How to improve FPS in Risk of Rain 2 (PC)
Risk of Rain 2 is a third-person action roguelike with a low-poly art style, so in the first minutes of any run it runs effortlessly on practically any PC. The real problem appears later: as you stack items (Wisp, Ukelele with electric chaining, stacked area items, shield gems, etc.) the game's Unity engine starts generating hundreds of simultaneous projectiles, particle effects, and physics calculations per second. In "endless mode" or runs that go past 40-50 minutes, this becomes a massive single-thread CPU load that no GPU can compensate for. This guide focuses on identifying what's actually the bottleneck (CPU, not GPU) and which settings move the needle surgically without wrecking the visual readability of combat.
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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 +54% free FPS.
Particle and Effects Density
Risk of Rain 2 doesn't have a single particle slider, but the general effects quality setting reduces the number of active particle systems Unity processes per frame. In late-game runs with Ukelele, Wisp's ring, or stacked area items, every bolt, explosion, or shot spawns its own particle system.
Dynamic Shadows
With dozens of enemies and projectiles on screen, each one casting a dynamic shadow adds rendering cost that multiplies exponentially compared to a game with few actors. Given the game's low-poly art style, the aesthetic loss from lowering shadows is minimal.
V-Sync
V-Sync introduces input lag and caps the frame rate to the monitor's refresh rate, counterproductive in a fast-paced action game with frame-perfect dodges on high difficulties (Monsoon).
Render Scale
Unlike other settings in this list, lowering resolution only helps if the bottleneck is the GPU, which is uncommon in RoR2 except in 4K with multiple players on split-screen or multiplayer.
Anti-Aliasing
Heavier AA adds post-processing cost per frame that competes for the same GPU resources as particle effects. FXAA offers acceptable smoothing at nearly zero cost.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Screen Resolution
When the bottleneck is purely CPU-bound (the typical case in RoR2's late-game), lowering resolution doesn't help real framerate, but if you're also playing on a 4K panel with local split-screen multiplayer, it does relieve GPU pressure.
Display Mode
Risk of Rain 2 uses the classic Unity engine, where exclusive fullscreen mode reduces Windows compositor overhead compared to borderless windowed mode, especially relevant on mid-range CPUs.
Draw Distance
On large maps like Sky Meadow or Sundered Grove, reducing draw distance limits how many active enemies and effects the engine has to simulate simultaneously outside the immediate field of view.
Texture Quality
RoR2 isn't a VRAM-intensive game given its low-poly style, so this setting has marginal impact except on GPUs with very limited memory.
Post-Processing (bloom, motion blur, DoF)
These effects stack on top of a scene already overloaded with item-based particles, adding extra post-processing passes across the whole screen. Motion Blur also hurts readability in chaotic fights.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
No upscaling support
+0% FPSRisk of Rain 2 doesn't natively implement DLSS, FSR, or XeSS: the game's Unity engine (an older version, pre-HDRP) doesn't include temporal-reconstruction-based upscaling support. Unofficial mods exist that inject FSR 1.0 via ReShade or similar, but they aren't supported by Hopoo Games/Gearbox and can cause artifacts or compatibility issues with anti-cheat in online matches. Since the real bottleneck is CPU, not GPU, upscaling wouldn't fix the underlying late-game drop issue anyway.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Low Latency Mode "On" in the NVIDIA control panel instead of "Ultra" to reduce input lag with no FPS cost, useful in frantic late-game fights.
- •Force the maximum performance power mode to prevent the GPU from clocking down during the quiet early stretches of each run.
- •Don't expect big gains from DLSS/Reflex: RoR2 doesn't support them natively, so the real savings will come from lowering particles and shadows.
AMD
- •Enable Radeon Anti-Lag to offset the input lag that CPU saturation can introduce during big waves, especially in Teleporter events.
- •Check that the driver power mode is set to Performance and not the default balanced profile, since RoR2 has very irregular load spikes.
- •On Radeon APUs or integrated GPUs, prioritize lowering shadows and render resolution before particles.
Sistema
- •Close third-party overlays (Discord, GeForce Experience, MSI Afterburner with active OSD) during long runs: every overlay adds constant overhead that's more noticeable when the CPU is already maxed out.
- •A processor with good per-core performance matters more than core count: RoR2 heavily depends on a single main thread for physics and item logic.
- •Install the game on SSD and keep at least 4-8GB of RAM free: asset-streaming stutters when generating new maps are especially noticeable on mechanical hard drives.
5. Known game issues
Drastic FPS drops in endless mode runs or runs past 40-50 minutes
This is the game's central problem: the more stacking items the team has, the more simultaneous projectiles and particle systems the Unity main thread has to process. Framerate can drop from 100+ FPS to 20-30 FPS on the same hardware simply from the passage of time, with resolution or GPU having nothing to do with it.
Stutter spikes during teleporter events
When the teleporter activates, the game spawns massive enemy waves, and on high difficulties or with many players, this can cause noticeable micro-hitches even in early runs, from the instant AI and physics load of many actors at once.
Lower performance in local split-screen multiplayer
Every additional split-screen viewport doubles or triples rendering cost, worsening the late-game particle problem much more noticeably than in online matches where only one camera is rendered.
6. Frequently asked questions
Why does my framerate drop only in long runs when it starts out perfect?▾
Is it worth buying a better GPU to fix the late-game FPS drops?▾
Which setting should I lower first if I notice stutter in runs longer than 30 minutes?▾
Does Risk of Rain 2 support DLSS or FSR?▾
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Calculate FPS for Risk of Rain 2 →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →