Lockdown Protocol

Lockdown Protocol is proof that you should never judge a game's hardware appetite by its art style. Mirage Creative Lab's first-person social deduction game looks like a friendly cartoon about astronauts doing chores, but across 3,714 measured CPU and GPU combinations in our database it averages 96 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 70 FPS at 1440p Ultra, and 46 FPS at 4K Ultra, with the slowest tested systems crawling along at 12 FPS and the fastest clearing 500 FPS at 1080p Low. Those are not the numbers of a trivially light indie game. They are the numbers of a game with two personalities: genuinely punishing if you blindly max every slider, nearly effortless if you spend two minutes in the settings menu. Since its early access debut in 2024 and the 1.0 release in November 2025, it has settled in as one of Steam's defining party games, with lobbies of up to sixteen players lying to each other over voice chat. This page is the measured guide to running it well.

A stylized DX11 engine with a split personality

On paper, Lockdown Protocol's official minimum spec reads like a joke from 2014: Windows 10, an Intel i3-4150 or Ryzen 3 1200, 2 GB of RAM, a GTX 1050, and 2 GB of disk space. It is a DirectX 11 title with stylized low-poly characters, compact maps, and clean, readable geometry, the kind of visual design that usually means integrated graphics territory. And at Low settings, it largely is. Our data shows the weakest tier of GPUs still managing playable frame rates once the presets come down.

The split personality appears at Ultra. Maxed out, the game leans hard on real-time lighting, shadow rendering, and post-processing, and the cost is real: the 1080p average drops from 196 FPS at Low to 96 FPS at Ultra, and the weakest tested combinations bottom out at 12 FPS. That 12 FPS floor almost certainly includes integrated graphics and ancient cards being asked to run a preset they have no business touching, but it is an honest warning that the Ultra badge means something here.

As for what limits what, the data draws a clear picture. At 1080p, the RTX 4090 reaches 165 FPS at Ultra against 87 FPS for the RTX 4060, less than a 2x gap for several times the silicon. That compression at the top tells you the engine and CPU set a ceiling at lower resolutions; single-thread speed matters when you chase triple digits. At 4K the spread widens properly, 80 FPS for the RTX 4090 against 42 for the RTX 4060, which is the signature of honest GPU load. So the summary is simple: below 1440p, this game is CPU- and engine-limited once your card is decent; at Ultra presets and high resolutions, the graphics card carries the weight. Memory and storage barely register. The install is 2 GB, so it loads in seconds on any NVMe SSD, and 8 GB of RAM is comfortable, though 16 GB of dual-channel DDR5 remains the sensible baseline for any modern gaming PC build.

1080p: the value preset does the heavy lifting

At 1920x1080 the measured averages stack up like this: 196 FPS at Low, 144 at Medium, 127 at High, and 96 at Ultra. The jump from Ultra to High alone recovers roughly a third more frame rate, and that pattern repeats at every resolution we tested. If you take one number away from this page, take that one.

Per-card data makes the tiers concrete. The RTX 4060 averages 87 FPS at 1080p Ultra, the Arc B580 manages 72, the RX 6600 sits at 68, and the older GTX 1650 lands at 37, climbing to 79 at Low. The GTX 1050 Ti, the card the developers themselves cite as the minimum, averages 29 FPS at Ultra and 61 at Low, which validates the official spec almost exactly. At the other end, the RTX 4090's 165 FPS at Ultra and the 518 FPS ceiling at 1080p Low show what happens when CPU limits take over: the game simply stops scaling with GPU spending.

What does this mean for monitors? A 144Hz monitor is a realistic pairing for any current 60-class or 70-class card if you run the High preset, which puts mid-range hardware into triple-digit averages. Chasing a 240Hz monitor is only honest work at Low settings on a flagship card, and in a social deduction game where the action peaks during short chases rather than sustained firefights, the difference between 144 and 240 FPS matters far less than it would in a competitive shooter. Buy the monitor for your other games, not for this one.

1440p and 4K: where the GPU earns its keep

At 2560x1440 the Ultra average falls to 70 FPS, with Low reaching 148. This is the resolution where the game finds its natural balance: the RTX 4060 holds 64 FPS at Ultra, the RTX 4070 manages 86, the RX 7800 XT sits at 80, and the RTX 4090 stretches to 122. For most players with a mid-range card, 1440p Ultra is entirely playable, and 1440p High at a 94 FPS average is the sweet spot for high-refresh panels. Nothing about these numbers demands exotic hardware.

