bit odd to see 1080 Ti underperform. Not that you'd really want to use a $700 GPU for 1080p medium gaming.

Moving down the chart, the 1060 6GB and 1060 3GB come next. Where is AMD? Lounging in the bottom half of the chart. The RX 470 normally outperforms the GTX 1060 3GB, but Nvidia is clearly doing better in Battlegrounds right now. The RX 470 4GB has spotty minimum framerates and stutters, and the same goes for any of AMD's 4GB cards.

And if you want more evidence of AMD driver problems, look no further than the RX 460 2GB, which can't even get out of the teens—at minimum quality, the card still only manages 21 fps. The 4GB 460 does better, though it still underperforms, but the GTX 1050 proves that a 2GB card can actually run these settings without falling flat on its face.

If you're gunning for 60 fps or more, budget GPUs will generally need to drop to the low or very low preset, and some of them will still come up short. I suspect we'll see an updated AMD driver in the near future to improve things, given the popularity of Battlegrounds, and hopefully some game engine tweaks as well.

1080p ultra drops performance on the fastest cards by about 20 percent, while slower GPUs lose about 33 percent relative to medium quality. Most mainstream and above cards are playable, but if you're looking for 60+ fps, the only way to get there is with an Nvidia GPU right now—GTX 1060 6GB (or the 2015 model GTX 980 4GB) barely clear that mark, though minimum fps will still be a concern.

One of the issues with testing games like Battlegrounds is that performance optimizations typically happen later in the game development process—the opposite of Early Access. Again we see the 1080 Ti fall below the 1080 performance. A few months from now should change things for the better, but regardless, Battlegrounds is one of the more demanding games currently available.

Given the above results, 1440p ultra is clearly going to be a problem for all but the fastest GPUs. You pretty much need a 1080 or 1080 Ti to break 60 fps, though a few minor tweaks will get the 1070 there (or a 980 Ti, which performs similarly). At least the 1080 Ti is finally able to brute force its way ahead of the 1080.

AMD's RX Vega should be out within the next 30 days, and the current rumors are that we'll see three different models. Hopefully AMD will also have drivers that tune Battlegrounds performance a bit more, as the Fury X is clearly not living up to its potential. As for the RX 460 2GB, I couldn't even complete the benchmark sequence, and resorted to spinning in a circle in stop-motion fashion.

Notice that VRAM is also becoming a defining factor, with the 1060 6GB showing much more consistent framerates than the 1060 3GB. Going forward, I would strongly recommend that anyone purchasing a 'mainstream' card ($150 or above) should set their sights on 6GB or 8GB VRAM.

In typical fashion, it should be no surprise that 4K ultra kills performance—even the 1080 Ti falls short of 60 fps. If you want to game at 4K, the 1080 Ti can get there at medium/high quality (give or take), while the vanilla 1080 will need to opt for mostly low/very low settings—see below for details on which settings have the greatest impact on framerates.

There's a darker side to this chart as well. Unreal Engine 4 uses deferred rendering techniques that, generally don't work with multi-GPU. I did check SLI 1080 performance, and it was worse in all cases compared to a single GPU. Unreal Engine 4.15 did add an option for AFR SLI support, but Battlegrounds is using an older build, and it's still not clear if multi-GPU will ever happen. Considering the apparent CPU bottlenecks (see below), other items are likely much higher on the list before the developers even think about tackling multi-GPU.

Not that you really need to game at 4K ultra, right?

CPU performance scaling

What about the CPU side of things—how many cores does Battlegrounds need to run properly? Given the 1080 Ti results (and its price), I've decided to standardize on the GTX 1080 8GB for CPU scaling. I tested that card on four Intel CPUs along with four AMD Ryzen CPUs.

I do need to mention a game update that came out between the Intel Core and AMD Ryzen testing, which may be why Ryzen performs slightly better in some cases. Regardless, it's pretty clear that the most important thing with your CPU will be raw clockspeed, provided that you have at least four physical CPU cores. All four Ryzen CPUs were tested at the same 3.9GHz overclock—an overclock I expect nearly all Ryzen chips to reach. While SMT does add 6 fps at 1080p medium, going beyond 4-core/8-thread has a relatively minor impact on performance.

This is even more the case at 1080p ultra and above, where the four Ryzen CPUs are very nearly tied. The 8-core 1700 does come out on top, but not by a huge margin. Meanwhile the 2-core/4-thread Core i3 part struggles, particularly on minimum fps.

Of course, most of these CPU limitations are only visible with an ultra-fast graphics card. Using a slower mainstream card like a GTX 1060 3GB, Core i5 and Ryzen 5 are more than sufficient. I didn't run a full set of benchmarks, but there's less than a five percent difference between the i5-7500 and i7-7700K using a 1060 3GB.

There's also a "-USEALLAVAILABLECORES" launch option that may help some people. I didn't see a difference in limited testing with an i7-5930K, but I haven't checked performance with lower-end CPUs yet.

Mobile Battlegrounds

Shifting gears to notebook testing, the mobile CPUs aren't able to keep the GPUs fully fed with data. Clockspeed matters more in Battlegrounds than core counts, so the 4.8GHz i7-7700K can distance itself from the i7-7700HQ, which runs at around 3.5GHz while gaming.

The GT72VR has a slightly faster i7-7820HQ, plus better cooling to keep it running at higher Turbo clocks, but it still can't touch the desktop 7700K. Thanks to the CPU bottleneck, the mobile GTX 1080 actually falls below the desktop 1060 6GB card at 1080p medium, at least when combining average fps and minimum fps. At 1080p ultra, it's still slower than the desktop 1070. That's not normally the case, but here we're dealing with about a 20 percent CPU clockspeed deficit.

