FPS Drop

[Stike7g5]

Recently I have noticed my Frame rate drop significantly with the past couple updates. I am not entirely sure what is going on. I am using the same game configurations and RAM configurations as I did pre-launcher update but I am now noticing that builds I used to be able to skim by with 15-20FPS have now dropped down to 2-3FPS making the game near impossible to play. I Have tried configuring the Graphics settings, RAM settings and even tried using the original (custom JAVA path) to run StarMade with no luck. I have even went back a couple versions to test out to see what was going on.

Spoiler: PC Specs

Windows 10 PRO 64-bit
Intel Core i7-3740QM
32GB RAM (4X8GB)
256GB SSD(where StarMade is installed) with 1TBHDD
Nividia GTX Geforce 680M

 

[DukeofRealms]

Change the view distance, chunk size increased by 8 so technically view distance settings (even though they are the same number) increased by 8 also.

 

[Antikristianos]

I had probably the same issue after the last patches.

when i start the singleplayer and come around my giant space station the game becomes unplayable.

seems to be a serious Single player only problem. when i start a dedicated server on my computer and then connect to it via localhost the game runs smooth on max settings where it in singleplayer got down to 1 fps on lowest quality settings.

 

[kupu]

Here are a few key settings to troubleshoot FPS drops or increase performance beyond the obvious Texture Res and Normal Mapping options.

1. Make sure your memory settings fit your PC specs.

Eg: If you have 4gb of total system RAM, increase the maximal memory used to 2048 in the launcher.
If you have a total of 8 or more, you can set this to 4096. This is the total memory Starmade may use, so always allow for background processes and windows to occupy some memory too.

2. As Duke has outlined above, a recent chunk update (larger chunks) means previous chunk view settings may be trying to render 8 times more than you are expecting. Lowering this value will improve performance and load times.

3. Try disabling the Framebuffer. The framebuffer is required for certain visual effects like bloom. Some players on older hardware could see a big increase in frames by disabling this.

4. Texture compression. This is one of a few "last resort" options for those with older, or perhaps lower power integrated graphics on laptops etc.
In your Starmade installation folder there is a config file named Settings.cfg.

Open this config with Notepad, or a text editor and find the line

G_TEXTURE_COMPRESSION_BLOCKS = false

Change it to "true" and save the file. This will reduce the quality of block textures, but could be worth it on low power machines.

Hope this helps.