4K is a different conversation. The 3840x2160 Ultra average of 46 FPS comes with a floor of 4 FPS on the weakest combinations, and the per-card data shows why: the RTX 4060 averages 42, the RTX 4070 reaches 55, and only the true flagships clear 60 comfortably, with the RTX 4090 at 80 and the RTX 5080 at 75. This is the one scenario where Lockdown Protocol behaves like a genuine GPU benchmark. If you insist on playing it at 4K on a television, the High preset at a 61 FPS average is the pragmatic choice on upper mid-range cards, and Low at 97 FPS average is there if you want headroom. Native 4K Ultra on anything below an 80-class card is buying a worse experience for prettier shadows you will never notice mid-accusation.

Recommended settings: our tested configuration

The preset gaps in our data tell you almost everything about this game's cost structure. Ultra to High is the single best trade in the menu, recovering about 30 percent performance at every resolution for a visual difference most players cannot pick out in motion. High to Medium buys another meaningful step, 127 to 144 FPS at 1080p, and Medium to Low is the nuclear option for weak hardware, nearly doubling the Ultra figure. Lighting and shadow quality do most of the damage at the top end, as the steep Ultra penalty suggests, so if you tune manually, start there.

For players who want maximum responsiveness, the competitive configuration is straightforward: Low preset, cap your frame rate a few percent below your system's average to stabilize frame times, and keep your voice overlay of choice lightweight. One honest note on upscaling: this is not a game where DLSS or FSR should be your first resort, because the High preset already recovers more than typical Quality-mode upscaling would, at no cost to latency. On genuinely weak cards, driver-level FSR upscaling or simply dropping a preset beats torturing Ultra into submission. The clean, high-contrast art also means visibility never suffers at lower settings, which is exactly what you want when identifying a distant dissident matters more than admiring the scenery.

What hardware do you need?

Entry level (GTX 1650, RX 580, GTX 1050 Ti class): 1080p Low at 60 to 85 FPS in our data, with the RX 580 at 84 and the GTX 1650 at 79. Ultra is off the table at 29 to 39 FPS, but the game looks fine at Low and plays exactly the same. Any budget gaming PC built in the last six years qualifies here.

Mid-range (RTX 4060, RX 7600, Arc B580 class): 1080p Ultra at 72 to 87 FPS, 1080p High well past 100, and 1440p Ultra at 60 to 75. For most players this is the best graphics card tier for Lockdown Protocol, because it maxes the game sensibly at the resolutions people actually play party games at, without a dollar of waste.

High-end (RTX 4070, RX 7800 XT class): 1080p Ultra at 109 to 117 FPS, 1440p Ultra at 80 to 86, and 4K Ultra at 52 to 55. This tier makes 1440p high-refresh and occasional 4K sessions comfortable, and it is where the game stops asking for compromise entirely.

Flagship (RTX 4090, RTX 5080 class): 165 and 157 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 122 and 116 at 1440p, and 80 and 75 at 4K. Buying this tier for Lockdown Protocol alone is overkill; buying it for everything else in your library and enjoying 4K60-plus here as a side effect is perfectly rational.

Laptop playability

Gaming laptops handle Lockdown Protocol without drama. The mobile RTX 4070 averages 88 FPS at 1080p Ultra and 64 at 1440p in our data, essentially matching the desktop RTX 4060, and even the mobile RTX 5050 holds 64 at 1080p Ultra and 139 at Low. The mobile RTX 4090 reaches 122 at 1080p Ultra for those with money to burn. Thermals are a non-issue by gaming standards; this is one of the few current multiplayer games that will not turn your laptop into a space heater during a two-hour session.

The two cautions are integrated graphics and Steam Deck expectations. The 12 FPS floor at 1080p Ultra in our database exists because someone, somewhere, tried to run this on weak integrated graphics at max settings. On an iGPU, go straight to Low and 720p or 900p if needed; the stylized art survives the cut. The game is marked playable on Steam Deck, and its light Low-preset profile plus short session structure make it a natural fit for handheld play, which suits a game best enjoyed from a couch with friends anyway.

Streaming and content creation

Social deduction games live and die by content, and Lockdown Protocol is unusually kind to a streaming setup. Because the game leaves so much CPU and GPU headroom at sensible settings, a single mid-range PC can play at 144 FPS and broadcast 1080p60 simultaneously without breaking a sweat. The standard advice holds: use the hardware encoder, NVENC on GeForce or AMF on Radeon, rather than x264. Unlike heavier games, this one could actually spare the CPU cycles for x264 medium, but the hardware encoder still costs you nothing and produces a cleaner stream at typical Twitch bitrates, so there is no reason to do otherwise.

