Best Lethal Company PC Settings 2026

Lethal Company ships with exactly three in-game settings: display mode, a framerate cap, and brightness. That’s the entire menu. On a GTX 1060 or older hardware, default settings typically deliver 25–35 FPS — playable, but well below what your rig can actually produce.

The gap exists because Lethal Company’s Unity HDRP renderer runs several expensive render passes by default that were never exposed in the options menu. Closing that gap takes two free steps: Steam launch options (30 seconds to apply) and the HDLethalCompany mod (free, client-side only). This guide covers both in sequence, plus a Windows power plan fix that eliminates micro-stutters.

If you want to understand what these settings are actually doing to your GPU before changing them, our PC game settings explained guide covers the mechanics behind each graphics category.

System Requirements: Where Does Your Hardware Sit?

Lethal Company has unusually low hardware requirements for a 2023 release. The developer never published official recommended specs, but community testing has established what “runs well” looks like in practice.

If your setup exceeds the minimum specs, you’re not bottlenecked by hardware — you’re bottlenecked by default render settings. The optimizations below apply across all GPU tiers.

The Three In-Game Settings (and What to Set)

Open the pause menu and go to Settings. You’ll find:

• Display Mode — Set to Fullscreen. This is the most important in-game toggle: Fullscreen gives the GPU exclusive control over the display output, eliminating desktop compositor overhead. Windowed Fullscreen is fine if you alt-tab frequently, but expect a minor framerate cost.
• Framerate Cap — Leave Uncapped. Capping at 60 on hardware capable of 90+ FPS provides no benefit. Cap only if you need thermal management on a laptop.
• Gamma / Brightness — Personal preference. Zero performance impact.

These three settings won’t dramatically change your FPS. The real gains are in the next two sections.

Steam Launch Options: 4 Free FPS Flags

Right-click Lethal Company in your Steam library → Properties → General → Launch Options. Paste this line exactly:

-nolog -no-stereo-rendering -screen-quality Fastest -force-d3d11-no-singlethreaded

What each flag does:

• -nolog — Disables Unity’s runtime log file. Unity games write a continuous diagnostic log to disk during play. On HDD installs, this creates I/O overhead that manifests as micro-stutters during active gameplay. Disabling the log removes that overhead entirely.
• -no-stereo-rendering — Turns off the stereo rendering pipeline, a VR-specific feature that Unity enables by default on all projects. Non-VR players carry its GPU overhead for no benefit. Disabling it is a free cycle recovery.
• -screen-quality Fastest — Forces Unity’s lowest shader quality preset. This strips several post-processing passes from the render pipeline — passes that consume GPU time even though no in-game toggle exposes them.
• -force-d3d11-no-singlethreaded — Enables multi-threaded rendering under DirectX 11. Without this flag, all GPU draw calls queue on a single thread — a well-documented bottleneck in Unity DX11 titles that causes framerates to stutter under scene complexity.

Before you add resolution flags: If you also want to apply -screen-width 960 -screen-height 540 for a performance boost on low-end hardware, open the game first and change Display Mode to Windowed or Windowed Fullscreen. Custom resolution flags in Unity don’t take effect in Exclusive Fullscreen mode.

HDLethalCompany: The Graphics Menu Lethal Company Doesn’t Have

The HDLethalCompany mod adds proper graphics controls by injecting configuration into Lethal Company’s HDRP render pipeline at runtime via BepInEx. Install it from Thunderstore — search “HDLethalCompany” in the Lethal Company mod collection. Once installed, open BepInEx/config/HDLethalCompany.cfg in any text editor.

Set these values based on your GPU tier:

Why fog is the highest-impact single setting: Lethal Company uses HDRP’s volumetric fog, which calculates light scattering through a 3D density volume using ray marching — at 1080p, over two million per-pixel fog calculations run every frame. On a GTX 1050, this single render pass can cut framerate from approximately 45 FPS to 25 FPS. Setting EnableFOG=false removes the pass entirely. The visual tradeoff is that foggy moons like March become clearer than intended — treat this as a last resort after all other reductions are applied first.

LOD has the biggest impact outdoors: LOD 0 halves the distance at which objects switch to lower-polygon models. Inside the facility, the effect is nearly invisible — tight corridors limit sightlines anyway. On outdoor moons like March or Rend, distant trees and terrain geometry are where low-end GPUs struggle hardest. Community benchmarks show roughly 15–20 FPS gain from LOD 1 to LOD 0 on outdoor maps, with minimal visual change at normal play distances.

Windows Settings That Actually Help

High Performance power plan: Open Control Panel → Power Options → select High Performance. Windows’ Balanced plan throttles CPU clock speeds dynamically to save power. In Lethal Company — a Unity title with variable CPU workloads — this produces stutters each time the CPU ramps back up from a low-load state. High Performance keeps clocks at maximum continuously, eliminating the ramp-up delay pattern.

NVIDIA GPU settings: Open NVIDIA Control Panel → Manage 3D Settings → Program Settings → add Lethal Company. Set Power Management Mode to “Prefer Maximum Performance.” This prevents the GPU from downclocking during lower-intensity scenes like the ship interior, which causes the same stutter-on-ramp-up issue as the Windows power plan.

For the full system-level optimization stack that applies across all PC games — including HAGS, Resizable BAR, and driver settings — our PC FPS optimization guide covers every layer in sequence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Lethal Company support DLSS, FSR, or XeSS?

No — the base game includes none of the major AI upscaling technologies. HDLethalCompany adds manual resolution scale control, but it’s straight downscaling rather than AI upscaling. If you need AI-based upscaling to restore image quality at low resolutions, Lossless Scaling on Steam (€4.99) works as an external frame interpolation layer that’s compatible with Lethal Company without mod conflicts.

Will using HDLethalCompany get me banned?

No. HDLethalCompany is client-side only — it modifies your local render pipeline settings and has no effect on other players’ game state. Lethal Company has no anti-cheat system. The mod has been available since late 2023 with no ban incidents. It doesn’t modify game files; it uses BepInEx to inject configuration into the render pipeline at runtime.

What resolution is best for low-end PCs?

Community testing identifies 960×540 (Resolution Scale 1.116 in HDLethalCompany) as the practical lower limit before the in-game terminal and lobby list become hard to read. At 640×360 you gain another 30–40% FPS, but UI readability suffers significantly. If you need to run at 640×360 for playability, pair it with Lossless Scaling to restore readability via external upscaling.

Sources

1. Steam Community. FPS Company: How to Gain Performance (Benchmarked). Steam Community Guides.
2. Sligili. HDLethalCompany — Additional Graphics Settings for Lethal Company. GitHub.
3. PCGamesN. Lethal Company System Requirements. PCGamesN.
4. Steam Community. The Ultimate Guide to FPS Performance Improvements in Lethal Company. Steam Community Guides.

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.