Best Deadlock settings for FPS and visibility

Which Deadlock video settings to turn down for FPS, how to set up DLSS or FSR, and the options that make enemies easier to see in a fight.

The short answer

For more FPS, turn on Advanced settings under Settings > Video > Performance and lower Screen space AO, Shadow quality and Fog quality first. Keep your native resolution and let DLSS or FSR do the scaling, set NVIDIA Reflex (AMD Anti-Lag 2.0 on Radeon) to Enabled, and cap your frame rate at a number your PC actually holds in a six-versus-six teamfight.

For visibility, the big wins are in the Accessibility and Game tabs, not the graphics menu: a custom enemy colour, Reduce flashing effects, Reduce camera shake and health numbers on bars.

1. 01Measure FPS in a real teamfight, not in the Hideout. Lane numbers flatter your PC.
2. 02Change one setting at a time and play a match before you change the next.
3. 03Fix the drops before you chase the peak. A steady 144 feels better than 200 that dips to 90.

Where the video settings are

Settings > Video has four tabs: Display, Performance, Options and HUD Telemetry. Performance opens on a single Rendering quality preset (Low, Medium, High, Ultra); flip on Advanced settings to get the individual options.

Leave Preview rendering changes on while you tune. The menu goes see-through for a moment after each change so you can see what it did to the game world.

Display: resolution, window mode and brightness

Run your monitor’s native resolution and scale with an upscaler instead. A lower output resolution blurs the HUD along with the enemy models; an upscaler keeps the UI sharp.

Window mode offers Full Screen, Borderless Window and windowed modes. Full Screen Brightness only works in full-screen modes, which is why the slider sometimes does nothing. If dark corridors and the underground routes look muddy, raise it a step or two rather than turning up your monitor.

If the game warns you that Windows is running your display below its highest refresh rate, fix that in Windows display settings first. No graphics setting makes up for a 144 Hz monitor stuck at 60 Hz.

On a 21x9 monitor, Inset HUD pulls HUD elements in from the far corners towards the centre. Most ultrawide players keep it on so cooldowns stay in peripheral vision.

Recommended graphics settings

Valve writes the performance cost into each tooltip. These are starting points for a mid-range PC; go up a step on anything you have headroom for.

1. 01Screen space AO: Off or Low. It only adds soft contact shadows, and the tooltip rates it a moderate, consistent cost. Drop this first.
2. 02Shadow quality: Low or Med. Shadows get expensive in busy fights and add nothing to reading one.
3. 03Fog quality: Low. This lowers the resolution of the volumetric fog to save performance. It doesn’t remove the fog, so don’t expect clearer sightlines.
4. 04Texture quality: as high as your graphics card’s memory allows. It costs VRAM more than frame rate, so High is fine on most modern cards; drop it if you stutter after long sessions.
5. 05Post process bloom and Effects bloom: Off for a cleaner image. Both are rated small cost, but bloom adds glow around bright abilities at exactly the moments you need to see through them.
6. 06Area lights: Off on a low-end PC. Small cost normally, but the tooltip warns it can be higher on low-end systems.
7. 07Depth of field: Off. The cost is negligible, and nothing on screen gets blurred on purpose.
8. 08Anti-aliasing: FXAA if you aren’t using a temporal upscaler. It only applies when FSR2 is off, and DLSS or FSR handle edges themselves.

What the presets change

The Low preset turns off Screen space AO, both bloom options, anti-aliasing, area lights and depth of field, and puts shadows, fog and textures at their lowest. Ultra turns them all on at maximum and picks DLSS as the upscaler.

If you’d rather not touch every slider, pick the preset one step below what your PC handles, turn on Advanced settings, then raise only Texture quality.

Upscaling: DLSS, FSR or Stretch

Upscaling technology has five choices: Stretch (no upscaler, just a lower render resolution stretched to fit), FSR, FSR2 (TAA), FSR3 (TAA) and NVIDIA DLSS. An upscaler renders fewer pixels and rebuilds a full-resolution frame, and it’s the biggest single FPS gain in the menu.

Stretch and the original FSR give you a Render quality slider from 40% to 100%. FSR2, FSR3 and DLSS use a scaling mode instead: 1x, 1.5x, 1.7x or 2x, where the number is how much smaller the internal image is on each side. DLSS adds Auto and 1x (DLAA), which is native resolution with DLSS anti-aliasing and no FPS gain.

At 1080p the ratio matters. 1.5x renders 720p and rebuilds 1080p from it; 2x renders 540p, and that’s where enemy silhouettes at range start to smear. At 1440p and 4K you can push further before it hurts.

1. 01NVIDIA RTX card: DLSS at 1.5x. DLSS needs a GeForce RTX card.
2. 02DLSS Model: Transformer is sharper, especially at higher scaling ratios, but costs more than CNN. Transformer if you have FPS to spare, CNN if you don’t.
3. 03AMD, Intel or older NVIDIA: FSR3 at 1.5x. Raise FSR sharpness a little if the image looks soft.
4. 04Already at your FPS cap without an upscaler? Use DLSS 1x (DLAA) or no upscaling and take the sharper image.

FPS cap, V-Sync and NVIDIA Reflex

In-game maximum FPS goes from 60 to 1000, and for anything outside that the menu points you to the +fps_max launch option. Dashboard maximum FPS caps the menus separately. Set it low; nobody needs hundreds of FPS in a menu.

VSync removes screen tearing but, as the tooltip says, adds input latency. NVIDIA Reflex (Disabled, Enabled, Enabled + Boost) cuts input lag by keeping the CPU and GPU in sync. Boost draws extra GPU power and can cost a little FPS, so plain Enabled is the sensible default. Radeon cards get AMD Anti-Lag 2.0 in the same spot.

With a G-Sync monitor, the game recommends G-Sync, V-Sync and Reflex all on together. Without variable refresh rate, keep V-Sync off, Reflex on, and cap FPS at a number you hold in fights.

Rendering API: leave it on recommended

The Rendering dropdown in Video > Performance picks the graphics API, and one option is labelled recommended for your system. Stay on it. Switch only to troubleshoot crashes or stutter that a driver update didn’t fix, and switch back if it doesn’t help.

Settings that help you see enemies

Deadlock is bright and full of particle effects, and most of the settings that help you read a fight sit outside the graphics menu.

1. 01Accessibility > Custom UI colors: set Enemy color to something that stands out on your screen. It colours enemy health bars and other enemy indicators.
2. 02Enemy damage color marks the chunk of health an enemy just lost (yellow by default). Enemy zipline color also recolours enemy objectives on the minimap.
3. 03Accessibility > Reduce flashing effects: on. It cuts down flashing and strobing, though Valve notes it won’t remove all of it.
4. 04Game > Camera Settings > Reduce camera shake: on. Less shake from impacts and explosions keeps your crosshair readable when you’re the one getting hit.
5. 05Camera FOV runs from 75 to 90 degrees. If you ever lowered it, put it back to 90 to see more of the fight.
6. 06Game > Interface: turn on Health numbers and Ally health numbers. Knowing an enemy is at 300 HP, not just low, is what tells you to commit.
7. 07Show cumulative damage: Real-time adds a running total on top of each hit, so you can see whether a trade is going your way.

How to show FPS and ping in game

Video > HUD Telemetry controls the built-in overlay. Show frame time and FPS, Show ping and Show network problems each take Never, If conditions are poor or Always, and Frame time alert threshold sets what counts as poor. Show jitter adds a live graph of network jitter, and Show detailed network quality splits out packet loss and jitter on a second line.

Set frame time and ping to Always while you tune, then back to If conditions are poor so the overlay only appears when something is wrong. If you prefer the console, cl_showfps 1 draws a simple FPS counter.

If you still stutter

The game pre-compiles shaders and map resources while you sit on the dashboard, which cuts loading times and some in-game hitching. After a patch, give it a minute on the main menu before you queue.

Keep your graphics driver current; the game warns you when it’s out of date. If fights still spike, lower Texture quality one step, close browsers and overlays, and check the Telemetry overlay to confirm it’s your frame time and not your connection.