Best Dead By Daylight Settings for FPS in 2026: Competitive and Low-End Presets

Finding the best Dead by Daylight settings for FPS in 2026 requires balancing high frame rates with tactical visibility across every realm. Behaviour Interactive’s asymmetric horror title runs on Unreal Engine, and while the developer’s ongoing visual overhauls have modernized lighting, fog, and character textures, they have also increased the load on both your processor and graphics card.

Dead by Daylight is surprisingly nuanced when it comes to system performance. Out of the box, the PC client is locked to 60 FPS with V-Sync enabled, masking your hardware’s true capabilities and introducing noticeable input latency. The engine is heavily reliant on single-threaded CPU performance to compute Survivor physics, Killer power hitboxes, and server-client state reconciliation. On the GPU side, visual features like dynamic volumetric fog, screen-space reflections, and high-density shadow maps aggressively tax frame times.

Crucially, maxing out your graphics settings in Dead by Daylight actually puts you at a severe competitive disadvantage. Ultra-tier volumetric fog and dense dynamic shadows create heavy visual clutter, allowing Survivors to blend seamlessly into dark corners on maps like Midwich Elementary School or Borgo. By tuning specific engine variables, you can eliminate frame drops, drop input lag to absolute minimums for hit validation and Great Skill Checks, and spot Killer red stains or Survivor scratch marks much easier.

Quick Preset

If you want to skip the deep dive and instantly optimize your client, use the reference table below. We have tested these configurations across competitive play, balanced gaming rigs, and budget or integrated GPU setups.

Settings That Matter Most

In Dead by Daylight, graphics settings fall into two distinct categories: options that ruin visual clarity while hammering your frame rate, and options that keep crucial game mechanics like scratch marks and aura reads crisp without hurting performance. Understanding these settings allows you to customize your graphics pipeline for maximum frame output and optimal competitive visibility.

Volumetric Fog Quality

Performance Impact: Very High (~20% to 25% FPS change between Ultra and Low)
Competitive Impact: Critical

Volumetric Fog Quality is the single largest performance sink in the entire game engine. On High and Ultra settings, Unreal Engine casts complex, light-reactive mist density across tiles, filling loop structures, jungle gyms, and open areas with thick haze. This creates massive GPU fill-rate bottlenecks during frantic chases. From a competitive stance, heavy fog masks Survivor silhouettes at long range and obscures Killer red stains on dark tiles. Dropping Volumetric Fog to Low strips away atmospheric haze, instantly boosting your frame rate and giving you clear line-of-sight across entire maps like Yamaoka Estate and Garden of Joy.

Shadow Quality

Performance Impact: High (~15% FPS change between Ultra and Low)
Competitive Impact: Critical

Shadow Quality handles the resolution of dynamic shadow maps cast by map lights, flashlights, and environmental elements, as well as ambient occlusion in corners. High and Ultra settings render deep, soft-edged shadows that make dark Survivor outfits almost invisible in dark areas. Setting Shadow Quality to Low brightens environmental shadows and flattens scene lighting without removing essential gameplay cues. The result is a substantial frame rate uplift during tile loops and a massive advantage when scanning dark brush or corners for stealthy Survivors.

Effects Quality

Performance Impact: Moderate to High (~10% to 15% FPS change, heavy frame time spikes)
Competitive Impact: High

Effects Quality governs particle density, including blood splatters, generator sparks, dynamic fires, and Killer power visual effects like The Plague’s Vile Purge, The Doctor’s shockwaves, or The Singularity’s biopods. Setting this option to Low can cause certain visual cues—such as Survivor scratch mark trails—to render sparsely or disappear prematurely on certain surfaces. However, High and Ultra settings cause severe 1% low frame time drops when multiple particle systems activate simultaneously. Setting Effects Quality to Medium is the sweet spot: it preserves full particle visibility for tracking without inducing frame stutters during heavy combat actions.

Post-Processing Quality

Performance Impact: Moderate (~8% to 12% FPS change)
Competitive Impact: Moderate

Post-Processing controls bloom, depth of field, motion blur filters, and screen-space reflections. Ultra post-processing applies heavy blur and glow effects around bright lights, generators, and hook sacrifice pillars, which obscures visual clarity during night maps. Lowering Post-Processing to Low removes these heavy camera filters, creating a crisp image that sharpens character edges and reduces visual noise, while freeing up valuable shader pipeline execution time on your graphics card.

Texture Quality

Performance Impact: Low (VRAM dependent)
Competitive Impact: Low

Texture Quality affects the surface details of map assets, character models, and environmental props. Unreal Engine streaming handles textures efficiently, meaning this setting relies almost entirely on dedicated video memory (VRAM) rather than active GPU processing power. If your graphics card has 6GB of VRAM or more, keep Texture Quality on High or Ultra. It keeps character models and scratch mark edges crisp with zero impact on your average frame rate. Only drop this to Medium or Low if your GPU has 4GB or less of VRAM to prevent severe texture swapping stutters.

Resolution Scale

Performance Impact: Direct linear scaling
Competitive Impact: High

Resolution Scale renders the internal game engine at a percentage of your display’s native resolution before scaling it to fit your monitor. Lowering this slider below 100% reduces GPU rasterization load instantly, but it makes the image heavily pixelated and blurry. Distant Survivors become indistinct clusters of pixels, making long-range Killer sniping or Survivor scanning almost impossible. You should strictly keep this setting at 100% and rely on individual graphics toggles to recover performance instead.

Upscaling and Frame Generation

Dead by Daylight offers integrated upscaling technologies like AMD FSR and temporal dynamic resolution. While upscaling technologies are excellent for recovering frame rates in modern single-player games, their application in a competitive asymmetric multiplayer game requires caution.

Spatial and temporal upscaling render the internal image at a lower resolution and reconstruct it using motion vectors or spatial filters. In Dead by Daylight, enabling aggressive FSR modes introduces noticeable shimmer and visual artifacts around thin geometric elements like foliage, chain-link fences, and scratch mark trails. This visual noise makes tracking fast movement much harder during high-speed loops.

If you are struggling to maintain a stable 60 FPS on low-end hardware, set FSR to Quality or Balanced. However, on mid-range and high-end hardware, native resolution rendering with TAA or AA disabled yields the cleanest tracking image and lowest internal frame latency. Frame generation technologies should generally be avoided in this title; while they artificially bump your reported frame counter, they add internal queue delay, which negatively affects skill check input precision and frame-perfect Killer lunges.

Outside the Game

To get the absolute best performance out of Dead by Daylight, you must look outside the in-game options menu. By default, the game enforces a 60 FPS cap and enables V-Sync at the engine level, creating artificial input lag that hampers timing-critical gameplay.

Unlocking 120 FPS via Engine Configuration

Dead by Daylight allows you to safely adjust frame rate targets up to 120 FPS by editing your local configuration file. Modifying this specific file does not trigger Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) actions, as it only alters developer-exposed configuration lines.

1. Press Win + R, type %localappdata%\DeadByDaylight\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor, and press Enter.
2. Locate the GameUserSettings.ini file, right-click it, and open it with Notepad.
3. Locate the line reading FrameRateLimit=60.000000 and change it to FrameRateLimit=120.000000.
4. Locate bUseVSync=True and change it to bUseVSync=False.
5. Save the file and close Notepad. Right-click GameUserSettings.ini, select Properties, check Read-only, and click Apply to prevent the game from resetting your FPS target upon launch.

Windows and Graphics Driver Optimizations

Once your engine frame rates are unlocked, ensure your operating system and graphics drivers are configured to process frames as quickly as possible:

• Enable Windows Game Mode: Open Windows Settings > Gaming > Game Mode and toggle it On. This prioritizes CPU scheduling threads for the game process and halts background task interrupts.
• Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS): Enable HAGS in Windows Display Settings to reduce driver-level CPU overhead, stabilizing 1% low frame rates during chaotic map events.
• NVIDIA Control Panel / AMD Software: Open your GPU control panel, locate Dead by Daylight’s program profile, set Power Management Mode to Prefer Maximum Performance, and configure Low Latency Mode / Anti-Lag to On or Ultra. This minimizes render queue delay between your mouse inputs and frame outputs on screen.
• Launch Options: In Steam or the Epic Games Launcher, add -dx12 to your command line arguments if your CPU is older, as DirectX 12 handles multi-threaded draw calls far more efficiently across Unreal Engine environments. If you experience micro-stuttering on DX12 due to shader compilation, revert to the default DX11 renderer by removing the command line parameter.

Settings to Leave Alone

While tweaking performance variables is essential, modifying certain options yields no performance gain and actively hurts your gameplay experience.

• Audio Output Settings: Engine audio processing takes up negligible CPU cycles. Never lower your audio quality or collapse spatial channels to save performance. Audio cues—such as Survivor breathing, injured moans, Killer footsteps, and lullabies—are vital for situational awareness.
• Anti-Aliasing Toggles: Disabling Anti-Aliasing entirely gives a microscopic boost to frame times, but creates severe pixel jaggies on foliage and fences. Leave Anti-Aliasing on Low or TAA unless you are running at 4K resolution, where native pixel density minimizes aliasing naturally.
• In-Game Brightness / Gamma Sliders: Dead by Daylight intentionally limits native gamma adjustments in-game to preserve lighting balance. Do not artificially blow out display settings on your monitor to compensate for dark maps; doing so degrades picture contrast, making red stain highlights washed out and harder to track during loops.

FAQ

How do I unlock 120 FPS in Dead by Daylight?

To unlock 120 FPS, open your GameUserSettings.ini file located in %localappdata%\DeadByDaylight\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor. Change FrameRateLimit to 120.000000 and set bUseVSync to False. Save the file and set its properties to Read-only to keep the engine from overwriting your setting.

Why does my game stutter when playing certain Killers or maps?

Stuttering is usually caused by particle effect instantiation or dynamic lighting shaders loading during actions (such as sound effects, hit validation, or complex powers like The Doctor’s shockwaves). Lowering Effects Quality and Volumetric Fog Quality reduces these shader compilation frame drops and helps smooth out frame times.

Will modifying configuration files get me banned by Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC)?

Editing configuration parameters inside GameUserSettings.ini (such as FPS targets, V-Sync, or basic graphics quality presets) is completely safe and will not trigger an Easy Anti-Cheat ban. However, altering core game asset files, pak files, or using third-party injectors to bypass engine lighting limitations violates terms of service and can result in account bans.

Does lowering graphics settings make Survivor scratch marks easier to see?

Yes. Lowering Shadow Quality and Volumetric Fog Quality brightens dark areas and strips out dense fog, making bright red scratch marks pop clearly against map textures. However, do not drop Effects Quality below Medium, as settting it to Low can reduce particle density and make scratch mark trails thinner and harder to follow.