60FPS Hollow Knight on Potatoes

So, if you bought this game during sales like me, only to feel like a fool when you found out you couldn't run it properly, don't worry, I've got you covered.

First thing you wanna do is, of course, going into --> OPTIONS --> VIDEO --> and set "V-sync" and "Particles Effects" OFF.

If this is not enough(as it wasn't in my case), do not fret, just go to the same place and set "Fullscreen" OFF.
Now you would say "Rando, why set Fullscreen off, it's only gonna get worse!"... ehehe I've got you fooled my friend, because my guide isn't over yet.

Now that you've got the game on window, just shrink it. Yeah you've read it right, I just said "shrink it". Go to that juicy corner and shrink the window; not too much or otherwhise you won't be able to see ♥♥♥♥. Adjust the window until you've got a confortable amount of FPS.

And that's it, now you can go and enjoy this amazing game at 60FPS.


BONUS: "What?! Not over yet?!". Ha! You bet it ain't over yet!

Now, this is a little extreme, since it will ruin the in-game resolution, but if your PC is too much of a potatoe, you have to be willing to go extreme.
So, remember when I said to shrink the window until you're confortable with the FPS, but not too much or you won't see ♥♥♥♥? Never mind that, shrink it even more, shrink that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥! Now that the window is very very small, open the Start menu and type "Magnifier". Ahah yeah boi, that useless Magnifier will now come to use. Open the program and press the "+" button to magnify your screen.
If you're not used to the program, you might wanna know that by going into the options you can select the amount of magnifying it's gonna apply when you press "+".

Well, now it's definitely over. Enjoy yourself and, for the love of God, build a gaming PC and join the Masterrace, then you'll be able to enjoy the game as our magnificent devs intended! I plan to do it myself in the near future.



edit 2021: Hello everyone, happy 2021. Apparently, quite a few people have been reading this ""guide"" years after I had written it, especially as of recent; and so... while I just wrote it on a whim(I didn't think anyone would see it or find it helpful in the slightest), I'd like to improve on it a tad.
I do wish to preserve its full cringiness though; it's a testament to who I was, and I'd like to think those who already liked it, did so because of the style it was written in(although I also want to assure you that I grew out of that phase, I think...).

So, I corrected a few mispelled words, removed a couple of "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥" here and there(it was just... too much), and now I want to add to these footnotes, the helpful comments a few charitable Steam™ users wrote down here... to give them more visibility. I admit it has been almost 3 years since I last launched a Steam™ game, so I didn't test any of these, but you may find them of use:

Originally posted by D0HERRITT:

I just wanna point out that you can press alt+ enter to make the game go fullscreen again. Doing this will just upscale the resolution to the entire screen. The game will look a little blurry or pixelated, depending on how small you made the game in windowed mode.

Originally posted by dschoon:

like @DOHERRITT8PC said, there is a big difference between your OS resolution and the game resolution. usually you can improve FPS by reducing the resolution your computer renders at (the OS resolution), as it's cheaper to upscale it to fit your display resolution (the pixels on the monitor) than for the game's rendering engine to render the scene differently […] so rule of thumb: downscale the OS first if you're having performance issues.

Originally posted by oddant:

( Windows key + "+ sign" ) is shortcut for magnifier, you're welcome.
Also my advice would be to go into the display settings in your system and lower your screen resolution, not only it'll be similar to "zoom in" but it might give a very little extra performance push because now Windows takes less time to compute information per pixel, and closing the magnifier will also close one process and free some cpu usage

Originally posted by WhiteThaiGer:

The program Borderless Gaming also helps a lot with helping games run on potato computers.

[Limygeorge]

Oh, that's a shame. I was kind of hoping for some more of your guides. Oh well..

[Rando]

I'm happy to inform my fellow readers that, after all these years, I finally have a decent enough pc that I don't need any of this anymore myself :DDD

[Rando]

Thank you Georgy :)

[Limygeorge]

I rarely enjoy reading guides. Yours is kind of unique. Good stuff!

[Hamsternick]

finaly i can now play hollow knight for 2 miliseconds instead of 1 pico second!

[Fartmaster]

i turned both v-sync and particle effects off and lowered the game to the lowest resolution possible and lowered my pc resolution to lowest possible and its still lagging what do i do

[Rando]

Thank you for your valuable contribution!

[Daz]

Adding

gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1
gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1

to hollow_knight_Data/boot.config

Improved my potato by 20%.

[manhdua1]

nice

[Kato]

You definitely wanna try running the game in exclusive fullscreen if you can, and instead just lower your resolution. First the game resolution and if that's not enough you can lower your OS's resolution and then adjust the game to render at the same resolution as your OS. VSync should definitely be off, as should the Frame Rate Cap. Blur Quality should be low and the refresh rate next to the resolution should be the same as your monitor's refresh rate. Lowering it does not improve performance in the slightest.