Tips for peeps with lower-end computers!

[RobotLucca]

I made a guide that goes over things in greater detail, check it out:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=688160552

Some things may already be obvious:
- Turn graphics quality to low
- Use low-quality lighting: retro(white)/trippy(color)
- See if using multi-core lighting helps or hinders performance
- Enable autopause to increase performance on inventory screen

There's some interesting other things you can do, however:

If you are using a lower-end computer, then you will almost certainly notice frame skipping. This can be toggled using the Frame Skip option. Here's where things get interesting: enabling Frame Skip sacrifices smoothness for speed (highly recommended) whereas disabling it sacrifices speed for smoothness (does not affect sound, which is nice). For lower-end computers, disabling Frame Skip often induces a "slow-motion" effect where the game runs half (or more) as slow as before! This can be useful for bosses where every second counts (beware using this on multiplayer, however - I hypothesize weirdness).

If you are experiencing LAG SPIKES every few seconds, there is a VERY SIMPLE FIX that I didn't notice ANYWHERE ELSE I looked: DISABLE THE MAP. The lag spikes are because the game is periodically scanning every tile on the screen to update the map! So, enter the options from the title screen and turn that map off. Other "solutions" I saw out there mostly included the general options or even changing CPU priority - forget all that and just disable that darn map. Chances are, if the map is causing you to lag, you can't properly use the fullscreen map anyway.

I hope this helps some people or was a bit interesting. :-)

[RobotLucca]

Początkowo opublikowane przez aidenpons:

Hmm. I noticed in 1.2.4.1 with the terrible water physics keeping a world loaded & playing for... about five hours... would cause the water physics to bug REALLY badly.

If you don't mind, I might write this up as a guide on the Terraria wiki: http://terraria.gamepedia.com/Terraria_Wiki:Projects/Guides That way it'll never be buried, as this is some seriously useful information.

That would be great! Also, I put up that Steam guide too:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=688160552
I forgot to include the part about reloading the world, but maybe I'll wait a bit.

Also, about buggy water physics: one time, after letting some stuff drain, I found weird pockets of water that just stayed there floating. Oddly enough, though, water physics doesn't seem to cause any performance drops.

[tas]

The one which will extremely help is to invest on new parts which will increase performance or just consider on investing on a gaming pc there's actually a big difference between business and gaming pcs

[NIKFS]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Babby Steiner:

The one which will extremely help is to invest on new parts which will increase performance or just consider on investing on a gaming pc there's actually a big difference between business and gaming pcs

even a business pc would suffice, i got it to run on a 50$ used pc without gfx card and an old intel core2duo and it runs on 1600x900 (my desktop res) still faster pc never hurts although the terms "business" and "gaming" make no difference, its the parts inside that make the difference, depending on where you shop you can get business pcs that are faster than gaming pcs they just dont look as special but still, same performance if you know what to look for


Edit: obviously not talking about the cheapo pc i mentioned, that was just to show that you dont need a fast pc in the first place for terraria to run at stable 60fps

[John]

Here's a tip for people with low end computers.

If you can't play terraria on a potato, even that potato has gone bad and you REALLY need to get an upgrade.

[kk.lonewolf.37]

Brand new HP Laptop 500 GB HHD 4 GB RAM Intel Pentium CPU N3540 @2.16 GHZ Windows 10 Home X64. Terraria runs in slow motion around 40-50 FPS.

Really think people claiming only really old laptops are the ones having problems with the game and being rude need to shut up.

[NIKFS]

Początkowo opublikowane przez kk.lonewolf.37:

Brand new HP Laptop 500 GB HHD 4 GB RAM Intel Pentium CPU N3540 @2.16 GHZ Windows 10 Home X64. Terraria runs in slow motion around 40-50 FPS.

Really think people claiming only really old laptops are the ones having problems with the game and being rude need to shut up.

the problem isnt old, its that your cpu is too slow and the gfx chip probably too, that pc really is not for gaming but it may work if you turn down everything to low and enable frame skip

[Blargo]

Początkowo opublikowane przez kk.lonewolf.37:

Brand new HP Laptop 500 GB HHD 4 GB RAM Intel Pentium CPU N3540 @2.16 GHZ Windows 10 Home X64. Terraria runs in slow motion around 40-50 FPS.

Really think people claiming only really old laptops are the ones having problems with the game and being rude need to shut up.

Intel Pentium CPU N3540 is a very low-end processor, and the Pentium series is not designed for gaming (that would be the Core series).
You didn't list a GPU, so I'm assuming your laptop has integrated graphics, which isn't good for gaming either.

[Epic Timing]

Początkowo opublikowane przez kk.lonewolf.37:

Really think people claiming only really old laptops are the ones having problems with the game and being rude need to shut up.

You saying "need to shut up" comes across as "being rude" to me. Did you really have to necro this thread just to say that?
It's probably got to do with your settings, unless it's specifically a gaming laptop, laptops aren't made for gaming. Since it's a new laptop it should be able to run smoothly @ 60 FPS without a problem if you change the settings.

Just out of curiousity: did you buy this laptop to play games on, or are you just complaining your gift doesn't do what it's not supposed to do in the first place?

[guschti]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Sir Buttershoes:

Who would have lag on Terraria, somebody with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ room-sized circa 1970 computer? It's a pixellated 2d game, ffs.

I play on an 8 year old laptop and I have problems with it. Doesn't have to be ancient, just old.

[Navaron]

Some mods can require a lot more performance though. My computer runs normal Terraria very well but lags quite badly on the Devourer of Frames Gods.

[K13Cove]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Navaron:

Some mods can require a lot more performance though. My computer runs normal Terraria very well but lags quite badly on the Devourer of Frames Gods.

Most people who comment here saying you shouldn't be lagging don't play with mods or multiplayer constantly enabled (Which I need to have for reasons). Most content mods are projectile ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and it ends up even my GTX 1080 can drop to unplayable FPS (10-20) when fighting bosses like Astrum Deus and DoG. Funny how it's mostly a problem with Calamity, shows you how horrendous the boss design is.

[[TC] Toaster Oven]

Początkowo opublikowane przez \\ThatOneLamia:

If you lag on terraria... You need a new computer.

Forgive me for reviving this very old discission, but dude Terraria is imo the most unoptimized 'pixel graphics' game I know of rn (especially on Linux) just look at this thread:
Thread [forums.terraria.org]

You can have a 16 core beast computer and still lag since Terraria only uses one core for it's main engine. Multicore lighting only helps the lighting render; most of the time this will give little benefit and may even make things worse on some computers. For example, if I have a 1.4x16 Ghz processor (not a toaster cpu) then I might as well have a 1.4 Ghz "toaster-like" processor when running Terraria; single core performance on many great multicore cpus will suffer from this.

Just read the thread. Terraria needs a BIG optimization update for all platforms (especially Linux, I'm using a Linux system right now; and no it's not a toaster). I can get thousands of fps on Team Fortress 2 and many other games that you would expect to demand more than a simple pixel game like Terraria.

[RobotLucca]

Yeah, Terraria's engine is very unoptimized. You'd think that it's a pixel game, but that's just the artstyle - internally, Terraria doesn't care about that (in fact, the assets aren't even truly pixelized - they're using 2x2 pixels so the game doesn't have to resize them on default zoom). The insides of Terraria are a horrifying mess and this shows in how easy it is to lag in the game.

TF2: Ironically, you would in fact expect better performance here than in Terraria. TF2 has far less objects that the CPU has to update. Terraria could be keeping track of hundreds of entities at once (in an unoptimized fashion), while TF2 likely less than 50. TF2 also properly associates everything related to graphics with the GPU, meaning that performance there largely depends on the quality of your graphics card instead of your processor. Terraria, on the other hand, doesn't.

[Trace]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Toaster Oven:

Początkowo opublikowane przez \\ThatOneLamia:

If you lag on terraria... You need a new computer.

Forgive me for reviving this very old discission, but dude Terraria is imo the most unoptimized 'pixel graphics' game I know of rn (especially on Linux) just look at this thread:
Thread [forums.terraria.org]

You can have a 16 core beast computer and still lag since Terraria only uses one core for it's main engine. Multicore lighting only helps the lighting render; most of the time this will give little benefit and may even make things worse on some computers. For example, if I have a 1.4x16 Ghz processor (not a toaster cpu) then I might as well have a 1.4 Ghz "toaster-like" processor when running Terraria; single core performance on many great multicore cpus will suffer from this.

Just read the thread. Terraria needs a BIG optimization update for all platforms (especially Linux, I'm using a Linux system right now; and no it's not a toaster). I can get thousands of fps on Team Fortress 2 and many other games that you would expect to demand more than a simple pixel game like Terraria.

I think Starbound is even worse.

[[TC] Toaster Oven]

Początkowo opublikowane przez thegamemaster1234:

Yeah, Terraria's engine is very unoptimized. You'd think that it's a pixel game, but that's just the artstyle - internally, Terraria doesn't care about that (in fact, the assets aren't even truly pixelized - they're using 2x2 pixels so the game doesn't have to resize them on default zoom). The insides of Terraria are a horrifying mess and this shows in how easy it is to lag in the game.

TF2: Ironically, you would in fact expect better performance here than in Terraria. TF2 has far less objects that the CPU has to update. Terraria could be keeping track of hundreds of entities at once (in an unoptimized fashion), while TF2 likely less than 50. TF2 also properly associates everything related to graphics with the GPU, meaning that performance there largely depends on the quality of your graphics card instead of your processor. Terraria, on the other hand, doesn't.

Yep it shows, my Terraria setup is mainly cpu bottlenecked, and the Linux port is.... well also is a mess; they chose to use Mono to implement the Linux port and it's unacceptably slow as explained here [stackoverflow.com] . It's a mess over another mess... The 1.4 Journey's End update is the last hope for a big optimization update en masse. If we don't get that optimization update, chances are we'll get them in small patches over time, and even then we probably won't get a 64-bit version or multiprocessor update either (requires rewriting everything from the ground up). Unfortunate.