Guide:Troubleshooting Game Performance

Star Citizen, in it's alpha state, is a very graphically intensive game to run. In addition to this, there are various idiosyncrasies with the game's optimization that are not immediately obvious to a new player. This page aims to provide an easy-to-understand cheat sheet to maximize the performance of your system.

'''Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary; what works on one system may not work as well for a slightly different system. Everyone's hardware is a little different. The following is a collection of observations and personal experience from myself and other players.'''

General tips & tricks

 * Star Citizen will be effectively unplayable unless it is installed on an SSD. You will be waiting for 45 minutes to respawn when you die if not. This is a fairly common issue that a lot of people have, and unfortunately the only solution is to upgrade to an SSD.
 * In order to view FPS in Star Citizen you can use Console Commands. Press the tilde  beside 1 on your keyboard. Type in r_displayInfo 1 and hit enter. r_displayInfo 2, 3, or 4 will show you differing information. You can autocomplete using tab.
 * If it's your first time launching the game, be patient. Star Citizen compiles all of it's shaders on startup, so ridiculously low framerates are normal for ~10 minutes after you first log in.
 * Ensure nothing is running in the background. Chrome, Firefox, Spotify, and even Steam can all take up valuable processing power and RAM that Star Citizen could otherwise use.
 * If you have a Ryzen 7900x3D or 7950x3D you may see a performance boost from parking some of your CPU cores to reduce thermal load and increase cache response time.
 * Deleting your shader folder will fix visual issues and can help with performance bugs in some cases. Be warned that the game will recompile them on the next startup. The shader folder can be found at %localappdata%\Star Citizen\ in the folder with your game version on it.
 * Restart! If you run into a weird graphical bug, or lower-than-usual framerates, restarting your computer will often fix the issue.

Windows Settings

 * If you only have 16GB of RAM, it is strongly recommended that you set up a 16GB pagefile on your fastest SSD.
 * Make sure performance mode is enabled in Windows.
 * Change the Star Citizen Process Priority to High.

Nvidia Settings

 * If you have an Nvidia GPU, increasing the shader cache size to 10gb in Nvidia Control Panel seems to help.
 * Ensuring the 'Prefer Maximum Performance' power option in Nvidia Control Panel is selected can also increase FPS.