Performance Tuning

LUG Helper

The LUG Helper’s Preflight Check will do a quick check of your system for some common issues. Be sure it passes all checks.

Game Settings

The following game settings can help improve framerates:

Set Quality to High. Lower settings are not recommended as it will tax your CPU more. Set to Very High to offload more work from your CPU to your GPU.
Set Planet Volumetric Clouds to Medium
Set Scattered Object Distance to Low
Set Motion Blur to Off
Set Sharpening to 100

Zram & Swap

We currently recommend a combined 40GB RAM + swap to avoid Out Of Memory crashes while playing Star Citizen. Systems with less than 40GB RAM will need additional swap or zram configured. Systems with >40GB RAM should be fine as long as any size swap file exists; the game likes to swap even when you have plenty of ram.

Zram stores swap in RAM using on-the-fly compression which can improve game performance when memory utilization gets high. In our experience, this tends to provide better performance in Star Citizen than zswap.

For systems with 16GB RAM, we recommend all 16GB configured for zram with at least 8-16GB in a swap file.
For systems with 32GB RAM, we recommend configuring all 32GB for zram with at least 4-8GB in a swap file.

When using zram, zswap needs to be disabled. See the Arch Wiki for zram setup instructions that should work for most distros. Also see the Arch Wiki for swap file creation instructions.

If you prefer not to use zram, a swap file will need to be configured. Btrfs users please follow the Btrfs instructions. We recommend configuring at least a combined 40GB RAM + swap:

For 16GB RAM: 24GB swap
For 32GB RAM: 8GB swap

More swap should be configured if you intend to run background applications while playing the game.

ESync/FSync/NTSync

Which will work best depends on your specific hardware. You may experiment with the following:
If these environment variables are set, Wine will automatically choose the best option between esync or fsync. If you’ve installed the game via our LUG Helper, these variables are pre-configured for you.
```
export WINEESYNC=1
export WINEFSYNC=1
```
NTSync requires kernel 6.14+ and a patched wine runner which can be easily installed using the LUG Helper. No additional environment variables are needed.

Nvidia Cache

If you’ve installed the game via our LUG Helper, these settings are pre-configured for you.

By default Nvidia has a combined cache for all games. As the cache fills up from other games, Star Citizen’s shaders may get deleted leading to poor FPS. We recommend giving SC its own persistent cache by adding the following environment variables:

__GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE=true
__GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_PATH="/path/you/want/for/your/cache"  (example: /home/games/star-citizen/nvidiacache)
__GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_SKIP_CLEANUP=true

Mesa (AMD/Intel) Shader Cache

If you’ve installed the game via our LUG Helper, these settings are pre-configured for you.

Mesa can be given its own persistent shader cache by adding the following environmental variables:

MESA_SHADER_CACHE_DIR="/path/you/want/for/your/cache"  (example: /home/games/star-citizen/amdcache)
MESA_SHADER_CACHE_MAX_SIZE=10G

Feral GameMode

Gamemode may help improve performance by applying OS-level performance tweaks as the game is launched. For most configurations, it does not seem to result in significant benefits. Search for gamemode in your Distro’s repos. Refer to the Gamemode repository for configuration instructions

Use the LUG Helper to edit your launch script and add gamemoderun to the beginning of your launch command.

Picom/Compton Compositors

If you use the Picom or Compton compositor, it may cause a laggy experience despite having high framerates. We recommend disabling the compositor.

Changing CPU scaling behavior via the Linux kernel and System Management BIOS

To achieve a more stable framerate in Star Citizen, ideally you will want a stable CPU frequency. There are several schedulers provided by the Linux kernel. Start with the Performance scheduler to hint that the CPU should always run at the maximum frequency before trying the demand-based schedulers.

We have discovered that Dell laptops with Intel CPUs (and possibly other mobile hardware configurations) may have other factors that influence CPU frequency scaling:

In situations where one of these laptops is either thermal-limited or power-limited, the CPU and GPU will set the maximum frequency and then fall to a low frequency (ie. 800 MHz) when it hits the limit.
You can try to configure these settings in the BIOS or via SMBIOS. On Ubuntu distributions, this utility is provided by the smbios-utils package.

Solution for affected laptops:

If changing the kernel scheduler between Performance and the various demand-based schedulers doesn’t affect CPU frequency scaling for your laptop, try setting the SMBIOS thermal mode to cool-bottom. This mode behaves similarly to the Conservative kernel governor, gradually incrementing/decrementing the CPU frequency to stabilize the framerate.

Using the SMBIOS utility on Ubuntu, the command is sudo smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode=cool-bottom

Increased performance for CPUs with multiple dies

Affected CPU generations:

Amd Threadripper

Steps

Verify you have a CPU with multiple dies by running lstopo. If the results appear similar to the first image below, you can proceed:

If, on the other hand, your CPU is like this image where the dies are not shown, this will not improve your performace:
Modify the following environment variable to match your system:
```
 WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY=Number_of_Threads:List_of_threads_indexes
```
The Number_of_threads is the number of threads you want to run Star Citizen with.
The List_of_thread_indexes can be determined by looking at the lstopo output.
You can see the threads highlighted in the image below:

Run the game with the modified environment variable. As an example, the CPU shown below would end up with the arguments
```
 WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY=16:0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15
```