Once the notebooks are running at 1440p and 4K (via DSR on the GT62VR and GT73VR), the CPU bottleneck becomes less of a factor. The 1080 is nearly the same performance as the desktop card, while the 1070 and 1060 are 10-20 percent slower due to clockspeeds and thermal constraints. Still, it's nice to see gaming notebooks that are mostly within striking distance of desktop PCs—albeit at substantially higher prices.

Stop killing me, I'm running benchmarks!

Benchmarking Battlegrounds is a completely different beast from singleplayer games, thanks to the randomized starting locations. Trying to get a repeatable benchmark sequence with multiple people in the vicinity just isn't going to happen—if anyone is nearby, I'm likely to wind up dead long before I can finish testing. Plus multiple players in the same area tends to drop framerates, so if I ended up with too many people, I'd just quit/suicide and restart.

The urban settings in Battlegrounds have far more polygons and other objects to render, resulting in much lower framerates—out in the grassy countryside, performance can be up to 50 percent higher, but that's usually a shortcut to getting killed. Cities and buildings are where the action takes place, and I eventually settled on a benchmark location in Yasnaya Polyana. It's not quite as popular with the locals as some of the other cities, but it's still reasonably accessible.

Assuming I can get to my starting point without dying, I then run laps around a building in the northeast section of the city, logging framerates at the various settings and resolutions. I tested each setting twice, to control for variables like other players, using the best result (and sometimes running one or two more tests if the first two results were wildly different).

As noted earlier, I tested at medium and ultra quality. I suspect a lot of competitive players are running at the minimum quality settings (except for view distance) to gain a competitive advantage, but the degraded visuals really hurt the overall experience in my book. If you drop from medium to very low quality, that will usually boost framerates by 30-50 percent, about double the performance of the ultra setting—at least if you have a sufficiently potent CPU.

Fine tuning performance

The following numbers are not from running complete benchmarks on a bunch of different cards, but were gathered using a single GTX 1080 GPU running at 1440p, and noting the average framerate. I specifically selected a location where performance was lower, then started checking each setting.

The global preset is the easiest place to start tuning performance. Ultra quality gave a baseline score of 65 fps. Dropping to high improved performance to 81 fps, medium was 92 fps, low was 105 fps, and very low was 107 fps. CPU performance is still a factor even on the very low setting, so most systems won't be able to get much above the 100-130 fps range (depending on the area of the game world, naturally).

There's currently a 144 fps framerate cap in effect, which the devs have said they plan to remove in the future (it used to be 120 fps). Getting to 144 fps in my experience is difficult, as even at very low settings Battlegrounds tends to be CPU limited to around 120-130 fps during my testing.

If you're hoping to tweak the individual settings to better tune performance, I did some quick checking of how much each setting affects framerates using the ultra preset as the baseline. I then dropped each setting down to the minimum (very low) to see how much it helped.

Screen Scale: The range is 70-120, and this represents undersampling/oversampling of the image. It's like tweaking your resolution by small amounts, but I mostly recommend leaving this at the default 100 setting.

Anti-Aliasing: Surprisingly not a major factor, but this is because Unreal Engine requires the use of post-processing techniques to do AA. If you want better AA, you could set screen scale to 120 to get a moderate form of super-sampling. Going from ultra quality AA to very low quality AA only improved performance by 3 percent.

Post-Processing: A generic label for a whole bunch of stuff that can be done after rendering is complete, this is a moderate impact on performance—going from ultra to very low improved framerates by 10 percent.

Shadows: No surprises here, this is the most demanding individual setting (outside of resolution). This setting affects ambient occlusion and other forms of shadow rendering, and going from ultra to very low improved performance by just over 20 percent.

Texture: Only a minor impact on performance, provided you have enough VRAM. Dropping from ultra to very low increased framerates by 8 percent.

Effects: This setting relates to things like explosions, among other elements. It might have a more noticeable impact on performance with explosions going off (eg, in a red zone), but for the test scene dropping to very low only improved performance by 1 percent.

Foliage: Given all the trees and grass, you might expect this to have a larger impact on performance, but I only measured a 1 percent (1 fps) difference after setting it to very low.

View Distance: This has a much greater impact on CPU performance than on graphics performance, so if your CPU is up to snuff you can safely set it to ultra. On a Core i7 system, dropping to very low only made a 1 percent difference in framerates.

Motion Blur: There's a reason this is off by default, right? Spotting enemies while moving around is more difficult with motion blur enabled. But if you like the effect, turning it on has almost no impact on performance, maybe 1-2 percent.

Thanks again to MSI for providing the hardware. All testing was done with the latest Nvidia and AMD drivers, Nvidia 382.05 and AMD 17.5.1. My recommendation for Battlegrounds players is that Nvidia GPUs are the superior solution, for what should be obvious reasons. Hopefully AMD can improve the situation with new drivers, but currently even the fastest AMD GPUs are struggling.

If you already have an AMD card, plan on dropping settings below ultra if you want to hit 60 fps. Either that, or hope that game updates and new drivers will eventually improve the situation. AMD's 2GB cards are currently unable to handle the game at all, with the 460 2GB averaging just 20 fps at minimum quality 1080p. That's part of the pre-final nature of the game.

That wraps up my current Battlegrounds testing. I plan to revisit the game once it leaves Early Access. In the meantime, if you see me running laps around a building in Yasnaya, pop on over and say hi—maybe bring me an energy drink while you're at it. Whatever you do, don't shoot me—I'm only here for the science!