How to improve FPS in Lethal Company (PC)
Lethal Company is the indie cooperative horror phenomenon created by a single developer, Zeekerss, on Unity. While the engine is lightweight by design, the game leans heavily on a very demanding positional 3D audio system for detecting monsters by sound (similar to Phasmophobia) and on procedurally generated interiors created every match, lit almost exclusively by your flashlight. Being a solo-developer project, it doesn't have the same optimization polish as a large studio, and much of the bottleneck comes from how Unity handles procedural generation, audio, and Thunderstore mods, not demanding graphics. This guide helps you get stable FPS without sacrificing your ability to hear (and see) what's hunting you.
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Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +41% free FPS.
Shadow Quality
The dynamic shadows from your flashlight and emergency lights are among the most expensive elements in the procedural interiors. Lowering them to Low is barely noticeable in already-dark interiors, since your flashlight is the main light source and hard shadows don't add much to reading the environment.
Render Resolution
Lethal Company doesn't include native upscaling (FSR/DLSS), so on integrated or very low-end GPUs manually lowering the render scale is the most direct way to recover FPS without touching other graphics options. Being an already dark game, the loss of sharpness goes almost unnoticed.
Draw Distance (Draw Distance)
Exterior moons generate vegetation, rocks, and structures at a distance that are rarely relevant to gameplay. Reducing this distance frees up CPU and GPU without affecting the reading of nearby threats.
V-Sync
Unity's internal V-Sync in Lethal Company introduces noticeable input lag, especially critical when you need to react fast to a monster you've detected by sound. Disabling it and capping FPS externally reduces latency without generating perceptible tearing in a game of this pace.
Post-Processing Effects (Bloom and Motion Blur)
Bloom around light sources and motion blur are effects with a disproportionate GPU cost relative to their visual contribution, and in several interiors they generate annoying halos that make it harder to see monsters camouflaged in the dark.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
Being a solo-developer game, textures aren't as well optimized in terms of compression and streaming as in an AAA title. Lowering to Medium reduces VRAM usage and avoids microstutters when loading new rooms during procedural generation, especially on GPUs with 4-6GB of VRAM.
3D Audio Quality / Voice Chat
Lethal Company's positional 3D audio system, combined with proximity voice chat, notably consumes CPU in 4-player matches. It doesn't affect visuals but does free up CPU threads that Unity can dedicate to interior generation and monster AI.
Thunderstore Mod Management
Lethal Company has one of the most active modding communities in the genre thanks to Thunderstore, but many popular mods aren't optimized and can cause severe FPS drops or memory leaks, just as historically happens in GMod or Mount & Blade: Bannerlord. Playing vanilla or with a lightweight modpack is the biggest available performance improvement for many users.
DirectX Compatibility / Graphics API
Running on a Unity version that doesn't always optimally handle DirectX 12 shader compilation, some users report less stuttering by forcing DirectX 11 via Steam launch parameters, at the cost of a small ceiling FPS loss on powerful machines.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Low Latency Mode to "On" from the NVIDIA Control Panel to reduce input lag when disabling the game's internal V-Sync.
- •Use the NVIDIA overlay (Alt+Z) to cap the framerate externally instead of relying on Unity's limiter, which is less precise and adds microstutter.
- •Update to the latest Game Ready drivers; Unity Engine periodically receives NVIDIA optimizations that reduce driver overhead in titles with many draw calls like this one.
AMD
- •Enable Radeon Chill or Radeon Boost if your GPU supports it, to stabilize FPS between low-load scenes (interiors) and higher-load ones (exteriors with vegetation).
- •Check that Radeon Anti-Lag is enabled, since it offsets part of the input lag introduced by the game's internal V-Sync if you decide to leave it on.
- •On Vega APUs or integrated GPUs, prioritize lowering render scale before texture quality, since the bottleneck is usually fillrate, not memory bandwidth.
Sistema
- •Close Discord, Steam, and screen-recorder overlays in the background: being a solo-developer game with limited multithread optimization, any extra CPU overhead is felt more than in a modern AAA engine.
- •Install the game on SSD to reduce load times when generating each new procedural interior; short "freezes" when entering a facility are common on HDD.
- •Keep your Thunderstore modpack as lightweight as possible and periodically check the BepInEx/plugins folder: abandoned or outdated mods are the most common cause of performance degradation after base-game updates.
5. Known game issues
Progressive memory leak in long sessions
Several players report a gradual increase in RAM and VRAM usage after multiple rounds without restarting the game, leading to progressive FPS drops. Being maintained by a single developer, patch cycles for this kind of bug are slower than at large studios; restarting the game every 4-5 rounds is the most effective workaround while it's not fixed at the root.
Stutter spikes when generating interiors (Dungeon Generation)
Procedural interior generation happens in real time upon entering, and on low- or mid-tier CPUs it can cause a 1-2 second freeze, especially in large facilities. It's a known architectural issue of the procedural generator, not a one-off bug.
Performance incompatibility with outdated popular mods
After base-game updates, it's common for widely used Thunderstore mods to fall out of sync and generate console errors that silently consume CPU, causing framerate drops that on the surface look like a vanilla-game problem.
6. Frequently asked questions
Why does Lethal Company run poorly on my PC if the graphics look simple?▾
Is it worth lowering graphics quality if the game is already very dark?▾
Do Thunderstore mods really affect performance?▾
What GPU do I really need to play Lethal Company well?▾
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Calculate FPS for Lethal Company →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →