The Feb 7th (Crafting) update revamped Rust’s graphics menu, exposing additional options for tuning and optimization. While much of the core settings are the same, many sub-options have changed. Furthermore, the performance impacts of certain quality sliders are also much smaller now. Upscaling is still limited to DLSS, but we can still hope. Here’s the latest optimization guide for Rust (2025).
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
- Enable Resizable BAR.
- Turn on Game Mode.
- Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
- Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
- Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
- Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
- Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.
Rust PC System Requirements
Min
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5-8250U|AMD Ryzen 5 5500
- Memory: 10 GB
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1050|AMD 500
- Storage: 40 GB
Rec
- OS: Windows 11 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i7-4790K|AMD Ryzen 5 2600
- Memory: 16 GB
- Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 3060| AMD RX 570
- Storage: 40 GB SSD
Rust: Resolution & Graphics Scaling
Rust is fairly CPU-bound at lower resolutions, as indicated by the following benchmarks. The game averages 70 FPS at 4K, 84 FPS at 1440p, and 86 FPS at 1080p using the maximum quality settings.
Test Setup
- CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K @ 5.3 GHz.
- Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
- Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
- Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
The graphics presets exhibit ample scaling. Curiously, Rust features a “Max” preset that doesn’t max out all the settings. The game averages 70 FPS using the maximum quality graphics settings at 4K. The presets grant the following uplifts:
- Max: 83 FPS (+19%).
- High: 90 FPS (+29%).
- Medium: 112 FPS (+60%).
- Low: 119 FPS (+70%).
Global Rendering & Render Distance
Global Rendering enables the rendering of distant objects (long-range LOD) across the map. This usually doesn’t impact performance but sometimes grants a 4-6% FPS boost when disabled. The associated render slider sets the exact render distance, but altering its value doesn’t seem to do much.
Shader Level & Draw Distance
Shader Level sets the rendering quality of various surfaces, including sand, terrain, wood, steel, rocks, etc. Setting the slider between 100 and 250 exhibits similar performance. Higher values reduce frame rates by 5-7%.
- >200 renders the simplest surfaces with minimal detail. For example, the sand is blocky and lacks advanced shading or mapping techniques.
- 200-300 enables basic shading without any normal or bump mapping.
- >300 renders the most detail, including normal and bump mapping. The sand uses complex shaders, including wetness and footprint.
- Most shaders are enabled past 300. Further increasing the value increases the shader LOD.
Draw Distance sets the LOD of large-scale geometry, including vegetation, electric poles, distant islands, etc. It also reduces the shader LOD at lower values (<1000), culling shadows and ambient occlusion.
- The maximum quality reduces performance by 10%.
- 1500-2000 is the sweet spot, just 5% slower than 500.
Water Quality & Reflections
Water Quality adjusts water surface detail, including waves and ripples. It also scales underwater geometry detail. The highest quality option can reduce frame rates by up to 10% around water bodies.
- 0-1 mainly adjusts the LOD of waves and ripples and underwater shading. Quality “1” is 4% slower than “0.”
- 2 increases the water surface detail. It’s up to 10% slower than the lowest quality.
Water Reflections set the quality of screen space reflections cast on the surface of water bodies. Setting it to “0” disables reflections, granting an 8% FPS boost. Lowering its value from 2 to 1 reduces the reflection LOD.
Grass Displacement & Shadows
Grass Displacement enables the displacement animation when tramping over grass and bushes. It doesn’t noticeably impact performance, except perhaps on lower-end CPUs.
Grass Shadows enable dedicated shadows for grass patches. It improves frame rates by 3-4% when disabled.
Soft Particles & Pixel Lights
Soft Particles enable “softer” diffusion of particle effects, including ember, fire, and smoke. It generally reduces the spread of the particle lighting effect. Subtly impacts performance.
Pixel Lights improve lighting by calculating the lighting on a pixel instead of a vertex level. They improve spotlight shapes and point-light highlights. The performance (and visual) impact is subtle.
Particle Budget & LOD Bias
Particle Ray Cast Budget sets the number of ray casts for particle collision testing. It impacts shadow and ambient occlusion cast by fire. Higher values produce longer, softer shadows as particle lighting is calculated over a wider area. The performance impact is trivial.
LOD Bias adjusts the LOD of man-made objects, including cars, boats, trains, buildings, etc. While irrelevant in the wilderness, it can dramatically impact frame rates in and around settlements. Reducing it can grant up to a 50% performance boost near bandit camps and compounds. The lowest values cull entire objects from view.
