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

See CIG’s Spectrum post for an explanation of each graphics setting along with what it affects in terms of performance, visuals, or hardware usage. Note: The post is long and continues into the comments.

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 24GB in a swap file.
  • For systems with 32GB RAM, we recommend configuring all 32GB for zram with at least 8GB in a swap file.

The zram-generator package must be installed and requires a configuration text file. Many distros use zram-generator by default.
Use a text editor to modify existing or create your own text file in /etc/systemd named zram-generator.conf copy this sample:

## /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf

[zram0]
zram-size = ram
compression-algorithm = zstd

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: At least 24GB swap
  • For 32GB RAM: At least 8GB swap

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

ESync/FSync/NTSync

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

  • If these environment variables are set, Wine will automatically choose the best option between esync or fsync. 
    export WINEESYNC=1
export WINEFSYNC=1
  • NTSync requires kernel 6.14+ and a wine 10.16 or newer 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

For most configurations, Gamemode does not seem to result in significant performance benefits. If you wish to experiment with its capabilities, install gamemode from your package manager, then 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.

CPU scaling on Laptops

When configuring kernel schedulers on a mobile device, the Performance scheduler will hint that the CPU should always run at the maximum frequency.

Dell laptops with Intel CPUs may have other factors that influence CPU frequency scaling:

  • If the laptop is thermal-limited or power-limited, the CPU and GPU will fall to a lower frequency 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

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

    If, on the other hand, your CPU is like this image where the dies are not shown, this will not improve your performace:
    CPU Topology

  2. 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:
    CPU Topology

    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

    CPU Topology