How To Optimize Your War Thunder For Maximum FPS!

Hello there! Is your War Thunder running slow or in need of some cleaning? Then this guide is for you! Follow the steps and see which ones can help you out! All programs and links are safe so there is nothing that is a virus here. Otherwise I wouldn't have made this guide in the first place but I hope this helps you out!

Why Is My War Thunder Even Lagging In The First Place?

Now I want to answer this in the most nicest way I can say it. Your computer first of all might be bad or your computer has a virus etc. You might aswell say that you don't know what each option in the War Thunder client is so I will be teaching you about that. Your PC does more than just play games. That is what consoles are for. Your PC is running a bunch of other tasks, programs and etc as you play your game as Windows needs to have a lot of programs running but I can teach you how to stop some and some good programs to do this but here are some of the things that affect performance on your PC.

1. Background Processes
   
2. Windows Appearence
   
3. Theme (your desktop background etc
   
4. Hard Disk Drive Space
   
5. Junk Files
   
6. System Specs
   
7. Dust In Your Computer

These are just some of the many things that can make your performance go down or you need to check. The reason I say dust is because dust clogs your fans which makes your computer work harder than it has to. There is also two more things I want to say before I start this tutorial. Overclocking is not a recommended option for someone new to the whole graphics card thing. You could potentionally break your graphics card or overheat it if you do not do overclocking right so please I recommend that you don't do it or do it at your OWN RISK!!! Last but not least I recommend you match up your specs with the ones I post below here. Here are the system requirements for War Thunder both recommended and minimum.

Minimum:

OS: Windows XP/Vista/7/8
Processor: 2,2 GHz
Memory: 1 GB
Video Card: Radeon X26XX / GeForce 7800 GT
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 3 GB

Recommended:

OS: Windows Vista/7/8
Processor: Dual-Core 2,4 GHz
Memory: 4 Gb
Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 460 or higher, AMD Radeon 55XX series or higher
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 11 Gb

If you really need help matching your graphics card to this and see if you can run it just ask me down in the comments! I am always here to help on the steam and War Thunder Forums!

Cleaning Up Your PC

First thing I would recommend doing is cleaning your computer of junk files that might be in it. A useful program I use is called CCleaner. CCleaner cleans your computer of any junk files that are located inside of your computer like the temp folder and prefetch and worst of all your internet cache.
Here the program in action:


This program will help you get the best performance out of your PC for free. Just don't use the registry cleaner. It's not safe to.

Link: Click Here[www.piriform.com]

There are others like Advanced System Care but this is up to you. Just make sure to search if the program is safe.

Defragging Your Hard Disk Drive

Defragging a hard drive puts files closer together so that the system doesn't have to look so hard to find these files. Basically it makes disk usage a lot slower and can speed up War Thunder in general. If you would like to try this method you can use the default windows defragger but honestly that thing isn't that great. You'll never know when your done with defragging because of how it does it in passes or something. You can try a program called "Auslogics DiskDefrag". This program allows you to defrag your PC, shows how fragmented your PC is and then fixes it. There is also special options to defrag it and optimize your hard drive.

Don't do this on an ssd. This is to speed up hdds which are slower than ssds.

Link to program: Click here[www.auslogics.com]

This program is safe and trustable and is not a scam. I use it personally and I love it. It works great to optimize my hard drive to the maximum! Try it! You won't regret it.

Here is the program:

What Each Option In The Graphics Menu Means

So now this is where I go over each option in the War Thunder options. Let's just get into it.

Graphics Option	Meaning
Anisotropy	How far textures render with full detail
Antialiasing	How Sharp The Edges Look
Texture Quality	How Detailed Each Texture Looks
Shadow Quality	How Sharp and Detailed The Shadows Look
Clouds Quality	How Good The Clouds Look
Render Resolution	The Quality of The Backgrounds
Terrain Quality	This is the quality of the earth
Trees Range	How Far The Trees Load In With Full Detail
Particle Density	The amount of Particles that show up
Grass	How much grass is showing when near or on the ground.
SSAO Quality	How Much Screen Space Ambient Occlusion is in the area
Shadow Blur	Just don't use it.
Water Reflections	How Good The Reflections on Water Look.

Here is the list for the graphics options located on the side. Here you go.

Graphics Option	Meaning
Shadows	Enables shadows to be on or off
Self Reflections	Reflections that are made by your plane or tank.
Object Shadows	The Shadows cast by trees, houses, basically anything on the ground.
Advanced Shore	Waves near the shores of land/islands.
Motion Blur	Blur effects when moving.
Haze	Atmospheric effect as objects are farther in the distance, they become foggy. Haze is still there with this option off.
Soft Particles	Softens particles when clipping. Particles are effects such as smoke, fire, dust, etc. Clipping is when geometry intersects.
FX reflections	Reflections of effects like smoke, fire, dust, etc.
Terrain far details	Higher detail terrain in the distance
JPEG screenshots	Save screenshots as jpeg as opposed to tga. Not really a graphics option but it's there.
Old videocards support	For if you have an old video card that is showing graphic anomalies or is very weak. The most noticeable difference is low settings you will still notice everything on the ground still has a shadow and this will turn those shadows off. That is the biggest change in performance. Other noticeable changes are significantly lower ground textures, water is no longer transparent, and less haze.
Terrain Deformation	When Tanks Role over the ground they make dents in the ground, this makes them look better and more dynamic.
Tire Tracks	Tire Tracks made by tanks look better or like lines or just not there.

That is all the main options. For more details on these then you can go to this link on the War Thunder forums. Some info was used from kaewon. Link: Click Here![forum.warthunder.com]

Drivers

Updating your drivers is the best way to maximize fps. Download and install drivers for your GPU. Follow one of these 2 links:

AMD: Click Here[support.amd.com]

Nvidia: Click Here[www.nvidia.co.uk]

Nvidia Geforce Drivers: Click Here[www.geforce.com]

Choose your gpu and all the other things and download your latest driver! Enjoy the boost.

Also upgrading to Windows 10 helps especially when War Thunder supports Dx12.

MSI Afterburner

MSI Afterburner is an application that allows you to overclock your graphics card. Overclocking your graphics pushes your graphics card to the maximum.

Please don't use this on intergrated graphics cards such as intel graphics cards.

I WARN YOU NOT TO DO THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING! I WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS!!!

Here is how you can overclock your gpu with MSI Afterburner.

1. Get MSI Afterburner (Click Here To Go To Download Site[gaming.msi.com])

2. Install the program.

3. Change These Options By These Amounts

Core Clock: Change by 10-20
Memory Clock: Change by 5-20

Leave everything else as is unless you know what you are doing.

AMD Application Settings

So there is those things called application settings for the AMD Catalyst Control Center and NVidia Control Center. Let's get on with doing AMD Catalyst Control Center's way of doing it. Here's the best options for War Thunder.

First go to your AMD Catalyst Control Center (I used Paint Because I'm MLG)

Then Put It In Advanced View (Yes I know I did Photoshop to it)

Then Go To Gaming, Then 3d Application Settings (More Paint)
Then where it says
click it and find your aces.exe and open it in the Catalyst Control Center.

Then set it to these settings:

Once your done with that click save and close it and then try them out and see if it helps your fps. It usually does. I was using AMD Catalyst Control Center 15.7.1 to do this. Make sure you get that as it helps your fps a lot.

Nvidia Application Profiles

Okay so for us Nvidia users, we cannot use the above. We have our own nifty little system called "Nvidia control panel"

Okay for people using a Nvidia GPU what you want to do is right click on the desktop>then select nvidia control panel

Follow the screenshot and text below


In the drop down menu if you do not see War Thunder then click the add button then look for aces.exe, if it is still not there then click browser then go to the war thunder directory and manually add aces.exe.

Okay now that we are in the Driver settings for War Thunder. We can now apply settings to improve graphics and performance.

Most stuff where possible in this I would leave to application controlled.

