Guide
Hi
I have a terrible computer, running at 18 FPS in galaxy mode at the beginning of the game with 600 stars and 17 AI, but I found a way to dramatically improve the performance. If you have a potato computer, this may help you too.
My specs are: Arch Linux, Intel Core i3-5005U CPU @ 2.00GHz (2 core), Intel HD Graphics 5500
First of all, turn down the only graphics option available in Stellaris' options menu: multisampling. Set it to 0. On my PC, this can increase the framerate by 10.
Then, there's a console in-game that allows you to use commands, they can be used for debugging, cheating, or tweaking graphics. To open it, press ~ on a QWERTY keyboard (the key on the left of 1), or ² on AZERTY. You can press up and down to scroll through the console's history, and tab to autocomplete
(note that you can't use the console in ironman or multiplayer, so to use the commands in these modes you need to open the console in the main menu and input the commands there, before starting the game.)
So anyway, here's a list of commands I found useful to improve my framerate. Open the console, type them and press enter:
help : show available commands and variables. Commands are followed by [], variables aren't. Variables can be modified using the tweakergui command.
info : show debug info
tweakergui draw.dust borders.usemesh: display a window with 2 checkboxes. Turn off all dust by unchecking draw.dust, by doing this I gained 30 FPS (!) in galaxy mode, going from 18 fps to 48 fps. After disabling the dust you need to enable the borders mesh with borders.usemesh to be able to see the countries borders. The galaxy map looks like this[i.imgur.com] after these commands
bloom : turn on/off bloom. I gain around 10 fps with it off in the galaxy map tweakergui draw.objects : a check box to turn off the drawing of all 3d objects in star system mode, this could be useful in large battles if your computer can't keep up
If you find yourself having to type the same commands in the console every time you launch Stellaris, you can make a script and run it instead:
Create a text file in the game's folder (Steam/steamapps/common/Stellaris/), I call it "fix.txt". It'll contain all the commands you want, like this[pastebin.com]
In Stellaris, open the console and type run fix.txt
Finally, it may help to change settings directly in the setting.txt file. It's located in C:\Users\username\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris on Windows and ~/.local/share/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/ on Linux.
In this file you can set vsync=no, or maxanisotropy to 0. On my PC it doesn't do anything performance-wise, but it's been reported that it helps.
I hope this is useful for other players with potato computer :)
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682063274
More Stellaris guilds
- All Guilds
- [META]
- Stellaris Guide 820
- Stellaris: Space Warfare Explained
- Stellaris V3.7 My Commands Compilation
- Stellaris FAQ [RU]
- Artistic Screenshots
- [UPDATED FOR 1.5.1+] Making Your First Mod: A Guide For Primitives
- Ship design
- The Purger Guide to the Galaxy - a Detailed Fanatic Purifiers Guide
- [JP]MOD