Framerate and Performance: Difference between revisions

''Large view distances or unusually high world heights have an effect not only on the framerate (fps) on screen, but also performance throughout the game. If everything is sluggish or there are frequent lag spikes, try turning down the view distance. The game is balanced to be smooth and playable on most modern PCs at view distances around 256 blocks to 512 blocks, depending on your hardware. Playing at above 512 blocks is certainly possible on most PCs - but long-term play at such large view distances with max graphics is best left only for high-end gaming PCs who followed the advice in step #1...''

5. Make sure your CPU is not overheating and therefore "thermally throttling". If you run Vintage Story with no VSync and unlimited frame rate, your GPU and perhaps also one CPU core might be being pushed to 100% permanently. That in turn will cause the CPU and GPU internal temperatures to rise. You can monitor temperatures using a free 'Hardware Monitor' tool, or just listen to the fan noise ramping up! If the CPU internal temperature is approaching maximum allowed levels (90-100 °C on a modern CPU, that's hot enough to boil water) then the CPU will automatically switch to running slower than its maximum speed, this is "thermal throttling". A GPU acts similarly. Either one will slow down the game's performance. To prevent this thermal issue, use VSync or a sensible max frame rate limit, or both, to prevent your CPU and GPU reaching maximum temperature - limiting the max frame rate to something sensible like 60fps or 72fps allows the system to rest for a short while between frames, and therefore reduces the chance of overheating. At unlimited frame rates, GPUs can also overheat and thermally throttle, again the solution is a combination of proper cooling of the GPU, and not pushing graphics settings to their max limit.

''Tip: on a multi-core PC, the overall CPU usage percentage shown by Windows can look small even if one core is maxed out. For example, with 8 cores, one core maxed out at 100% would only be 12.5% CPU usage overall. To see what's really going on, you need to use a non-Microsoft tool like Hardware Monitor.''

''(Note that VintageStory does use multithreading for efficient performance. But not all cores are used equally, the main thread runs on a single core. Windows Task Manager can show the main rendering thread as busy when it is not really busy, on normal game settings the CPU is spending some time each frame just waiting for the GPU to catch up. A third party tool like Open Hardware Monitor can give you a better picture of how the hardware is really being used.)''

''Tip: You can troubleshoot the possible causes of lag spikes yourself by running the command <code>.debug logticks 50</code> and then afterwards examining the `client-main.txt` log file in VintagestoryData/Logs.''  You can ask a more experienced player or a team member for help interpreting the output.

10. The Occlusion Culling graphics setting is recommended on any modern multi-core CPU (4 cores or more) - it uses one additional CPU thread but leads to less work for the GPU. This can drastically increase performance while playing with high render distances. However, try toggling it - on a few systems things might be smoother if it switched off.