How to Increase Game Performance

General Tips​

  • Some issues will require an account reset including infinite loading screens, missing ships, and crashes on load
  • Graphical issues, stuttering, and other issues like these can be fixed by deleting your shaders folder:
    1. Make sure Star Citizen and the launcher is shut down completely
    2. Go to ‘C:\Users\your_username_here\AppData\Local\Star Citizen’
    3. Delete any folders that start with ‘sc-alpha-[…]’
    4. The next time you load the game, it will have a low FPS for about 10-15 minutes while shaders are being rebuilt
  • 16GB of RAM is the recommended lowest amount of RAM you should use
  • Update your GPU drivers
  • When changing graphical settings, it’s best to reset your game for the settings to take effect
  • Install Star Citizen on an SSD. It’s virtually unplayable on a HDD

Graphics (Escape > Options > Graphics)​

Option Set to…
Quality High*
Scattered Object Distance Low
Terrain Tessellation Distance Low
Planet Volumetric Clouds Off
Motion Blur Off
VSync No
Sharpening 0
Chromatic Aberration 0
Film Grain No

*’High’ and ‘Very High’ are more “optimized” than ‘Low’ and ‘Medium’

Set a Page File If You’ve Got Less Than 16 GB of RAM​

  1. Open your ‘Control Panel’ (Start Menu > Search ‘Control Panel’)
  2. Click on ‘System’
  3. Click on ‘Advanced System Settings’ on the right
  4. Click the ‘Advanced’ tab
  5. Under ‘Performance’, click ‘Settings…’
  6. Click the ‘Advanced’ tab
  7. Under ‘Virtual memory’, click ‘Change…’
  8. Uncheck ‘Automatically manage paging file size for all drives’ at the top
  9. Set a single one of your drives to ‘System managed size’ (make sure it’s an SSD)
  10. Set all other drives to ‘No paging file’ UNLESS you set your ‘System managed size’ SSD to one that your operating system is NOT installed on
  11. Make sure you leave at least 300 MB on your operating system drive (if separate) for crash info & recovery

Disable the Windows 10 Gamebar & DVR​

  1. Right-click the ‘Start’ button
  2. Click ‘Settings’
  3. Click ‘Gaming’
  4. Under ‘Xbox Game Bar’ (on the left), make sure ‘Enable Xbox Game Bar for things…etc’ is set to ‘Off’
  5. Under ‘Captures’ (on the left), make sure everything is set to ‘Off’
  6. Under ‘Game Mode’ (on the left), set ‘Game Mode’ to ‘Off’

Using a user.cfg file for optimal performance​

  1. Download the ‘user.cfg’ file below
  2. The ‘user.cfg’ file you’ve downloaded above is a very high performance-tuned configuration that works well for me. Some settings MUST need to be changed for your system (read below), but you can drop this right into your LIVE folder and start the game
  3. Open the ‘cfg’ file in any text editor (Visual Studio Code works best and highlights the appropriate lines for easy readability)
  4. Read through the green description text to edit the configuration below it to what works best for your system
  5. Once done, save & copy the ‘user.cfg’ to the LIVE folder for Star Citizen (C:\Program Files\Roberts Space Industries\StarCitizen\LIVE)

Nvidia Specific Tweaks​

  1. Completely close the Launcher
  2. Open Nvidia Control Panel
  3. Click 3D Settings > Manage 3D Settings
  4. On the Global Settings tab, locate and select the Preferred graphics processor. From the list, select High performance Nvidia Processor (*note: applicable to only those with integrated GPUs present on their motherboard. option may not show for all). Click Apply
  5. You can also add and configure Star Citizen in the Program Settings list
  6. Click the Program Settings tab
  7. Click Add and browse to the Star Citizen exe: (install drive)\Program Files\Roberts Space Industries\Star Citizen\LIVE\Bin64
  8. For the preferred graphics processor, select High performance Nvidia Processor. Click Apply
  9. Under Settings, click Set Physx configuration
  10. From the drop down menu, select your Nvidia graphics card for the processor. Click Apply
  11. If you overclock your graphics card, you may also need to reset to defaults
  12. Try launching the game again

Your Nvidia card settings may cause issues with resolutions and scaling when loading the game. The changes below will always keep those in check

  1. Open the Nvidia Control Panel
  2. Under Display, click Change Resolution
  3. Check the resolution and refresh you have set here. For example:
  4. Under Display, click Adjust desktop size and position
  5. On the Scaling tab, turn off Override the scaling mode set by games and programs

Nvidia G-Sync & 3D Vision​

There may be an issue involving Nvidia 3D Vision / G-sync & Star Citizen.

  1. To perform a fully clean uninstall & install depending on your Windows version, open Uninstall Programs or Add and Remove Programs. Uninstall Nvidia 3D Vision Controller and Driver. These are separate installs. The following is an example in Windows 10:
  2. Download and install your driver from Nvidia
  3. Select perform a clean installation
  4. Select Advanced Installation. You can actively deselect specific options during the install, including the 3D Vision Controller Driver and 3D Vision Driver. NVIDIA HD Audio is not mandatory unless you depend on HDMI Audio output
  5. Complete the installation and try launching the game

Override Fullscreen Optimization​

It’s recommend making these changes on your RSI files. These work for all graphic cards. Disabling fullscreen optimization should keep 3D Vision from activating and crashing your game. You may need to configure this for the RSI Launcher and Star Citizen .exe files

  1. Right-click the RSI Launcher desktop shortcut. Or go to the .exe directly in (install driver)\Program Files\Roberts Space Industries\RSI Launcher\RSI Launcher.exe and right-click the file
  2. Click Properties
  3. Click the Compatibility tab
  4. Enable the option Disable Fullscreen Optimization. Click Apply
  5. Navigate to (install driver)\Program Files\Roberts Space Industries\StarCitizen\Live\Bin64 and right-click the StarCitizen.exe file
  6. Click Properties
  7. Click the Compatibility tab
  8. Enable the option Disable Fullscreen Optimization. Click Apply

Making Star Citizen Look Better – DSR / VSR – Super Resolutions​

This is the process of downscaling higher resolutions to lower ones. For example I use it to Render in 1440p or 4k then downscale it to 1080p. This gives some quality benefits in the forms of reducing Aliasing, detail is clearer, effects and shadows better, and overall image quality far superior. This is an extremely resource intensive feature but for higher end machines or even for mid range machines wanting to downscale from 1440p you can get some amazing results Make sure you have the Latest Drivers for your Graphics Card, then perform the following:

AMD GFX VSR Settings

  1. Enable Virtual Super Resolution
  2. CLick On Apply

Nvidia DSR Settings (Dynamic Super Res)

  • DSR Factors
    • 1080p: Native
    • 1440p: 1.75x
    • 4K: 4x
  • DSR
    • Smoothness: You’ll want to adjust smoothness to your preference. For 1440p I go for around 17% but for 4k only 10%
      *this reduces aliasing that occurs but you want to go for the lowest % you can for the best image quality without make images too jagged

Nvidia has a Low Latency Mode

  • Setting it to Off or On is fine based on your System, I have mine set to On. There is an Ultra setting that currently caused jitters for me. The settings are supposed to balance pre-drawn-frames vs latency

nVidia Shader Cache​

A few versions ago, the nvidia graphics driver changed the shader cache setting content from on and off to set size

  • Default: That’s what people usually use, lag, screen tearing, and transients
  • 128M-5g: not much difference, but the lag will be reduced
  • 10G: perfect, lag, screen tearing, transient are gone, the screen is smooth like a stocking
  • 100g: memory explosion, extensive use of virtual memory virtual memory, screen lag
  • Unlimited: virtual memory explosion, finally used up all the space on my C drive, lag

NVIDIA Control Panel – Manage 3D Settings – Shader Cache Size

  • Triple cushioning may not be effective
  • Vertical sync on fast, for many low fps players can reduce sluggishness and screen tearing, and will not affect the performance
  • 10g currently works better for users with more than 32g physical memory, but you need to set the best virtual memory above 10g, otherwise the showroom in NB will cause flashbacks
  • For players with 16g physical memory, try using 1g or 5g shader rendering size
  • Some players open the vertical synchronization to fast after the screen will appear shaky, this time modified to adaptive may make the screen becomes very smooth, and there are no more cases you can try

Easy Anti-Cheat and CPU Priority​

For many gamers, ensuring that their games take the highest priority with their computer’s processing resources and thus getting better gaming performance is of great importance. This is done by setting their games to run with high priority. Unfortunately, games with EAC enabled may in some cases counteract this or cause undue lag and crashes when this is attempted. To counteract this, you will need to follow these steps to make some registry edits:

  1. Open the Registry Editor by typing “regedit” (no quotes) into the Windows search bar
  2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options
  3. Right click on this folder and create a new key called “StarCitizen.exe” (no quotes)
  4. Right click on the new StarCitizen.exe folder and create a key called “PerfOptions” (no quotes)
  5. Right click on the new PerfOptions folder and create a new DWORD (32 bit) called “CpuPriorityClass” (no quotes)
  6. Double click on CpuPriorityClass in the value window change the value to 3. Save

Upscaling​

Magpie magnifies any window to fullscreen with a handful of algorithms/filter. The main goal is to tackle the situations where the games either do not natively support fullscreen or display blurry images under fullscreen modes. You can run Star Citizen in windowed mode at a lower resolution and use this application to upscale the resolution to make it seem like it’s in fullscreen 1080p or 1440p