Arc Raiders' overpowered aim assist gets stronger at high frame rates, and I feel like I'm cheating when I use it

I remember the days of other children on the playground telling me I could 360 in a zombies map to get the ray gun. These sorts of 'hacks' never worked, unfortunately. That's why I felt a twinge of scepticism in me today when I spotted this report from IGN pointing out players on the Arc Raiders subreddit found you can magically get better aim by cranking up your fps. But I've tested it, and it's true.

This saga all started when a viewer of streamer Nickmercs noticed Nick's aim snapped onto Arcs (the bots in the game) as he was shooting. Nick uses a controller, which is key to the whole affair. After some took to accusing the previous Faze member of cheating, others discovered that the aim assist for controller players appears to be stronger in Arc Raiders, the higher your fps is.

With the PC Gamer RTX 5070 Ti rig, I set everything to low, dynamic lighting to static, and resolution to 1080p and managed to get up to 300 fps without frame generation. It's possible to cap the frame rate in the game's settings, so I have all I need to test this theory out.

I discovered that Reddit is actually right about this one. Shock horror, I know.

At 300 fps, I discovered a few quirks when it comes to aim assist. The first is that it's strangely inconsistent and locks on much easier as you move. But, once the reticule locks onto a target, it would move six or seven in-game feet back and forth without any input. I can put the controller down and watch it go. This is, frankly, absurd, and the five or so people I've shown it to have all scoffed.

At 30 fps, however, it locks on for a second or so, but I could never get it to track anywhere near as accurately or consistently. It wouldn't follow the Arc whatsoever without human input.

In the clip on the left, I move the reticule to try and lock onto the Arc, but it rarely follows for more than a second. The clip on the right has no input from me at all.

However, perhaps the most consistent way to point out how strong the aim assist is by aiming next to an Arc as it moves without actually touching it with the reticule. I found that, at 30 fps, the reticule would move ever-so-slightly towards the arc. At 300 fps, however, it would snap to the Arc and would require moving the thumbstick quite dramatically to the side to pull it away.

It sharply locks on, and the Arc simply won't let me go without a fight. I had to pull my right analogue stick halfway across to the right simply to pull away, and it would fire the reticule a couple of centimetres away from my target. It's almost distractingly sticky.

The left-most clip above only gently pulls my reticule inward, where the clip on the very right sharply snaps onto the Arc.

So, I knew aim assist was affected by the frame rate in some form, but I didn't yet know how that shapes up in real games. So I took me and my Razer controller to a public match.

Turns out being able to sharply lock onto an Arc doesn't just make shooting easier, but it also manages to follow an Arc through a tree. This is a straight advantage over mouse and keyboard. In the clip below, you can see it follow for an unbroken eight seconds, moving through a scattering of leaves on top of a tree. Even when it stops, it snaps back on a moment later.

I do find gently moving my reticule or even walking towards Arcs significantly improves my chances of activating the OP aim assist, and being short to mid-range helps too. Too far away and it gets lost, too close and it never quite snaps right.

Even at 60 fps, I do manage to get the reticule to lock onto Arcs, but only while moving and gently moving the stick. This means that aim assist is still a viable choice on low fps, though not nearly as potent. With some practice, I mastered the art of just doing enough for the game to help me out. Thanks, Arc Raiders.

In the clip below (60 fps), I am gently moving the stick, and aim assist is doing the rest of the work.

Still, to get Arc Raiders running at such a high fps, I have to make a lot of compromises I usually wouldn't when I play games. The resolution and graphics settings are significantly lower than I want. I also noticed that turning on frame generation makes aim assist much worse, too. I'd prefer a good-looking Arc Raiders to an easy Arc Raiders. And this explains why viewers managed to pick up on the aggressive aim assist in Nickmercs' stream.

According to PowerGPU, Nick is reportedly running a rig with an RTX 5090, AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, and 64 GB of RAM. It's a beefy rig that will naturally get up to average frames per second even at solid graphics settings, which will clearly show how strong the aim assist is.

If you like to play the game on a controller and are lucky enough to have a rig capable of a cool 240 fps, it might be worth cranking down the quality settings for such an improvement on your aim. Though, if I'm honest, I still thinking playing with a mouse and keyboard will be more accurate overall. Though that's a skill issue.