Satisfactory Best Settings: Graphics and FPS for Big Factories

Two different bottlenecks

This guide covers the Satisfactory 1.2 PC release on Unreal Engine 5. Independent settings guides and community reports were reviewed on 29 October 2026. We have not measured frame rates in a running client.

Satisfactory changes character as your factory grows, and the right settings depend on which limit you are hitting:

To find out which you are in, check GPU usage. Near 100% = GPU-bound, so graphics settings help. Well below 100% inside your factory = CPU-bound, and graphics settings will barely move the frame rate.

The most expensive graphics feature: Global Illumination

Satisfactory uses Lumen global illumination, and community guides consistently name it the single most expensive graphics feature. If you are GPU-bound, set Global Illumination to Off or Medium first before touching anything else.

After that, lower in this order:

1. Shadow Quality — high impact on the GPU.
2. Reflections — costly with little practical value in a factory game.
3. Draw distance / View Distance — matters most in open terrain.
4. Anti-aliasing — drop a step rather than switching it off entirely.

Textures mostly cost VRAM, not frame rate. Keep Texture Quality high if your GPU has the headroom.

Use an upscaler

Satisfactory offers DLSS, FSR, XeSS and TSR. Enabling one is the biggest single FPS gain with the least quality loss — try it before lowering resolution. Use Quality at 1080p/1440p and Balanced if you still need frames.

Graphics API

The Graphics API menu lists DirectX 12 as standard, Vulkan as experimental and DirectX 11 as deprecated. Stay on DirectX 12. Switch to another API only as a troubleshooting step if DirectX 12 crashes on your system.

The conveyor settings (late-game)

When your factory is the bottleneck, these three settings still help because they control how much of the simulation is drawn:

• View Distance
• Conveyor Belt Render Distance
• Conveyor Belt Item Frequency

Lower all three in a late-game factory view before lowering the overall preset.

Factory design beats settings

For a large factory, how you build affects FPS more than any single setting. Community testing reports that enclosing a factory in walls and ceilings can run 30–50% faster than the same factory left open, because Unreal Engine’s occlusion culling skips rendering machines hidden behind walls. Vertical, enclosed factories also beat sprawling ground-level layouts. This is the highest-impact “setting” that is not in the menu.

Memory and storage

• 32 GB RAM is recommended for late game. Large factories can consume 12–16 GB for entity state, belt items and machine cycles; on 16 GB this turns into page-file stutter.
• Install on an SSD. UE5 streams terrain and factory data, and late-game saves can be 50–100+ MB.

What we have not confirmed

These are independent community settings guides and reports, not measured benchmarks, and we have not tested them in a running client. Names can shift between patches, so match by name rather than position, and change one setting at a time while measuring FPS.