FPS Fix?

[Stoners Knight]

Hello. I am really trying to enjoy the game but the FPS drops are getting to be too annoying. FPS fluctuates from 5-110 on planets while on foot, steady 140+ in space. Flying the ship on a planet however FPS rarely goes over 60. Low settings and Ultra settings yield the same result, as well as 1080p and 1440p.

i5 4690k
gtx 1080
16 gb ram

Any help is appreciated, thanks for taking the time to read this.

[GrandTickler]

you could check some of the performance guides out in the tab at the top. i also wrote one myself pointing out why its bad to mess with the majority of the settings and theres not too much you can do besides letting nvidia handle the vsync: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1457547353
feel free to draw your own conclusion from them and test some around :)

edit: followed by majority:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1450968623

i still have it set up like i have in my own guide, (4 cores 4 threads, and i have set it to
NumLowThreads=1, high=3) and its running perfect right now. a stable 40-60 fps without cpu spikes

[Don Cheadle's victim face]

After 2 years they can't optimize this game properly. I can't play it at all due to my 20fps. Maybe it would have been better if Sean Murray just took the money and ran. Rather than keeping us waiting like this only to disappoint nt month after month, year after e year

[SubTonic]

If you're using in-game vsync, don't. It's god awful. Disable it and enable vsync (with triple buffering) through your GPU's control panel. It fixed all of my crazy FPS fluctuations.

[Don Cheadle's victim face]

It fixed nothing. Hello games are crooks

[Vanilla Drizzle]

I was having massive issues and couldn't seem to track down where the problem was. I've got an older rig with an i5 4440 that ran NMS respectfully before the update. I just tried the NumLowThreads=1 and High=3 (after having set it to 4 and 4 per someones bad advice in a different topic) and THIS smoothed everything way out.

[Altarn M. Rain]

I gave up on getting 60 fps and set the max to 30 FPS. This really smoothed out the game for me and with enough motion blur the difference between 60 and 30 fps isn't all that noticeable. My theory is that when the game is set to 30 fps it can prioritize stuff it is doing in the back ground rather than produce as many frames it can.

[Part-Time Jesus]

Originally posted by Trident_Barclay:

It fixed nothing. Hello games are crooks

You either have a low grade computer for gaming or do not know how to optimize your system for games.

They're not crooks

[LeftPaw]

Originally posted by GrandTickler:

you could check some of the performance guides out in the tab at the top. i also wrote one myself pointing out why its bad to mess with the majority of the settings and theres not too much you can do besides letting nvidia handle the vsync: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1457547353
feel free to draw your own conclusion from them and test some around :)

edit: followed by majority:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1450968623

i still have it set up like i have in my own guide, (4 cores 4 threads, and i have set it to
NumLowThreads=1, high=3) and its running perfect right now. a stable 40-60 fps without cpu spikes

So if I set v-sync and tripe buffering in my Nvidia CP, do I turn them off in game.
How would you set the thread thing if you have coffee-lake with 6 cores?

[Lemunde]

After the pathfinder update I ran into severe performance issues. Kept waiting for a fix but it never came. A year later Microsoft released a Windows update that corrupted my OS, forcing me to do a complete reinstall of Windows and losing all of my settings in the process. On a whim I reinstalled NMS after reinstalling Windows and surprisingly the performance had gone back to what it was before the pathfinder update, which was not great but it was playable.

It's really strange but somehow this seems related to something in the OS being corrupted. Maybe NMS utilizes resources that other games don't which is why we only notice it while playing NMS. I can't say for certain what it is. Maybe try completely uninstalling your graphics drivers and installing updated ones.

For reference, I'm running a 750ti, i5 6400, 8GB and I'm getting between 30 and 50 FPS depending on where I'm at, sometimes less on certain planets. After PF update and before the reinstall I was getting between 10 and 20 FPS.

[Prometheus]

Regarding the threads, you need to look at your cpu. Do you have hyperthreading or not? If you, then you can double the threads, compared to cores. Thus 4 cores is 8 threads total. If not, 4 cores is 4 threads.

NumHighThreads seems to be high priority threads. NumLowThreads seems to be low priority threads. Threads are lines of orders for a core to solve. Hyperthreading allows you to split the core functions in two, so if the first thread stalls, you just move on to the second on the same core. What has worked for me is the standard setting of 2 high and 4 low, on a 4 core hyperthreading cpu. Which sets 2 threads not used (if they are to be added which I think it seems they should be), which are probably used for background system services. No other setting has helped. In traditional testing on other software, assigning ALL threads is overcommitment and stalls background services, leading to a 5-8% DROP in performance in general. So, don't assign ALL threads, at least for hyperthreaded CPUs (which is what I have and have tested on).

I have seen TexturePageSizeKb interpreted as VRAM, that is ram on your GFX card. It is not, this is a page file. Setting the size to correspond with VRAM size is almost 100% certainly wrong (more VRAM should mean SMALLER page file, less VRAM should mean BIGGER page file). I got 8GB VRAM and the game defaults to 64kb for me.

I have Nvidia, so I have no advice for AMD. But the TWO only settings I have found that have helped me are Maximum pre-rendered frames at 1 (which has been a champion setting for years and years with many games). Pre-rendered frames smoothes out pacing (better timing between frames, the reason why 24FPS works brilliantly in the movie theater), but if something changes before the frame is shown, then it is discarded and your GPU wasted all that work. If the frame is not ready, it is skipped, dropping performance and looking like stutter.

The second setting is threaded optimization ON. For some reason, leaving it on auto does not see NMS activate it.

Everything else I have tried did nothing or was worse.

YMMV, so DYOR!


4790K No OC
MSI 1070 gtx gaming x
16 GB ram.

FPS capped at 60 to allow the system to breathe a bit, but I can run between 60-100+ uncapped. Everything maxed at 1080p, no vSync. Only ONE episode of freeze/frame drop, on many, many hours of gaming on NEXT. Did a complete wipe and reinstall for NEXT.

[GrandTickler]

very nice and informative post Prometheus i completely agree. sadly a lot of the guides seem to make things worse without people realising it right away.
especially the TexturePageSizeKb=64 should NOT be messed with as it defines the quality of initial streamed textures before your pc can load in high-res textures. setting this number higher defeats the purpose of texture streaming and causes stuttering. setting it too high will result in a crash on start up even because people put vallues that are higher than the actual supported texture size.

[Digibluez]

the guides are waste of time, they only make things worse, i set new GPU texture size, all the alien faces where missing textures and plants and minerals as well. Ony thing that helped was turning on triple buffering and v-sync

[big wet johnson]

dont run above medium if you dont have more than 4GB of video ram, change TextureStreamEx to Off.

[Kathrynerius]

Originally posted by Prometheus:

Regarding the threads, you need to look at your cpu. Do you have hyperthreading or not? If you, then you can double the threads, compared to cores. Thus 4 cores is 8 threads total. If not, 4 cores is 4 threads.

NumHighThreads seems to be high priority threads. NumLowThreads seems to be low priority threads. Threads are lines of orders for a core to solve. Hyperthreading allows you to split the core functions in two, so if the first thread stalls, you just move on to the second on the same core. What has worked for me is the standard setting of 2 high and 4 low, on a 4 core hyperthreading cpu. Which sets 2 threads not used (if they are to be added which I think it seems they should be), which are probably used for background system services. No other setting has helped. In traditional testing on other software, assigning ALL threads is overcommitment and stalls background services, leading to a 5-8% DROP in performance in general. So, don't assign ALL threads, at least for hyperthreaded CPUs (which is what I have and have tested on).

I have seen TexturePageSizeKb interpreted as VRAM, that is ram on your GFX card. It is not, this is a page file. Setting the size to correspond with VRAM size is almost 100% certainly wrong (more VRAM should mean SMALLER page file, less VRAM should mean BIGGER page file). I got 8GB VRAM and the game defaults to 64kb for me.

I have Nvidia, so I have no advice for AMD. But the TWO only settings I have found that have helped me are Maximum pre-rendered frames at 1 (which has been a champion setting for years and years with many games). Pre-rendered frames smoothes out pacing (better timing between frames, the reason why 24FPS works brilliantly in the movie theater), but if something changes before the frame is shown, then it is discarded and your GPU wasted all that work. If the frame is not ready, it is skipped, dropping performance and looking like stutter.

The second setting is threaded optimization ON. For some reason, leaving it on auto does not see NMS activate it.

Everything else I have tried did nothing or was worse.

YMMV, so DYOR!


4790K No OC
MSI 1070 gtx gaming x
16 GB ram.

FPS capped at 60 to allow the system to breathe a bit, but I can run between 60-100+ uncapped. Everything maxed at 1080p, no vSync. Only ONE episode of freeze/frame drop, on many, many hours of gaming on NEXT. Did a complete wipe and reinstall for NEXT.

So that I understand this correctly. I have the GTX 1060 6GB card. What should my high and low be for an i7 8700k CPU? It says 6 cores, and 12 threads. So how should I set the number? The Internet says it has hyperthreading. Is that 12 threads the hyperthreading? Ir is there 24?... So should it be like 5/1. Or like 11/1 or something?

[Prometheus]

Good questions. I would look into the file first and see what it has set you up for. I would believe that it should be doing it reasonably right to begin with.

Your cpu has 6 cores, that is 12 threads with hyperthreading enabled.

Given the previous ratio for mine (8 threads, 2 not used + 2 high + 4 low = 8 total)... 2 reserved for background stuff is the starting point, which leaves 10 total to work with. 10 does not split into a 1 to 2 ratio, but these are close: 3/6 (3 not assigned), or 4/6 (2 not assigned), or 3/7 (2 not assigned).... all seem plausible to me.