Best Deep Rock Galactic PC Settings 2026

Deep Rock Galactic doesn’t punish mid-range hardware — even a GTX 1060 can push 100+ FPS in most missions. The real threat is your CPU during late-game swarms, when the engine spawns dozens of Glyphids simultaneously and AI calculations compound fast. Four settings drive the majority of your FPS headroom: Volumetric Fog, Shadow Quality, Anti-Aliasing, and Resolution Scale. Nail those and you’ll run DRG smoothly at any hardware tier. For a broader primer on PC game tuning, see our PC optimization guide.

System Requirements

DRG’s requirements haven’t changed since 2020 and reflect how undemanding the game actually is. Meet recommended specs and you’ll hit 60+ FPS on High settings without breaking a sweat.

Quick Start: Recommended Settings by Tier

Start with Balanced. If frames drop below 60 during Elite Deep Dives or dense Hollow Bough missions, switch to Performance. RTX 3070 and above can comfortably run Quality.

Display Settings

Get these right before touching quality sliders:

• Resolution: Always native. Use the Resolution Scale slider to reduce render load, not your display resolution setting.
• Window Mode: Borderless Window gives you fast Alt-Tab without screen tearing.
• VSync: Off. It adds up to one frame of input lag with no gameplay benefit. Use the frame cap instead.
• Max Frame Rate: Cap at your monitor’s refresh rate (60, 144, or 165 Hz). Uncapped FPS burns GPU resources on frames your display can’t show.
• NVIDIA Reflex: On + Boost if available. Reduces system latency by 10–20 ms — noticeable during fast-reaction fights against Mactera Grabbers.

The Four Settings That Actually Move the Needle

Volumetric Fog — Always Low

Volumetric fog is DRG’s biggest single FPS drain. Unlike screen-space fog, volumetric fog is calculated as a full 3D texture updated every frame. In DRG, that cost compounds with every light source: your headlamp, thrown flares, the Driller’s Flamethrower, and Scout’s Flare Gun each add a pass to the calculation. In biomes like the Hollow Bough or Fungus Bogs — which have dense atmospheric haze — this can tank frames by 20–30 FPS compared to Low. Setting it to Low removes the expensive 3D calculation while preserving basic atmospheric haze and cave lighting. There’s no reason to run Volumetric Fog above Low unless you’re on an RTX 3080 or better and specifically want the full atmospheric effect.

Shadow Quality — Low to Medium

Shadows are the second-highest impact setting. DRG uses dynamic lighting throughout its caves — your headlamp casts real-time shadows from stalactites and rock formations, and flares bounce light off irregular geometry. Low removes most dynamic shadows, which looks flat in deeper biomes and reduces 3D spatial awareness in tunnels. Medium adds character and object shadow resolution at a reasonable cost and is the sweet spot for most rigs. High adds cascaded shadow maps with longer draw distance — useful for spotting Praetorian Guards at range, but the cost jumps significantly. If you’re on minimum specs, Low is fine. Recommended specs, go Medium.

Anti-Aliasing — FXAA for Performance, TAA for Quality

DRG’s procedural rock geometry has irregular edges that shimmer badly without anti-aliasing. FXAA is a post-process filter — it applies a slight blur to edges each frame and costs almost nothing. TAA uses temporal reprojection from previous frames to clean up edges more precisely, especially on particle effects and moving surfaces. The trade-off: TAA can introduce ghosting on fast camera swings and adds a small but real performance cost. For performance builds, FXAA is the better choice. For high-end rigs, TAA produces noticeably cleaner images in motion. To understand how these AA modes compare across more games, the game settings explained guide covers each mode in full.

Resolution Scale — Your Emergency FPS Lever

Resolution Scale renders the game at a percentage of your native resolution, then upscales it. Dropping from 100% to 80% at 1080p means the game renders at roughly 864p — barely noticeable on a desktop monitor but worth 15–25 FPS. Use this as a situational adjustment: if frames crater in a particularly dense Elite Deep Dive, pull Resolution Scale to 80–85% without changing anything else. Avoid dropping below 75% — at that point the image turns visibly soft and enemies become harder to distinguish against cave walls. One common mistake: accidentally leaving this at 110% or higher after experimenting, which forces the GPU to render above native resolution and cripples performance.

Settings to Leave Alone

Texture Resolution: Set to High or Ultra and forget it. Texture data is loaded to VRAM at session start, not calculated per frame — Low barely improves FPS but makes rock and dirt surfaces look muddy.

Effects: Controls particle density for explosions, bug viscera, and gas clouds. Don’t drop below Medium — too few particles at Low makes Engineer mines and Driller’s gas overlap harder to read in a swarm. High is fine on recommended specs.

Post Processing: Governs bloom, lens distortion, and screen-space ambient occlusion. Low is acceptable for performance builds. Medium adds ambient occlusion, which slightly improves depth perception in caves. High adds more intense bloom — looks atmospheric, rarely worth the FPS cost.

Config File Tweaks for Maximum FPS

DRG supports engine.ini overrides for players who want to push further than the in-game sliders allow. Navigate to %LOCALAPPDATA%\FSD\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\ and open or create Engine.ini. Under [SystemSettings], add:

fx.EnableNiagaraSpriteRendering=0
fx.MaxCPUParticlesPerEmitter=6
r.Decal.FadeDurationScale=0.001
r.ViewDistanceScale=0.4

These cut Niagara particle sprite rendering and cap emitter count per source — the biggest CPU-side gains during large swarms. The r.ViewDistanceScale=0.4 is more aggressive than the in-game Low preset (equivalent to 0.6) and meaningfully reduces background geometry processing in large chambers. Skip r.Fog=0 — it removes fog entirely rather than reducing it, which breaks cave lighting in a way that looks wrong rather than just minimal.

FPS Diagnostic

Sources

1. Ghost Ship Games. Deep Rock Galactic — System Requirements. Steam
2. Community Guide. How to Boost FPS in Deep Rock Galactic. Steam Community
3. Steam Community Discussion. What graphics settings are most impactful? Deep Rock Galactic General Discussion