Shadow Quality & Resolution
Shadow Quality adjusts the soft shadow quality. The lowest value (0) renders hard shadows, while higher values render soft shadows. Values from 1 through 3 adjust the soft shadow quality. The highest quality option is 5-6% slower than the rest.
Shadow Resolution sets the quality of shadow maps. Surprisingly, its visual impact is negligible. The lowest quality option is 4% faster than the rest.
Distance Shadowmask allows static objects to cast shadows on dynamic objects (players, NPCs, and creatures). The performance impact depends on the number of characters onscreen.
Shadow Cascades, Distance, & Lights
Shadow Cascades partition the game world into different zones or cascades. The cascade nearest to the player renders the most detailed shadows, with the following cascades decreasing in quality.
- 0 enables only the nearest shadows.
- 2 enables short and midrange shadows. 2-3% slower than “0.”
- 4 enables low-resolution shadows for distant objects. Up to 6% slower than the lowest quality.
Shadow Distance adjusts the shadow LOD. It supersedes the cascade setting but can’t render past the cascaded shadow distance maximum range. Reducing it improves performance by up to 7%.
Max Shadow Lights adjust the number of artificial lights that can cast shadows. It primarily impacts performance at night, reducing frame rates by 2-4% over the lowest quality option.
Particle & Object Quality
Particle Quality sets the LOD of particle effects, including fire, embers, smoke, and spotlights. Higher values increase the range of artificial lighting as the particle distance increases. It minimally impacts performance.
Object Quality sets the LOD for man-made structures, buildings, rocks, and certain types of vegetation. Its performance impact ranges from 3-6%, mostly noticeable above 100.
Tree Quality & Meshes
Tree Quality sets the LOD for trees. It’s most evident around forested areas, reducing frame rates by up to 5% at the highest quality option.
Max Tree Meshes sets the number of trees using high-quality geometry (meshes). Its performance impact is nominal.
Terrain & Grass Quality
Terrain Quality sets the LOD of tessellation applied to terrain meshes. Higher values produce slightly more detailed terrain. The performance impact ranges from 2-3% at higher quality options.
Grass Quality sets the LOD, including the render distance and density of grass. It trivially impacts performance (2%).
Ambient Occlusion & Sun Shafts
Ambient Occlusion renders self-contained shadows along object boundaries, edges, crevices, and intersections. It drastically improves visual fidelity but reduces frame rates by up to 6%.
Sun Shafts enable volumetric rays (god rays) for sunlight as it passes through trees and canopies. It reduces performance by 3-4%.
Occlusion Culling & Contact Shadows
Occlusion Culling culls geometry hidden by other geometry, improving performance. It can grant frame rate boosts of up to 10% in settlements and densely packed areas.
Contact Shadows improve shadow quality and accuracy by rendering additional shadow detail where objects intersect. They reduce frame rates by 2-3%.
Upscaling & Anti-Aliasing
Rust is limited to DLSS 3.7 upscaling. The performance gains from upscaling are minimal, partially due to CPU bottlenecks. The maximum performance (50%) preset is 10-20% faster than native. Upgrade to DLSS 4 for superior image quality.
TSSAA (Temporal Super Sampling Anti Aliasing) is over 10% faster than NVIDIA DLAA, but the visual quality is subpar. Much detail is lost due to excessive blurring. FXAA and SMAA fail to tackle temporal aliasing, so DLAA remains the best option for RTX users.
Rust: VRAM Usage
Rust uses over 16 GB of graphics memory at 4K “High” and above. The medium quality preset brings it below 12 GB, while the lowest limits it to under 10 GB.
1440p and 1080p use over 14 GB at higher quality settings, though this is slightly alleviated using upscaling.
Rust: CPU Bottlenecks
Rust is severely CPU-bound at 1080p, with an average GPU-Busy deviation of 21%. This figure goes as high as 50% in demanding areas.
QHD or 1440p is also CPU-bound, with an average deviation of 13%. Deviations of 30-35% were observed in heavily packed scenes.
4K is mostly GPU-bound, but upscaling can make it moderately CPU-bound, ranging from 10-20% in CPU-intensive regions.
Rust Performance Summary
- Global Rendering: If you’ve got an old or lower-end CPU, disable this.
- Shader Level: Set it to 350-450 for a quality-performance balance.
