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Custom Resolution for FPS Boost

By Pyxelate

If you have an old poor-performing PC like me, you probably have had some frame rate issues. This guide will show you how to lower the resolution more than allowed by the game to get better FPS.

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Created by

Pyxelate
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Category: Gameplay Basics, Modding or Configuration

Languages: English

Posted

Updated

22 Jan, 2021 @ 9:14am

20 Jun, 2021 @ 3:39am

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Guide Index

Overview

How to do it

Results and notes

Comments

How to do it

Go to your steam library and right click on the game, then select Propreties.

]

In this window, select General on the top left corner.

At the very bottom there is a section called Launch Options. Here you can modify a lot of things about launching the game and one of them is the width and height of the screen. In order to do that you need to type in these commands :
-screen-width
-screen-height
For example, if you want the resolution to be 800x600 you need to type this :
-screen-width 800 -screen-height 600
I'd suggest using true resolutions based on your aspect ratio :
4:3 > 640×480, 800×600, 960×720, ...
16:9 > 768x432, 896x504, 1024x576, ...

Results and notes

Now you can close the window and launch the game. you will see that the resolution has been lowered and hopefully your FPS is much higher now.
Keep in mind :
* This doesn't make a big change if your PC is already handling the game well with a high FPS.
* It's better if you choose a proper resolution that matches the aspect ratio of 16:9 or 4:3.
* The game will not be fullscreen anymore and the screen will be smaller, unless the resolution you've chosen matches your monitor's aspect ratio.
* If you change the resolution back to normal from the in-game settings you can't change it until you launch the game again.
* In order to completely remove this feature, simply erase the commands you wrote in the Launch options section.
* UPDATE : A patch was released for the game on June 2021 that added "Borderless Window" option to the game. If this method didn't work, you can tamper with that option and hopefully it'll be ok. For me, the resolution was normal for the first time but then I changed it once to borderless and then back to normal and restarted the game and everything was good.

Here are the results on my game, I couldn't capture the FPS overlay in the images so you just have to take my word for it...

Trial of Fools, 1280x720, 20-24 FPS :

Trial of Fools, 800x600, 42-46 FPS :

Some extra useful info from a viewer's comment (rezno) :

Because Hollow Knight runs in Borderless Windowed Fullscreen by default, you can actually set these values to non-standard values, even as low as 480x270 for example. This will maintain the original monitor aspect ratio (standard is 16:9) and the image will be still fullscreen without any black bars.
Screenshot: https://sta.sh/022i9t6jwmwq
And of course this should massively improve performance as well.

Thank you for reading this guide and I hope it helps. This is my first one ever so... I apologize if it doesn't look good or has issues.

26 Comments

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Anex 13 Feb, 2024 @ 2:57pm

Super duper late to 2nd to last reply @ArthurNA, my brother please just buy the game, it obvious you pirated it. When I first played HK I too pirated it, but very quickly I realized how much love and effort and passion was put into this game. I am all for being a pirate, but support the devs when it matters. Team Cherry is not a large team, and they're in the middle of producing HK Silksong, just buy the game, it's $15. Much love

rλsho 20 Jul, 2023 @ 5:34pm

Kind of late to the last reply, but anyways, launch parameters are added in the shortcut that you create of the .exe of the game, so if you want to add for example the "-screen-width 800 -screen-height 600"

You'll need to create that shortcut, go to properties, and in the destination section, you add after the quotation marks the "Hollow Knight.exe" -screen-width 800 -screen-height 600

It worked like that with other games

ArthurNA 2 Sep, 2022 @ 8:44pm

Is there a way that you can change the game resolution withouth steam?

Pyxelate [author] 21 Mar, 2022 @ 1:39am

I'm glad it helped you bro

samuelcely123 20 Mar, 2022 @ 1:55pm

Thank you very much for create this section, this really helped me to have a little more fps and at the same time, to solve a "bug" of Hollow Knight (Final boss) invisible. I Love you dude, for real, for save me of the sadness of stop to play 'cause of that.