IMPROVING SUBNAUTICA FRAMERATE USING F3! [TIPS AND MANIPULATION] [FOR MEDIUM OR LOW-END DEVICES] [PC, MAC, OR LAPTOP]

[Animeke]

This is a simple and easy way to increase your FPS in Subnautica. To start press F3 for some extra game settings and modifications and then press F8 to lock your mouse.
Things to change:

-Texture Quality: you have more options to test the texture quality on the F3 options menu, if you want the game textures of the enviroment/ water to look good but your pc or laptop can't handle the highest settings try setting it to 3 (It still looks great and the water still looks like actual water and not squares moving around); if you can't handle 3 try 2 and then 1. [This will bring FPS up a lot]!

#1-6 below texture quality:
1. Light shafts- enables and disables sun rays coming into the water.

2. Bloom- the glowing light effect coming from any lights in the game. [Turning these 2 off (Light shafts/Bloom) could improve FPS, but can ruin immersion]

3. Nothing there...

4. Frame Time Graph- Allows you to see your frame rate in graph form and I highly recommend keeping this on the whole time you are testing out these settings to see what is helping the most.

5. Ambient Particles- The small, clear, spherical particles hovering in the water which can be seen during the daytime.(Turning this off may increase your FPS a little bit but it's probably going to be a very small amount; feel free to turn it off, it adds little immersion to the game and could possibly improve FPS).

6.Visualize Depth, Water Volume, and Water Surface- These do improve FPS but is not to be change for gameplay, I'll still tell you what they do. Visualize Depth- Exactly what is sounds, it turns everything grey and white and allows you to see throught the map easier. The same is for Water Volume and Water Surface. Water Volume gets rid of the volume effect of the water and makes it look like there's no water underneath the surface water effect. Water Surface- Gets rid of the water animation, making the top layer of water flat.

ShaderLOD: This affects all of the light particles or shader meshes on plants, the lower you go the less of this you will have and will make everything look more dull and boring. (I don't recommend changing this because it ruins the game's look; but if you were going to change it don't go lower than 300. It will improve FPS but will get rid of the light particles on some of the plant's branches and will make the shaders and meshes of some plants/enviroment different and more simple).

LODGroup bias: In simple terms the render distance or even simpler how far you can see objects and terrain in Subnautica. I recommend around 8.5 because if you go too low it makes it hard to navigate sometimes because you may lose track of some enviromental markers. (This affects the view range of the islands and creatures too; Reaper Leviathan and Sea Dragon jumpscares LOL)! This will improve FPS majorly the further you go down but like i said it might make it hard to navigate and could make the game less immersive for you.

Shadow cascades: I know what this does visually but not technical. I will try my best to explain this! What this does is make the edges of shadows less straight and less HD. Honestly 4 is way to high and realistic shadows don't have perfect edges. Set this to 2 and it will make the shadows look more realistic! (Improves FPS the lower you go). The best way to test this is to change these settings in front of a shadow from either a piece of the Aurora or and creature shadow.

Last but certainly least is the disable console commands option at the top left. Disabling console commands might help FPS but I'm pretty sure it doesn't [it might though].

I hope this helped! Please leave a comment telling me if it helped and/or if you see improvements in your FPS with my tips. If you have any questions please comment them below too and I'll try to help ASAP!

[Zemecon]

Originally posted by Gbhs11:

6.Visualize Depth, Water Volume, and Water Surface- These do improve FPS but is not to be change for gameplay, I'll still tell you what they do. Visualize Depth- Exactly what is sounds, it turns everything grey and white and allows you to see throught the map easier. The same is for Water Volume and Water Surface. Water Volume gets rid of the volume effect of the water and makes it look like there's no water underneath the surface water effect. Water Surface- Gets rid of the water animation, making the top layer of water flat.

This is interesting. A few people were saying that a lot of the lag in Subnautica has been there since the H2O update and a lot of the effects you've described seem to have been implemented in the H2O update to make the water look more realistic.

[Animeke]

Originally posted by Zemecton:

Originally posted by Gbhs11:

6.Visualize Depth, Water Volume, and Water Surface- These do improve FPS but is not to be change for gameplay, I'll still tell you what they do. Visualize Depth- Exactly what is sounds, it turns everything grey and white and allows you to see throught the map easier. The same is for Water Volume and Water Surface. Water Volume gets rid of the volume effect of the water and makes it look like there's no water underneath the surface water effect. Water Surface- Gets rid of the water animation, making the top layer of water flat.

This is interesting. A few people were saying that a lot of the lag in Subnautica has been there since the H2O update and a lot of the effects you've described seem to have been implemented in the H2O update to make the water look more realistic.

You're completely right, Ever since the H20 update framerate has gone downhill just because of the massive amount of detail to water. They haven't fully optimized the game yet so I hope the full release will still have the amazing affect but won't cause so much lag. Great observation!

[Phaota]

Disabling the console does not affect the framerate of the game whatsoever. It just gives you the ability to open the console when desired.

[TheTool]

My save game is over 5 gig, This is voxel terrains. Every step I take loads terrain from this folder. There is no fix until the terrains become static. For now it's just a cess pool of HDD thrashings.

[Magma Dragoon]

Originally posted by TheTool:

My save game is over 5 gig, This is voxel terrains. Every step I take loads terrain from this folder. There is no fix until the terrains become static. For now it's just a cess pool of HDD thrashings.

I wonder what this is doing to my SSD lifespan...

[Animeke]

Please keep the comments on subject. -Thank you