How to improve FPS in R.E.P.O. (PC)
R.E.P.O. went from an almost unknown indie project to a viral phenomenon in a matter of days, which means it runs on a Unity engine designed for a small dev team, not the flood of simultaneous players it received. Its charm (and its performance cost) lies in the physics: dragging valuable objects between several players while ragdolls collide, bounce, and get tangled generates constant CPU spikes. On top of that there's procedural generation of the facilities and monster AI that has to recalculate paths through corridors that change every match. The good news is that graphically it's a modest game, so the optimization margin lies mainly in easing the physics simulation and CPU load, not in brute-forcing texture quality down. Here are the settings that actually move the needle in R.E.P.O.
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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 +51% free FPS.
Shadow Quality
Dynamic shadows in narrow procedural corridors force constant shadow-map recalculation as the group moves around. Dropping it to Low frees up a notable GPU margin.
Post-Processing
Bloom and vignette effects help the horror atmosphere, but they're recalculated across the full screen every frame. Reducing this removes that cost without affecting gameplay.
Resolution Scale
Lowering the resolution scale directly reduces the pixels to render without touching the UI. In R.E.P.O., with dark corridors and little fine detail, an 85% scale is barely noticeable but frees up GPU.
Anti-Aliasing
The default TAA adds a notable rendering cost and tends to produce a slight blur in motion during chases. FXAA is much cheaper in performance.
V-Sync
V-Sync adds input latency right at the moments when you most need quick reaction, like dodging a monster while carrying an object.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Texture Quality
R.E.P.O. doesn't have especially heavy textures, so the impact of lowering them is limited, but on systems with little VRAM it prevents microstutters when loading new procedural rooms.
Fullscreen Mode
Windowed or borderless windowed mode adds OS compositing overhead that's noticeable in a game this CPU-dependent. Exclusive mode reduces that overhead.
Physics Quality / Fixed Timestep
R.E.P.O.'s Unity engine allows adjusting the physics update frequency on some builds. Lowering it eases the CPU cost of shared ragdolls.
Ambient Occlusion
Ambient occlusion adds an extra rendering pass that, in dark and procedural interiors, contributes little perceptible contrast.
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 in the NVIDIA control panel to compensate for having V-Sync disabled.
- •Force maximum performance mode in the control panel if you're using a laptop with a dedicated GPU.
- •Keep Game Ready drivers updated: as an explosively growing indie game, optimizations arrive through engine patches.
AMD
- •Enable Radeon Anti-Lag to reduce input latency, especially important since V-Sync is recommended off.
- •Check that Radeon Chill isn't aggressively capping FPS during calm phases between extractions.
- •Use the driver's performance mode instead of balanced mode on laptops.
Sistema
- •Close Discord with overlay enabled, or disable its overlay in-game, since it duplicates audio processing and can cause microstutters.
- •Prioritize a CPU with good per-core performance over many cores: ragdoll physics depends more on single-thread speed.
- •Install the game on an SSD if possible; each facility's procedural generation involves constant asset streaming.
5. Known game issues
FPS drops with more than 4 players in the same room
The more players interacting with the same physical object at once, the more collision and sync calculations the engine has to resolve.
Microstutters when generating a new facility
When loading a new level's procedural layout, geometry streaming and monster AI initialization can cause a couple of seconds of stuttering.
Physics desync in matches with high latency
Due to the game's viral growth, the netcode has had moments of instability on servers with many concurrent players.
6. Frequently asked questions
Why does R.E.P.O. give me low FPS if it looks like a simple game graphically?▾
Is it worth lowering resolution to gain FPS in R.E.P.O.?▾
Does R.E.P.O. have DLSS, FSR, or XeSS?▾
Which component affects R.E.P.O.'s FPS more, the CPU or the GPU?▾
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Calculate FPS for R.E.P.O. →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →