Palworld

Palworld World Tree graphics glitches: flicker, black textures and broken lighting

By the New Games Guide team · Last updated 2026-08-02

Visual glitches concentrated in one area are a different problem from glitches everywhere. An area-specific artifact means the game is failing on a particular set of assets or a particular lighting configuration — which is fixable — rather than your GPU being unwell, which mostly is not.

Start with the cheap fixes. The first three resolve the large majority of these reports.

Fix 1 — Delete the shader cache#

A stale or partially written shader cache is the number one cause of area-specific flicker, black surfaces and broken lighting after a patch or a driver update.

Close the game, delete these, and relaunch:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Pal\Saved\Shaders
%LOCALAPPDATA%\NVIDIA\DXCache
%LOCALAPPDATA%\NVIDIA\GLCache
%LOCALAPPDATA%\AMD\DxCache
%LOCALAPPDATA%\D3DSCache

Expect one stuttery session while it rebuilds. That stutter is the fix working, not a new problem. Do not touch SaveGames — that is your world and your character, and nothing here requires going near it.

Fix 2 — Clean-install the GPU driver#

Not "update" — clean install. Layered driver upgrades carry forward the corrupt cached compilations and stale per-game profiles that cause exactly this class of artifact.

• NVIDIA: run the installer, choose Custom, tick Perform a clean installation. For a stubborn case, use DDU in Safe Mode first.
• AMD: use the AMD Cleanup Utility or DDU, then install fresh.

If the glitches started right after a driver update, try the previous driver version. New drivers and recently patched games are a well-established bad pairing, and rolling back is a legitimate fix rather than a hack.

Fix 3 — Turn off upscaling and frame generation#

Temporal upscalers reconstruct frames from motion vectors and history. Where a scene has heavy foliage, volumetric lighting and lots of transparent geometry — which describes a giant tree almost exactly — a temporal artifact shows up as shimmering, ghosting or flicker that looks like a rendering bug.

Test in this order and stop when it looks correct:

1. Turn frame generation off entirely.
2. Set upscaling to off / native, and check whether the artifact disappears.
3. If it does, re-enable upscaling at Quality rather than Performance — lower presets have less history to work with and artifact far more.
4. Try the other upscaler (DLSS ↔ FSR ↔ XeSS). Their failure modes differ, and one may be clean where the other is not.

Fix 4 — Check whether you are out of VRAM#

Black or missing textures in one dense area, with everything else fine, is the classic signature of VRAM exhaustion. The game is not failing to render — it is failing to load the textures, and it substitutes black.

1. Open Task Manager → Performance → your GPU while playing in the affected area.
2. Watch Dedicated GPU memory. If it is pinned at maximum, that is your answer.
3. Drop texture quality one step and re-test. One step is usually enough.
4. Close browsers and other GPU-using applications — a browser with many tabs can hold gigabytes of VRAM.
5. Set resolution scale to 100% or below.

Fix 5 — Settings that specifically cause area artifacts#

If it is not VRAM, these are the settings most likely to be responsible. Change one at a time.

Fix 6 — Verify the installation#

A corrupt texture or mesh file produces reproducible corruption in exactly one place — which is what you are seeing. Verification finds it in minutes.

Steam → right-click the game → Properties → Installed Files → Verify integrity of game files. On Game Pass, use Windows Settings → Apps → the game → Advanced options → Repair.

If verification replaces files, delete the shader cache again afterwards.

Fix 7 — Rule out overlays and injectors#

Overlays and post-processing injectors hook the render pipeline and are a real cause of visual corruption, not just crashes. Disable all of them and re-test:

• ReShade and any post-processing injector
• Discord, Steam and GPU vendor overlays
• MSI Afterburner / RivaTuner (close it completely — it survives hiding the OSD)
• Screen recording and streaming capture hooks
• HDR auto-conversion tools

Also check your GPU control panel for per-game overrides. A forced anti-aliasing mode, a forced texture filtering quality, or a leftover profile from another title will produce artifacts that look exactly like game bugs, and they persist across reinstalls.

Fix 8 — Rule out hardware#

If nothing above helps, and the artifacts appear in other games too, treat it as hardware:

• Reset any GPU overclock — including factory overclocks on the card, via your vendor's utility. Memory overclocks in particular cause exactly this kind of texture corruption.
• Check temperatures under load. Thermal throttling and VRAM overheating produce artifacts before they produce crashes.
• Reseat the card and check power connectors if the machine is more than a couple of years old.
• Test at stock clocks with a fresh driver before concluding anything.

Artifacts confined to one game and one area are almost never hardware. Artifacts across multiple games usually are.

FAQ#

Why only around the World Tree?#

Landmark areas are the most graphically demanding parts of a map — dense foliage, large-scale transparent geometry, heavy volumetric lighting and a lot of unique assets in one place. They hit VRAM limits and expose temporal-upscaling artifacts before anywhere else does. It is the place your settings stop being sustainable, not a uniquely buggy location.

Will lowering settings hurt how the rest of the game looks?#

Marginally, and only for the settings you actually change. Texture quality one step down is close to invisible at normal viewing distance while freeing substantial VRAM. Turning frame generation off costs you smoothness, not image quality.

Do mods cause this?#

Frequently. Anything that replaces textures, meshes or shaders can produce area-specific corruption, and texture packs are the most common culprit because they increase VRAM demand beyond what the game budgeted for. Test vanilla before reporting anything.

Is it safe to delete the shader folder?#

Yes. It contains only compiled shaders, which the game regenerates automatically. It is one of the safest troubleshooting steps available, and it is a routine thing to do after every driver update.

It happens on console too. What can I do?#

Fewer options, but the same logic. Do a full power cycle (hold the power button until the console shuts down completely, not a menu restart) to clear the persistent cache, confirm the game is fully updated, and check you have adequate free storage. If it persists, it is a game bug and worth reporting with a photograph and your console model.