- Draw Distance: 2000 is the sweet spot.
- Water: Set water quality and reflections to 1 for a hefty boost around water bodies.
- LOD Bias: Lower this if you experience low frame rates in settlements.
- Shadows: Set shadow quality and cascades to 2.
- Mesh Quality: Set the mesh sliders to 75% or 50% if you continue to experience poor performance.
- Excluded settings like textures, texture filtering, and billboards don’t impact performance and should be maxed out.
Optimized Settings for Rust (2025)
| High-end | Midrange | Low-end PC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 4K (3840×2160) | 1440p (2560×1440) | 1080p (1920×1080) |
| FPS Target | >60 FPS | >60 FPS | 60 FPS |
| Global Rendering | On | On | Off |
| GR Distance | 1500 | 1500 | – |
| Shader Level | 600 | 400-500 | 400 |
| Draw Distance | 2500 | 2000 | 2000 |
| Parallax Mapping | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Water Quality | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Water Reflections | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Grass Displacement | On | On | On |
| Grass Shadows | On | On | On |
| Precise Terrain Billboards | On | On | On |
| Soft Particles | On | On | On |
| Pixel Light Count | 8 | 4 | 2 |
| Particle Raycast Budget | 1024 | 1024 | 1024 |
| LOD Bias | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Texture Mipmaps | Full | Full | Half |
| Anisotropic Filtering Mode | Per Texture | Per Texture | Per Texture |
| Anisotropic Filtering Level | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Shadows Quality | 3 | 2 | 2 |
| Shadowmask Mode | Distance | Distance | Distance |
| Cascades | 4 | 4 | 2 |
| Max Distance | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Max Shadow Lights | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Particle Quality | 100 | 100 | 60-80 |
| Object Quality | 200 | 200 | 150 |
| Tree Quality | 200 | 200 | 150 |
| Max Tree Meshes | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Terrain Quality | 100 | 100 | 50 |
| Grass Quality | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Decor Quality | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Ambient Occlusion | On | On | On |
| Sun Shafts | On | On | On |
| Occlusion Culling | On | On | On |
| Contact Shadows | On | On | On |
| Upscaling/Anti-Aliasing | DLSS Balanced | DLSS Balanced | DLSS Balanced |
| High-end (4K) | Mid-range (1440p) | Low-end (1080p) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Core i7-13700K|Ryzen 7 7700X | Core i5-12600K|Ryzen 5 7600 | Core i5-12400 AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
| GPU | GeForce RTX 4080 Super | GeForce RTX 4070 Super | RTX 3060|RTX 4060 |
| Memory | 32GB (dual-channel) | 16GB (dual-channel) | Less than: 16GB (dual-channel) |
Best Graphics Settings for Rust: Low-end PC (2025)
Here’s a link to our low-end PC performance guide for Rust.
| RTX 3060 | RTX 4060 | RTX 3060 Ti | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 1080p (1920×1080) | 1080p (1920×1080) | 1080p (1920×1080) |
| FPS Target | >60 FPS | >60 FPS | 60 FPS |
| Global Rendering | Off | Off | On |
| GR Distance | – | – | 1500 |
| Shader Level | 600 | 600 | 600 |
| Draw Distance | 2000 | 2500 | 2500 |
| Parallax Mapping | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Water Quality | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Water Reflections | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Grass Displacement | On | On | On |
| Grass Shadows | On | On | On |
| Precise Terrain Billboards | On | On | On |
| Soft Particles | On | On | On |
| Pixel Light Count | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Particle Raycast Budget | 1024 | 1024 | 1024 |
| LOD Bias | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Texture Mipmaps | Full | Full | Full |
| Anisotropic Filtering Mode | Per Texture | Per Texture | Per Texture |
| Anisotropic Filtering Level | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Shadows Quality | 2 | 3 | 3 |
| Shadowmask Mode | Distance | Distance | Distance |
| Cascades | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Max Distance | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Max Shadow Lights | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Particle Quality | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Object Quality | 200 | 200 | 200 |
| Tree Quality | 200 | 200 | 200 |
| Max Tree Meshes | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Terrain Quality | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Grass Quality | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Decor Quality | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Ambient Occlusion | On | On | On |
| Sun Shafts | On | On | On |
| Occlusion Culling | On | On | On |
| Contact Shadows | On | On | On |
| Upscaling/Anti-Aliasing | DLSS Balanced | DLSS Balanced | DLSS Quality |
