My experience with performance tweaking

[wildforester]

- Fov

Has a linear feeling impact on fps, would recommend lowering last. Helps to a point.

- View distance

View distance has a fairly large impact on overall fps, if you crank it up really high. If getting low fps at low render distances it’s more likely however that animals are what’s tanking your fps, not view distance.

- AO + Smoothlight

Leave this on, there should be virtually no effect on your fps if disabled.

- Waving Foliage

Foliage has a low fps impact in small amounts, but this can quickly become problematic with large amounts of foliage. 

- SSAO

Has a small impact on visuals at higher values, so I’d recommend setting it lower anyway. In my experience it doesn’t have as great of an fps impact, but it also doesn’t do much visually.

- Shadows

Going above medium/high has diminishing visual returns for the fps impact. Shadows can have fairly good performance at certain times of day and terrible performance at other times. If your fps is suddenly dropping around morning and evening shadows are likely the cause.

- Resolution

Has a decent effect on fps. This setting is likely intended for higher end hardware. Lowering it will give a small fps boost on most hardware with diminishing returns the lower you set it.

- Max FPS

Set this to 5 fps over your monitor refresh rate. No sense in uncapping it.

- Vsync mode

Set this to off (will explain what I use further on)

- Occlusion culling

Enable this.

 

For the following settings I cannot say too well how they affect fps. You’ll have to go off what the tooltips say for these.

• Chunk upload rate limiter
• Optimize ram
• Particles
• Dynamic Lights
• Foam and Shiny Effect
• Bloom
• God Rays
• FXAA

 

- Hardware/driver tweaks

Make sure you know what you’re tweaking! Especially with bios settings!

On my system I have gone and enabled resizable bar, additionally in the drivers I have enabled vsync. I have Radeon graphics and use the wait for vertical sync option set to always in the drivers. I do this since I’ve noticed an fps drop with the ingame vsync options, this also syncs better than the ingame vsync for me. Another thing that can be done is force enabling freesync if your monitor supports it.

XMP (intel) and EXPO (AMD) are also things to look at in the bios, I unfortunately do not have these options.

A bios option I am less sure the impact of is disabling TPM, I had to do this either way for enabling reBAR support.

(Here’s an interesting mod if anyone thinks it’ll help their situation https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/27133)

 

Just adding this here, when tweaking performance I’ve been trying to maintain good visuals at high fps, even if the fps suffers a little from that.

 

Am welcome for other people to put their experience with intel and nvidia hardware, bios settings, and the additional settings I didn’t have much to comment on. Of course if you’d like to add something about the other settings, do so.

[Mrozak]

Regarding the in-game VSync...

I used to experience very mild, but frequent stuttering with in-game VSync - it was barely noticeable, but still felt weird.
It stopped after i set the in-game VSync to OFF and only use the Max FPS of 63 (using a 60Hz display).
(also not using frame rate limit or VSync in Nvidia control panel - i did not test how that feels)

I have Nvidia 4070S, and i play in 1080p, but with high-ish graphics settings (in spoiler).

Here is an in-game FPS graph.
As you can see, both VSync options come with a subtle frame rate jitter that goes under 60 FPS.
With VSync OFF, that downward jitter is gone, the lows are nicely flat, never going under 60 (well, 61 to be exact).

Spoiler

 

Edited August 9, 2025 by Mrozak

[Krougal]

Yeah, it is pretty widely accepted these days that you should turn vsync off and just set whatever framerate cap you feel comfortable with, and that seems to get the best results.

I cap VS at 75 fps and it runs smooth with high graphics options on my 4060. My monitor is 145hz, but I just don't see any point to push the card to make the room hotter when it wouldn't make any difference for this game to run at a higher framerate.

 

[wildforester]

@Mrozak How much did setting optimize ram to (presumably) 0 improve performance? I assume it helps most with reducing stuttering also how much ram do you have?

[Mrozak]

2 hours ago, wildforester said:

@Mrozak How much did setting optimize ram to (presumably) 0 improve performance? I assume it helps most with reducing stuttering also how much ram do you have?

Hard to say. I didn't take any measurements and set it to 0 based on some explanation i read.
The way i understood it was: no reason to bother with RAM "optimization" if you have more than enough - even if it doesn't help, it won't hurt.
I have 64 GB.

I want to say that it did help with occasional, stronger stuttering, when moving rapidly over long distances.
Like when flying around in Creative mode, checking if the worldgen works fine after updating mods like Better Ruins or whatnot.
But when it comes to normal gameplay... i don't know.

It is possible that my computer is still decent enough to make the potential benefits hard to notice.
For comparison, my computer specs are:

CPU: i7-13700KF
RAM: 64GB RAM DDR5 5600MHz/CL40
GPU: GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER 12G
MB: Gigabyte Z790 AORUS ELITE AX

Or maybe it is the other way - maybe with my HW and game settings, the benefits aren't strong enough to make a noticeable difference.

Edited August 9, 2025 by Mrozak

[Mrozak]

I will do some testing later, because i am curious about it myself now.

[FlareUKCS]

Is it VRAM or System RAM ? I figured System but was not 100% as its usually a VRAM thing. I didn't notice much change myself.

I tend to adjust to my tolerances, I can and will tolerate a lot of stutter if the scene warrants it, I played Dues Ex on a PC woefully unpowered to a point I was doing boss battles at 2 -5 FPS (so I got a habit of using GEPS on boss battles), I played Unreal in a tiny window because it looked awesome... so I am not a I need 20 000 FPS or the game is unplayable, I am happy with a lot less.

I roll with most of the eye candy on, 614 view distance with FPS limited to 75 fps at 1920 x 1080 , and its mostly smooth and looks great. I did up the chunk limiter so it stuttered a bit less as I have 32 gig ram.