Enlisted’s settings menu affects two things that matter separately: raw frame rate, and how easily you can actually spot enemy soldiers at range. The two goals don’t always point the same direction, so it’s worth tuning for both rather than just chasing the highest FPS number.

Check where your PC sits first

Enlisted’s Steam page lists these requirements (Windows 10/11, 64-bit, DirectX 11, 49 GB of storage):

Minimum Recommended
Processor Intel Core i3 or better Intel Core i5-10400 or Ryzen 5 3600
Memory 8 GB 8 GB
Graphics GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon 78XX series GeForce GTX 1080 or Radeon RX 5700 XT

If your PC is near the minimum, plan on low-to-medium settings and focus on a stable frame rate. If it’s at or above the recommended tier, you have room to keep textures and resolution high and spend your tuning on shadows and lighting instead.

Shadows, reflections and global illumination cost the most

Of all the graphics options, shadows, reflections and global illumination carry the largest performance cost. Lowering shadow quality alone can meaningfully improve frame rate, and it’s the first setting worth touching if you’re chasing smoother gameplay on mid-range hardware.

Anti-aliasing: lower than you’d expect

Anti-aliasing is often worth lowering to Low or Medium: the visual loss is usually small relative to the frame rate you get back, particularly at 1440p and above. This is one of the easier trade-offs in the whole settings menu: the visual loss is small relative to the performance gained.

Don’t drop resolution to fix blur — fix the real cause first

If the game looks blurry after lowering settings, the instinct is often to reduce render resolution further, but that usually makes spotting distant enemies harder, not easier. Restoring native resolution and instead reducing shadows, effects, reflections and ambient occlusion tends to preserve clarity while still recovering performance, which matters more in a game where seeing a soldier a fraction of a second earlier has real tactical value.

A balanced setup for higher-end hardware

If your hardware can handle it, native resolution with high-quality textures, medium-to-high anti-aliasing and medium shadows is a reasonable balance. It keeps enemy silhouettes and terrain detail clear without pushing the most expensive settings (shadows, reflections, global illumination) to their most demanding levels.

A practical tuning order

  1. Lower shadows first, since it’s the single biggest performance lever.
  2. Lower reflections and global illumination next if you need more headroom.
  3. Set anti-aliasing to Low or Medium rather than leaving it maxed out.
  4. Keep resolution native where possible; use the settings above to recover performance instead of downscaling.
  5. Re-test in an actual firefight, not just a menu or empty map, since spotting matters more in combat than the settings screen shows.

In Enlisted, the fastest frame rate isn’t automatically the best setup. A configuration that keeps enemies visible at range while staying smooth is the real goal.

If you’re still learning squad basics, our beginner guide covers that first. You can also visit the Enlisted hub for everything else we’ve covered.

Sources

Facts in this guide were checked against these pages in October 2026: