Framerate and Performance

This is the page for you if your frame rate is below the advertised ratings according to our system requirements. If all else fails, please refer to the #Reporting a performance issue section.

The guide below assumes you are experiencing these issues without mods in single player mode. If you installed mods, disable all of them and check if that resolved the issue first.

Performance checklist

1. While in-game, go to Settings=>Graphics and make sure your Quality Preset is set up according to your hardware specifications as noted on our system requirements page:

• Between Ultra Low and Low preset if you have a computer that is more than 10 years old or a very low cost/low spec computer
• Medium or High for computers less than 10 years old and not a low spec machine
• High or beyond High for dedicated gaming computers.

2. If you have a high resolution screen (for example a 4K monitor) but you do not have powerful graphics hardware you should lower the Resolution in the in-game graphics settings to 0.75x or 0.5x

3. In Graphics settings, play in Fullscreen if possible. Try adjusting the VSync and MaxFPS settings. For troubleshooting, set VSync to Off and MaxFPS to Unlimited. For stable gameplay, normally, Unlimited MaxFPS and VSync On is recommended, but you can try also VSync Off, MaxFPS set to a sensible value like 75fps. Experiment to see what is best and smoothest.

4. If you experience stuttering / freezing issues, first check whether your system is close to running out of RAM or CPU. When the game is stuttering, check in the task manager whether RAM or CPU usage is above 90%. If that is the case, you might need to close other programs, lower your view distance in graphics settings, remove 3rd party mods if you installed any or as a last resort buy more RAM for your computer. You can also save some RAM by only playing multiplayer games. As a general rule of thumb - 16 GB of RAM should usually make the game run fine unless many mods are installed. Even as little as 8 GB of RAM may be enough with care: no other programs running, view distance lower like 128 blocks or 192 blocks, no mods.

5. In the graphics settings, reduce your view distance. Troubleshoot performance issues with view distance set to 256 blocks or 192 blocks or even less. If that's good, slowly increase view distance, see if everything stays good. Note, anything much above 512 blocks view distance is very demanding, needs powerful hardware.

6. Make sure your hardware is not overheating. There are tools such as CPU-Z and GPU-Z, or Open Hardware Monitor, to monitor temperatures. Do not use unlimited "Max FPS" if you run into overheating issues, or take steps to increase your system's ventilation and cooling. A system which overheats can 'thermally throttle' and slow down randomly, common for laptops.

7. Make sure no other active programs are reducing your in-game frame rate. Especially look at screen-recording/screen capture software, Discord, and demanding web browsers such as Chrome, as well as automated processes like backups, software updates and file indexing. Before playing the game, exit all other apps, edit your startup programs to a minimal list, restart the computer, see if the problem persists. Possibly unwanted background actions of Windows can be removed using this tool OOSU10

8. Install the game on a SSD instead of a HDD. Please do not run the game from an external or network drive.

9. Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date, but also, unfortunately sometimes a driver update can reduce performance. Trying out older versions of drivers can sometimes fix the problem.

10. For further performance tuning, in-game or from the main menu, in Graphics settings click 'Show all available settings' (top right) then you can mouse over the individual settings to see the performance impact of each setting.

11. If you have bad performance on Windows you could try running the game on Linux instead, sometimes this can improve performance if something is broken in your Windows setup.

12. Antivirus/anti-malware programs may be affecting performance.

13. If you launched the game inside a VM (virtual machine) it will likely affect performance significantly.

Hardware/OS specific checklists

Laptops/Notebooks

• Make sure you are either not running on battery or that your laptop is configured to supply maximum performance while on battery
• Make sure your laptop has sufficient ventilation. An overheating laptop will become performance limited. Do not place a laptop on a cushion/blanket/bedding while gaming, it blocks ventilation.

Computers with dedicated Graphics cards

• A dedicated graphics card means usually Nvidia, Radeon or Intel Arc
• Make sure Vintage Story is actually using your dedicated graphics card. You can verify that by knowing the model of your graphics card and comparing it against what is shown in-game. One you are in a game world, hit the keyboard combination CTRL+F3 to see the debug screen - on the top left corner, the fourth line of text will show you the currently used graphics card
• If Vintage Story is not using your dedicated graphics card, see tips here, point 3
• Dedicated graphics cards often come with driver management software, you might be able to adjust settings there to improve performance.

AMD / Radeon Graphics

• Some users reported double or triple the frame rate after enabling reBAR (Smart Access Memory) in the Bios settings.

Nvidia Graphics

• Some Nvidia cards stutter with VSync enabled. Turning off VSync and setting "Max FPS" to 60 or 75 might yield smoother gameplay
• Check out user experience on the forums.

Linux

A simple method to increase performance may be to enable mesa_glthread by running the game with: mesa_glthread=true mono Vintagestory.exe

There is a beginners guide on this on the forums. One user on the forums suggests running the game with strangle 60 mono ./Vintagestory.exe to fix issues with input lag.

For Linux game servers, utilizing the method listed above, enabling mesa_glthread by using mesa_glthread=true mono VintagestoryServer will allow you to hypothetically enable multithreading on your Linux server. In the packaged server.sh file which comes with linux servers, this can be achieved by changing the following lines in the vs_start function:

   if as_user "cd \"${VSPATH}\" && mesa_glthread=true screen -h ${HISTORY} -dmS ${SCREENNAME} ${INVOCATION}" ; then
     sleep 7
   else

Reporting a performance issue

If nothing helps and you want to report it as an issue to use, please do so using our issue tracker on Github. The more information you can provide, the better. Especially helpful is

• A copy of all your log files after you have typed `.debug logticks 50` and experienced the performance problem for a minute or 2. This will write performance data into your log files for us to look at.
• A video showcasing your performance problems with the debug screen enabled (CTRL+F3)
• Your full hardware specifications
• Installed mods, if any