Risk of Rain 2 - Performance Guide for Low End PCs

A quick guide on how to boost performance on older/weaker systems that struggle to achieve playable FPS.

Other Risk of Rain 2 Guides:

Table of Contents Hide

Introduction

In-game Settings

Display Settings

Launch Options

Performance

Introduction

Before we start the guide, I want to apologize for the picture quality. Since the game is still new, there aren’t many adjustments available to improve performance. However, the few tweaks we do have can significantly increase your FPS.

In-game Settings

General rule of thumb for low end users – ALWAYS start at the lowest. That means using the lowest settings the game allows.

Risk of Rain 2 - Performance Guide for Low End PCs

Most of the settings are turned down to their absolute lowest other than a select few. Some options such as Bloom and VFX Culling Bias currently aren’t toggleable or just resets themselves.

Display Settings

If you are still struggling for performance, you can try changing your display resolution.

I advise you to experiment with this but for the sake of MAXIMUM performance, we’ll be using both 1366×768 and 800×600. The smaller the resolution, the lesser the load put on your computer. This allows it to direct more of its resources towards running the game.

Launch Options

Most of the usual launch options such as -high don’t work. The only launch command that works as of right now is -window-mode exclusive which essentially puts your game into TRUE fullscreen.

What’s true fullscreen and why do I need it?

Well, the game was made on the Unity engine and Unity games don’t have a fullscreen mode, The given ‘fullscreen’ option is actually Windowed Borderless Fullscreen.

How is that different from true fullscreen?

Windowed Borderless Fullscreen imitates fullscreen but is actually a window without borders (hence, windowed borderless). That means your desktop is still running in the background so the resources of your computer are being directed to BOTH the game and your desktop. While this is useful for those who alt+tab frequently, it consumes performance alot.

So how do I actually enable true fullscreen?

It’s simple. Launch the game and once you’re in the main menu, press alt+enter twice. The first ‘alt+enter’ should put your game in windowed mode and the second ‘alt-enter’ puts your game into true fullscreen mode.

By using true fullscreen mode, your computer dedicates all its resources to running the game. This helps you get higher and more stable frame rates. The drawback is that when you switch between the game and desktop using alt+tab, you’ll experience a brief black screen for a second or two during the transition. But that’s a small price to pay if your main goal is just to play the game with better performance.