For creators cutting clips, the practical note is that Lockdown Protocol content is short-form friendly: accusations, chases, and betrayals compress into thirty-second highlights, and the clean art style survives re-encoding better than noisy, filmic games do. If your machine already handles video editing work, it is wildly overqualified for capturing this game. The only real broadcast tip specific to this title is audio: the game is voice chat, so a decent microphone and a push-to-talk discipline matter more to your viewers than any encoder setting ever will.

Common problems and fixes

Low FPS at Ultra on an older card: this is expected behavior, not a bug. The Ultra preset roughly halves performance versus Low across our entire database. Drop to High first, which recovers about 30 percent, then Medium if needed.

Stutter that FPS counters do not explain: in an online party game with up to sixteen players, hitching is often network or host related rather than hardware. If your frame rate matches our database figures but the game still feels rough, check your connection and lobby region before touching a single setting.

The game launches on the wrong GPU: a laptop classic. If your frame rate is far below what your hardware should produce, force the high-performance GPU for the game in Windows graphics settings. Integrated graphics running Ultra is precisely how you end up in our 12 FPS floor statistics.

Crashes or a black screen on very old hardware: the game requires DirectX 11 and 64-bit Windows. Update your GPU driver first, verify the install through Steam second, and if you are below the GTX 1050 minimum, accept that the floor of the spec sheet is the floor of reality.

Upgrade priorities

If Lockdown Protocol runs poorly for you, the upgrade order is short and heavily front-loaded. First, the graphics card: it is the limiting factor at Ultra and at any resolution above 1080p, and moving from a GTX 1650 to an RTX 4060-class card takes you from 37 FPS Ultra to 87, the single biggest jump available. Second, the processor, but only if you chase triple-digit frame rates at Low settings, where our data shows the engine and CPU ceiling compressing flagship GPUs. A CPU upgrade does almost nothing for someone already at 60 to 90 FPS. Third, nothing else. RAM beyond 16 GB, faster storage, and exotic cooling buy you nothing measurable in this title. Put the savings toward the 144Hz monitor you will enjoy across your whole library instead.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Is Lockdown Protocol hard to run?

A: Not if you respect the presets. The official minimum is a GTX 1050 and a dual-core i3, and our data confirms it: a GTX 1050 Ti averages 61 FPS at 1080p Low. Ultra is another story, halving frame rates across the board, so weak hardware must tune down.

Q: What GPU do I need for 144 FPS?

A: At 1080p High, a mid-range card like the RTX 4060 Ti (102 FPS at Ultra, roughly a third more at High) gets there. At Ultra, only flagship cards like the RTX 4090 sustain 144-plus at 1080p, and nothing in our database holds it at 4K.

Q: Is the game CPU or GPU intensive?

A: Both, depending on the scenario. At 1080p with strong cards the CPU and engine cap performance, which is why an RTX 4090 barely doubles an RTX 4060 there. At 1440p and especially 4K Ultra, the GPU becomes the clear bottleneck.

Q: Can a laptop or Steam Deck run it?

A: Easily. Mobile RTX 40-series GPUs match their desktop 60-class counterparts here, and the game is rated playable on Steam Deck. On integrated graphics, use Low settings and expect the experience to be functional rather than pretty.

Q: How much RAM does Lockdown Protocol need?

A: The developer says 2 GB, and while that is optimistic, 8 GB is genuinely comfortable. Sixteen gigabytes is the sensible modern baseline, but for the rest of your library, not for this game.

Q: Is it worth playing at 4K?

A: Only with a flagship card. The 4K Ultra average across 3,700-plus combinations is 46 FPS, and mid-range cards sit in the low 40s. At 4K High the average rises to 61, which is the honest way to do it on anything below an RTX 4080-class GPU.

In short: Lockdown Protocol's place in 2026

Two years after early access and months past its 1.0 release, Lockdown Protocol has earned its niche: the social deduction genre's first-person standard, Very Positive across roughly twenty thousand Steam reviews, with lobbies now supporting sixteen players and a content community that keeps it visible long after the Among Us wave receded. It is not a hardware benchmark, and it should not be. What it is, measured across 3,714 CPU and GPU combinations, is a well-mannered game with one demanding preset and an honest settings menu.

The hardware verdict is therefore refreshingly simple. Any mid-range gaming PC from the last five years plays it beautifully at 1080p or 1440p with a two-minute trip to the settings menu. Budget hardware from the GTX 1650 era plays it fine at Low, exactly as the developer's minimum spec promises. The only players who need to think hard are 4K purists and high-refresh chasers, and even they have clear, measured targets in the data above. In a hobby where half the new releases each year arrive broken, unoptimized, or both, Lockdown Protocol is the rare case where the answer to "will it run?" is almost certainly yes, and the numbers on this page exist to prove it.