Performance Tweaks

The main config file responsible for your game settings is KillingFloor.ini. When you launch the game for the first time, this .ini file should be created.

It's located in System folder in the game directory.

[..]\Steam\steamapps\common\KillingFloor\System

For me it's:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\KillingFloor\System

My current settings are as follows:


I disabled Hints and set Minimal Messages.


I set everything to low except Resolution, although the lower you have, the more FPS you get, but everything is smaller. Textured Scope is better visually, so I also left this option.

Brightness, Contrast and Gamma should be set quite high enough to make your vision better. It really helps on dark maps like Farm or Bedlam.


If you don't use Custom Music, having Music enabled is unecessary, because it's getting repetitive after a while.

I also turned off Voice Chat, because it has poor quality and I'm not really into listening trolls or kid screams. In addition, people mostly don't talk, so this option isn't really needed.


Mouse Smoothing doesn't help in FPS games at all. Mouse Lag Reduction uses some CPU usage, so I also disabled this option.

I found 1.00 Sensitivity much more accurate than something higher (although it really depends of personal preference).


Light HUD looks better in my opinion. It doesn't have borderlines.

Kill Counter shows ZED kills and that's all about it.

If you hate thrash-talking in chat you can disable it by changing numbers on the bottom (and in case you wanted to see what somebody wrote, you can always open the console with ~ and see the game log).

We'll start our tweaking with adjusting value of CacheSizeMegs parameter in [Engine.GameEngine] section. It represents the amount of RAM for holding KF game information. The more game info is held in RAM, the smoother FPS are due to less freezes while playing. It can be set as high as 512, but it's recommended to set it at most to 256.

To do so, you need to open KillingFloor.ini, press CTRL+F and look for the first CacheSizeMegs parameter. When you find it just set the preferred value.

By default:

CacheSizeMegs=32

After:

CacheSizeMegs=256

Precaching implies storing files that are expected to be used - textures, sounds etc. It's said to disable all precaching functions, but according to the guy from TWI forums who did some tests[forums.tripwireinteractive.com], he concluded that is not neccesarily needed to disable them all.

With that said, open KillingFloor.ini file, press CTRL+H and replace:

UsePrecaching=True with UsePrecaching=False

bNeverPrecache=false with bNeverPrecache=True

Guided by Steam thread there are also extra 3 useful commands to smooth the gameplay. Set all of them to True value. First line in following part of the config file states that any changes will be applied Direct3D 9.0 section, which is default rendering device of the game.

AvoidHitches parameter needs to be added manually.

[D3D9Drv.D3D9RenderDevice] UseTripleBuffering=True CheckForOverflow=True AvoidHitches=True

Game by default locks FPS (frames per second) in multiplayer game to 90, but there is a way to disable this lock.

Open your KillingFloor.ini file and look for MaxClientFrameRate parameter and change it for something bigger, for example:

From MaxClientFrameRate=90.000000 to MaxClientFrameRate=300

Then join any game, open console with ~ key and type:

netspeed 30000

This command might resets everytime when you close the game, so it's better to just make a bind and it's easy.

Open console and type:

set input <key> netspeed 30000

where <key> needs to be replaced, so in my case it's:

set input F6 netspeed 30000

From now on, everytime I join the server I just click F6 and my FPS unlock.

Also I found quite useful commands, which display network and FPS statistics. You can bind it too if you like:

set input F5 stat fps | stat net

More: https://www.utzone.de/forum/showthread.php?t=4326

Lobby videos are stored in Movies folder:

(...)\Steam\steamapps\common\KillingFloor\Movies

I found them pretty outdated and I guess there are no plans for any "new works" in this aspect.

All what you need to do is downloading the texture from following workshop item (instructions are included in its description):
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=98000280

Thank you for reading my guide. I hope you found some useful information regarding performance improvement in Killing Floor.

When I got to know with these tweaks and implemented them to my config I saw a big difference in gameplay and I'm sure that it'll work for you the same way.

Have fun!

Used resources:
How to optimize Killing Floor[twistedserverkf.proboards.com]
To decrease loadtimes, turn off precaching and change game cache size[forums.tripwireinteractive.com]
Useful tweaks for Killing Floor