It's important to see the fps you get when playing Rust and make sure you are playing with the best settings for your machine. Optimizing your PC settings brings you closer to winning.
In-game Rust settings
In FPS games like Rust you need to balance between the high FPS and sharp visuals - it’s important to clearly see your enemy as much as possible, that’s why it’s highly recommended to tweak the in-game graphics settings in order to get the best visibility and performance available.
Screen Resolution - Native
With Mode set to exclusive.
VSync - OFF
This will allow for the lowest input lag. Keep graphic quality at 4 also. This is a good compromise between good FPS and acceptable visuals.
Shadow Quality – 1
Shadow quality is important because with open environment maps the shadows can be quite taxing. Set also Shadow Cascades - Four Cascades and Max shadow lights - 0.
Water Quality – 1
Water and its appearance in Rust seems like a big weight on the system. Set also Water reflections - 0 and World Reflections - 1 for an optimized performance.
Anisotropic Filtering – 1
Keep this setting to the lowest, higher values produce very grainy graphics. Also keep Parallax mapping at 0 and grass displacement as off, but if you have trouble finding objects on the ground - turning it on will make it a little easier.
Mesh Quality
We recommend the following for all the mesh quality settings: Particle Quality: 0, Object Quality: 150, Tree Quality: 145, Max Tree Meshes: 100, Terrain Quality: 10, Grass Quality: 50, Decor Quality: 0
Anti-Aliasing - TSSAA
We think this is the best option that produces clear and sharp texture quality while preserving good visuals for long-range objects on the Rust map.
Depth Of Field - OFF
Depth of Field should be kept off on Rust otherwise you may experience some blurriness in long distances. Keep turned off also the following: Ambient Occlusion, High-Quality Bloom, Motion Blur, Sun Shafts, Sharpen, Vignetting
Field of View - 90
This setting depends on your own situation - your distance to the monitor and your monitor size. So iit is better to start with FOV 90 and experiment to see if increasing or decreasing it makes more sense for you.