Change these Graphics settings IMMEDIATELY - Discovered what default settings “break” the experience. (FROM REDDIT)

[XI Vanquish IX]

*I'm posting this on the Steam forums because even though my post on the Reddit was intended to HELP players, the mod team there decided to delete this post. I'll let you all take guesses as to why I was moderated there for literally trying to help out.*

Ok so I’m going to go through bullet point by bullet in summary what to turn off or change IMMEDIATELY to get CS2 working anywhere remotely “normal” to how it should be. Trust me that the visual representation after changing these settings will actually make the game run and look like it’s supposed to.

Whoever chose the default settings for shipment to users needs to have their head examined because my god, that’s half the issue here. With that said, I’m piling on top of some obvious findings from earlier and luckily found additional settings (advanced) that need to be adjusted as well.

*Caveat - If you have a mid tier or low tier PC, in addition to the following settings, be sure to lower general graphics quality until you find the sweet spot for you.

1. Run in “Windowed” mode. (Seems that the game shipped with an issue running in full screen so for now just run in windowed mode)
2. Turn OFF the following completely: Depth of field, volumetric clouds, and vsync.
3. Change Anti-aliasing (AA) from the wretched “sub pixel morphological” to either TAA, FAA, or none.
4. Change Level of Detail Distance to 100% (default is 70% and causes major pop in and other issues)
5. Increase geometry cache limite (default is 2GB but if this gives you issue, lower it back)

Ok that’s it for now but these settings combined gave me massive improvement and the game plays more akin to CS1 now in quality. Huge difference but please report if your findings differ or how you adjusted from this for your rig.

[rsturgeon]

Are talking about game crash? I made the adjustments and it stopped that issue game would go to icon on the task bar but music would continue.

[rsturgeon]

only problem is cannot see icons at the bottom of the screen to change the speed.

[Undeadbanana]

A lot of newer building management games have texture caching that takes a minute for it to even begin running "normally," is there really this many people new to this genre?

Transport Fever 2 had the same thing going on at launch until they optimized it a few times, though it obviously uses much less textures for building transportation networks. Seems like people don't understand that it takes more than 0.1 hours for the game to "dynamically" load textures.

[XI Vanquish IX]

Originally posted by rsturgeon:

Are talking about game crash? I made the adjustments and it stopped that issue game would go to icon on the task bar but music would continue.

Not just game crash, but I figured changing these settings may help some users with that as well. The problem is the default graphics settings the game shipped with - which are the worst I could have imagined. The settings I identified in these (above) changes will help get most people's games to a more stable place and at least let them see how the game is "supposed" to look and play, then adjust the base graphics sliders up or down from there to suit their PC specs.

[XI Vanquish IX]

Originally posted by Undeadbanana:

A lot of newer building management games have texture caching that takes a minute for it to even begin running "normally," is there really this many people new to this genre?

Transport Fever 2 had the same thing going on at launch until they optimized it a few times, though it obviously uses much less textures for building transportation networks. Seems like people don't understand that it takes more than 0.1 hours for the game to "dynamically" load textures.

I totally agree with you and my post isn't intended to "rage against the devs" because they really did work hard on the game and now that I've gotten to play it, I'm more addicted than I was to the first. With that said, the game needs A LOT of polish and I suspect it will take 6 months to a year of patches to get it right. My sentiments are that if people change the settings I mentioned in my original post, most will be able to get the game in a playable and enjoyable state.

Because the review bombing and refunding is going to kill this game like it did with KSP 2 and then we will never get a finished product. Players will play themselves.