What I would recommend changing are these certain things

1. Power management mode - Change this to prefer the maximum performance - this option keeps it at maximum performance all the time, in game.
2. Multi-display/mixed GPU acceleration - Change this to either single or multi display depending on how many screens/monitors you use.
3. Vertical Sync - set to adaptive if you struggle to keep your FPS at your monitors refresh rate. This save system resources from keeping Vsync on when at low fps. - If changing this turn vsync off in game.
4. Anisotropic filtering > Set to 8 or 16 if you play on ultra, anything lower go with 8 or less.

I would also recommend adding the first two options if not all 3 to the global settings, this means every game and app will use these settings unless told otherwise in program settings.

Okay secondly

Go to configure surround, PhysX and make sure your Physx settings is always set to use GPU and not CPU. This can bottlekneck your CPU in certain games that use Physx for everything.

3rd

Go to change resolution - scroll down to the bottom and change output dynamic range to full if its set at limited

4. Warthunder is a joke for Graphics my GPU laughs at it...

Okay set everything to max in in the launcher using DirectX11 not 9.

Edit these following options > Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA) turn it on
Antialiasing - Transparency > set it too one of the options

5. I am not too sure on what each Graphic option does, or whats the best for me. Okay a lot of people are like this, they just want to play.

Firstly I still advise doing this in the control panel. Look above for more options

1. Power management mode - Change this to prefer the maximum performance - this option keeps it at maximum performance all the time, in game.
2. Multi-display/mixed GPU acceleration - Change this to either single or multi display depending on how many screens/monitors you use.
3. Vertical Sync - set to adaptive if you struggle to keep your FPS at your monitors refresh rate. This save system resources from keeping Vsync on when at low fps. - If changing this turn vsync off in game.

After that go to "Nvidia GeForce Experiance"

Let if scan for games, if it cannot find War thunder go to preferences>Games>click the + button on the right and add the steam libary as a directory and then scan again.

Once it has finished scanning (it may take a few moments depending on how many games and how big the directory is.)

In the games list select war thunder and press the optimise


P.S Nvidia GeForce Experiance doesn't support every game, it can also be wrong at times and suggest stuff to low or to high.

End

Thanks for viewing this guide! If it helped in anyway for you then please rate it up so more people who need this help can find it! Questions? Put em in the comments and I'll answer.

Website: Click Here[505northman.weebly.com]
YouTube: Click Here
Twitter: Click Here
Facebook: Click Here[facebook.com]
Steam Group (Anyone can join)Click Here
Please feel free to check them out!

A big thank you to Ryan "Griffin" for helping me out on the Nvidia part of the guide. I have no idea how to work Nvidia. Only AMD.

Change Log

For changes when they are made as War Thunder is updated a lot with new graphics options.

2015-08-26 1:19 AM: Added changelog.

[76561198285398721]

"make sure your Physx settings is always set to use GPU and not CPU" what if ur cpu is way more powerful than ur gpu, i have an i7 2600 with a gt720 ddr3

[OperatorJack]

N o i c e :>

[PresidentialPudding]

hibana really complaining about running 80-120 fps. with a 3090 and a i7 :/

[Hibana Oh Nana]

Lowering my settings doesn't even affect my fps, even when I set them to the lowest possible value. I'm stuck at 80-120fps. I'm running a 3090 with an i7 7820x, (I know 7820x is a bit old and I'm still waiting for i9 12th gen), and it is like my settings aren't even applying at all, I tried going 720p to 4k, fps remained the same, tried reinstalling the game but it didn't help.

[Kaiser Justinian von Neuweltia]

[Kaiser Justinian von Neuweltia]

thank kind sir i can now play WT

[Necrodamis]

I'm just glad that I finally know what all this settings mean. WT does a terrible job at telling you what settings actually do

[FatCat919]

nvm, its called Avast antivuirs deleted it before it actualy ran

[FatCat919]

;-; downloaded ccleaner, and i forgot to uncheck the box to also download an antiviurs i forgot its name tho.. and didnt find it in the uninstall thing

[CoreCass]

thanks. dont have the beta.. was wondering what it would be