Risk of Rain 2 Performance Guide for Low End PCs

Publish date: 2024-08-04

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

Other Risk of Rain 2 Guides:

Contents

Introduction

Before we get on with the guide, I would like to apologise for the quality of the pictures.
The game is still new so there aren’t many tweaks to help improve performance. However with the few that we do have, they can greatly improve 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.

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 enabling true fullscreen, your computer is focusing ALL of its resources towards running the game. This allows you to achieve higher and perhaps, stabler fps. The downside is that when you alt+tab, you’ll have a second or two of blackscreen as it transitions between the game and your desktop. But hey, we just want to play the game, right?