How to improve FPS in Raft (PC)
Raft throws you adrift in the middle of the ocean with nothing but a hook and the determination to survive, but its real technical challenge begins when your raft grows. Unlike most survival games, here you don't explore a static world: you literally build the physical object you move on, piece by piece, and the Unity engine has to simulate that entire structure as a single rigid body floating on procedural water. The more platforms, furniture, and decorations you add, the more expensive every frame becomes, regardless of how powerful your GPU is. On top of that there's an ocean that never stops calculating waves, buoyancy, and foam across the entire visible surface. Getting the settings right is the difference between sailing at a stable 60 FPS and suffering hitches every time you place a new wood plank.
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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 +43% free FPS.
Water Quality
Raft's water shader runs constantly across the entire visible ocean surface, calculating waves, refraction, and foam even when you're not looking directly at the sea. Lowering this setting reduces the resolution of those calculations and frees up GPU without the water losing credibility. It's the first setting the community recommends for a notable FPS improvement.
Reflections
Water reflections force Unity to render additional scene information projected onto the ocean surface every frame. On a large raft with many structures reflecting, this cost skyrockets. Dropping it to Low is barely noticeable during normal play but frees up GPU consistently.
Shadow Quality
With a mega raft full of structures, sails, and furniture, dynamic shadow calculation multiplies because every piece casts and receives shadow individually. Reducing shadow quality to Medium simplifies shadow maps without the game losing its floating-island atmosphere. Especially useful at the base when there are many light sources (torches, campfires).
Draw Distance
Raft is an open world of infinite ocean, so draw distance determines how many kilometers of water, islands, and floating debris are rendered at once. Reducing it to Medium keeps elements relevant to navigation visible (land, sharks, barrels) without forcing the engine to draw unnecessary horizon.
Anti-Aliasing
Anti-aliasing smooths the jagged edges of the raft and the sea horizon, but the heavier options have a disproportionate GPU cost in Unity. FXAA offers acceptable smoothing with a much smaller FPS impact than TAA or MSAA, being the preferred option for keeping smoothness on large raft screens.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Ocean Wave Detail
Wave simulation doesn't just affect visuals but also the buoyancy calculations that keep your raft afloat believably. Lowering wave detail reduces the sea geometry Unity has to constantly recalculate, which especially helps on very large bases where every point of contact with the water matters.
Anisotropic Filtering
Anisotropic filtering improves the sharpness of wood and metal textures at oblique angles, very present on your raft's platforms. Dropping it from high levels to 2x is barely noticeable day-to-day while building, but reduces texture sampling load consistently.
Texture Quality
Raft has relatively light textures as an indie game, so lowering this setting too much gives little FPS improvement while noticeably degrading the look of wood, rust, and cloth. Keeping it on High and adjusting other parameters first is usually the most efficient strategy.
Vegetation Density
Raft's islands are full of palm trees, bushes, and vegetation simulated with basic wind physics, an added cost on top of the already demanding raft physics. Reducing its density to Medium especially helps when exploring large islands or Balboa Island, without leaving the environment bare.
V-Sync
Vertical sync adds unnecessary input latency in a game where precision when hooking objects and dodging sharks matters. Disabling it and using the monitor's FPS limit or a G-Sync/FreeSync graphics card avoids tearing without penalizing performance.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Reflex if your driver version allows it to reduce latency when building and hooking moving pieces over water.
- •Force "Prefer Maximum Performance" power mode in the NVIDIA control panel to avoid clock drops during long mega-raft building sessions.
- •Keep drivers updated to the latest Game Ready version, since Unity benefits from shader optimizations NVIDIA regularly publishes.
AMD
- •Enable Radeon Anti-Lag to offset the extra latency introduced by the raft's constant physics simulation.
- •Check that the performance mode is set to "High Performance" in Radeon Software, since the balanced profile can limit clocks on integrated APU CPUs during intensive physics calculations.
- •Update Adrenalin drivers regularly, since Raft uses Unity and AMD publishes optimization profiles specific to engines based on it.
Sistema
- •Prioritize a CPU with good single-thread performance over core count, since raft physics depends heavily on a single Unity calculation thread.
- •Install the game on an SSD to reduce loading times when traveling between islands and avoid microstutters when streaming new ocean zones.
- •Close background applications that consume CPU (browsers, Discord with overlay) since Raft competes directly for those processor cycles with its physics simulation.
5. Known game issues
FPS drop on mega rafts
When the raft exceeds several hundred pieces, the joint rigid-body physics calculation can cause severe, consistent FPS drops even on high-end hardware, because the bottleneck is the CPU processing physics, not available graphical power.
Microstutters when generating new islands
When sailing long distances, procedural generation of new islands and ocean zones can cause small hitches while the game loads data in the background, especially noticeable on mechanical hard drives.
High VRAM usage in long sessions
Some players have reported a gradual increase in video memory usage during several-hour sessions in a row, which can lead to progressive stuttering until the game is restarted.
Estado: Partially mitigated in later Redbeet Interactive updates
6. Frequently asked questions
Why do my FPS drop as my raft gets very large?▾
Which setting gives the most FPS with the least visual loss?▾
Does Raft have DLSS, FSR, or XeSS?▾
What matters more for Raft, the CPU or the GPU?▾
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Calculate FPS for Raft →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →