Any Star Citizen folks here? I'm a new player with a barely passable rig, looking for tips to make play bearable...
Howdy, citizens!
So, after begging, borrowing and stealing, I've managed to piece together what I believe to be a barely capable rig so that I can get into playing this incredible looking game, but I'm running into a performance issue that makes it pretty unplayable.
Here's my rig:
AMD A-10 6800k @ 4.1 GHz
32 GB Ram
128 GB SanDisk SSD (for the game only, OS is on a similar size Kingston)
GTX 960 for the graphics.
Last night I tried running the game from my normal HD, which is a 1tb platter. This did not go well. Just moving my character around in the initial apartment was torture, and using anything in the room was an exercise in frustration to the point that the room ended up looking like a brawl had happened in it before I made it out, with coffee cups and water bottles all over the floor.
So, after I read a few pointers online, I salvaged the SanDisk from a different PC and began reinstalling on that. Today I hope to be able to move around smoothly enough to actually play, but aside from setting every option to its lowest, are there any other little tricks I can use to get it more playable?
https://scguide.space/getting-started/run-sc-better/
The biggest tip I have is try setting graphics quality to high. Anything below that and the game offloads way too much on your cpu in an already cpu heavy game
Wow... Really?
That's counter intuitive to everything I've learned in all my years of gaming, but your explanation sounds plausible.
I will give that a shot in a few minutes, as the game is loading up right now
I don't know about that with a GTX 960... maybe if the GPU were stronger and the CPU weaker. I think the GPU will be the bottleneck to be honest though. That should be the priority to upgrade first anyway.
Yeah definitely. I would try both ways and see which runs better
I'm commenting without looking up the relative specs of your rig, just in the general sense...Realistically there's only so much you can do. Install it on an SSD, make sure you're running as few background processes as possible, and hope that your graphics card is up to the task. Star Citizen is sometimes perfectly playable and sometimes an absolute dumpster fire even on the same system day to day, so you might also just wait until next patch or a slower day/time and see if the situation improves.
You should also try the different spawn points. Last time I played Loreville was a performance nightmare but it's been over a year. I'm sure the targets have shifted some in that respect.
Network connectivity with the server seems to make a big difference, but there's not really a lot you can do about that. If your internet is borderline, you could try to make sure you don't have any big downloads or anything happening while you're playing.
10-4.
The connection is the best the local cable company (now Rogers) can provide, so I'm good there I believe. I'll make sure to kill all aux processes, and see what happens with just the game running. Your post mirrors most of what I was able to find, so I'm hopeful.
Cheers!
+1 for spawning and setting your home to a space station, never on a planet or a large outpost. Grim Hex was always okay but has its own issues.
I was a fan of microtech’s space port, I forget the name.
Ok, so can I do that after the tutorial? Apparently I've already set whatever the first option was as my home system...
Yeah you can change it just go to the medical centre at any spaceport and use the terminal to set your respawn point.
Awesome.
If I can get out of the lobby of the tutorial building. Seriously, it's a slideshow, even after following all the suggestions in here lol
Having some kind of performance monitoring tools running while playing can be a useful data point. It can help tell you if you have an obvious hardware bottleneck.
From what I can see, it looks to be the processor. It's constantly pinned.at.100% during play, with the exe itself responsible for 80 to 90 of that. The rest is left to system processes etc.
I can see my video card through my case, and only one of the two fans is ever running on it, so I know it's doing fine. It might also be network traffic, but I know my home connection was clear, and I don't have lag with any other games or streaming.
Do AMD processors suffer from the same thing mentioned earlier where disabling two of the cores could help?
And just an additional note to what others have already stated, sometimes your PC can be doing just fine and performance is still a hot mess due to the current health of the SC server you're on. It's not unusual to find yourself moving smoothly but struggling to operate buttons, move inventory items around, or anything else that requires snappy conversations from the server to accomplish.