Roblox raises minimum draw distance to 500 studs
Roblox is raising minimum draw distance from 200 to 500 studs across all platforms. Retest low-quality visuals, streaming coverage and custom effects scaling.
Roblox is introducing a minimum draw distance of 500 studs, up from 200 studs, across all platforms on November 5, 2026. According to the November 5, 2026 announcement, the changes will reach every game automatically, with no opt-in required. They affect rendering at low graphics quality, including on lower-end devices.
What changes at low quality
Draw distance also increases faster through the initial quality levels. Roblox says terrain water can remain transparent at every quality level, while beams no longer have their segment counts reduced as aggressively. These changes address differences in how scenes and gameplay-related effects appear across quality settings.
Roblox says it rebalanced other quality scaling to accommodate these improvements. Its testing supports maintaining existing performance and stability on low-end devices, but that is not a guarantee for a particular game. The company also warns that draw-distance values may change again, so teams should not build around exact thresholds.
Test scenes and scaling assumptions
Our recommendation is to review a representative gameplay route this week at every quality level. In Studio Settings, open Rendering and adjust Editor Quality Level. Compare distant landmarks, underwater visibility and beam shapes. If higher quality does not reveal more scenery, check the streaming target radius: Roblox notes that missing objects may not have loaded.
We'd start by auditing effects code that reads UserGameSettings.SavedQualityLevel. Roblox advises against using it to adjust visual effects because that interferes with automatic scaling. Deprecation is planned, but the announcement gives no deadline. Particle-emitter scaling improvements are also future work, not part of this release.