Updated 20251218 This alpha game is an unruly beast when it comes to hardware. First, set your expectations low. This ain't Minecraft or some Lego game people! You aren't going to get 300fps. If you have the mediocre hardware you should see roughly 30-60 fps depending on where you are in game. Cities and stations will be on the low end. Outer space will be on the high end. You watch movies at 24-30fps. It is perfectly playable. My specs: POWERSPEC G760 9800X3D/32/2/9070XT/H Windows 11 Radeon 9070 XT AMD Ryzen 9800X3D 32 GB RAM 32 GB virtual memory 2TB M.2 SSD drive Your CPU probably matters more than your GPU If you have an Nvidia GTX 1080 or higher, and you aren't getting 30-60 fps, it is likely that your CPU is the bottleneck and not your GPU. Before I overclocked my old desktop CPU I was lucky to get 15-20 fps. However overclocking my Athlon to 4.2Ghz (Those Athlons are awesome overclockers!) almost doubled my FPS. I'm not saying to go overclock your CPU. I'm just saying that this game is in alpha. It isn't optimized. Your graphics hardware often isn't the problem. General OS Preparation: Synchronize to the correct time! - https://support.robertsspaceindustries.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041208893-Check-Your-System-Clock Update DNS to Google (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) or Cloudflair (1.1.1.1) DNS https://support.robertsspaceindustries.com/hc/en-us/articles/6138725219735-Error-Code-0x1007 Optional: Disable the Xbox game bar in Windows. Enable Windows Game Mode Tune your anti-virus protection to exclude Star Citizen. I suggest that you exclude "C:\Program Files (x86)\EasyAntiCheat_EOS" and "C:\Program Files\Roberts Space Industries". I do not recommend turning off security apps completely. Shutdown all non-essential apps and services. I turn off Steam, Epic, and any other background app I don't need during the game. Shutdown the Print Spooler, Hotspot, Windows Image Acquisition, Connected User Experience and Telemetry, Geolocation, and Biometric services (icssvc, stisvc, DiagTrack, lfsvc, WbioSrvc, and PcaSvc respectively) while you are playing. I recommend Decrapifying Windows with this script at https://christitus.com/windows-tool/. It will give your PC/CPU a boost just from running less processes and increasing available memory. Turn off overlays (MSI Afterburner, Discord, etc...) Use wired ethernet. A wired connection will provide a far more stable experience. If you have a secondary fast SSD drive, install Star Citizen on it, instead of the same drive as your OS. Do NOT use a spinning drive or an external USB drive as they are too slow and will negatively affect the game. SSD drives, at native PCI speeds, are absolutely essential. If you only have 16GB, shut down all applications. You should be planning to upgrade your RAM to 32GB for best performance. Unfortunately DDR5 prices have skyrocketed recently. Create a static 32GB virtual memory file on your fastest drive. Even if you have 64GB of RAM, you need virtual memory for Star Citizen to run optimally. RSI has a great article on a bunch of this stuff. Go read it. Its where I learned a great deal of this to begin with. https://support.robertsspaceindustries.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000081887-Guide-to-Graphic-Issues Some mice, have poor drivers or don't handle very high polling rates. If you see a massive drop in FPS when you move your mouse a lot, look into dropping your polling rate to 125 or 250 times per second. Turn on Resizable Bar in your BIOS. If you have more than one GPU make sure Windows is using your fastest GPU for the game! Open your System settings -> Display -> Graphics -> Custom Settings for Applications. Make sure there is an entry for Star Citizen and choose the fastest graphics card for the game. Video Card Settings: Start with a Fresh Driver Install I recommend starting from scratch with your driver. Download the latest and greatest driver from its respective website. Use Guru3D's DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) and nuke your current driver mess. Then reinstall the new driver. If you have issues with the newest drivers you can use DDU and rollback to a better drive if you need it. Nvidia Control Panel Settings I recommend that you leave almost everything set to the default. Manage 3D Settings -> Global Settings tab Shader Cache Size - 10GB (This worked on my 980Ti but didn't do much on my 3060 - may or may not improve performance.) Manage 3D Settings -> Program Settings tab -> Squadron 42 Low Latency Mode - Ultra (This works on my 980Ti but didn't do much on my 3060 - may or may not improve performance.) Power management mode - Prefer maximum performance (Try it and see, but it may not have any effect at all) Texture filtering - Quality - High performance (Try it and see, but it may not have any effect at all) Vertical Sync - Fast (this turns off vsync and just drops frames when needed to stop screen tearing. You can also try it set to Off) This will probably give you the biggest boost to FPS. AMD Settings Use Freesync (with Vsync turned on in game) if your monitor supports it. You can also just turn VSYNC off and set sys_maxfps in the game console to a few fps below your current monitor refresh rate (58 fps for a 60fps monitor) Or... Radeon Enhanced Sync - Enabled (vsync turned off in game) Other Radeon Settings I do not recommend any other changes. Leave it all at defaults. If you are getting a black screen when Star Citizen launches, make sure you have everything else except Enhanced Sync turned off. Even Sharpening can cause strange behaviors with Star Citizen 4.5 Vulkan. In Game Settings Graphics Graphics Renderer - Vulkan Resolution - I usually set this to my native monitor resolution Image Scaling - Quality 66% (Keep reducing this to improve FPS/Memory usage) Upscaling technique - Use CIGTSR for Radeon (Do not use AMD FSR! It is very old and terrible FS 2.0) or DLSS for Nvidia. Quality - Very High (review Video Memory Usage at the bottom right of your screen and reduce this setting until it is below your VRAM). This will change a variety of settings below, which you can also customize yourself. Motion Blur - Off Vsync - Off (this usually gives you a huge boost - see sys_maxFPS below to set your FPS lower than your monitor) Chromatic Aberration - 0 Film Grain - No Sharpening - Set to taste. I keep mine around 50 Face and Head Tracking If you aren't using the built in head track, turn it off and you will gain some performance improvements. I use SmoothTrack and OpenTrack that moves those CPU calculations off to your phone. Limiting your FPS Open the console with "~" and type the following: sys_maxFps 60 That will limit the FPS of the client to 60 fps. If you want to set it back to unlimited, set it to 0. I suggest you set this to the maximum that your monitor can display. You can also use this to provide a smoother experience in certain areas of the game. For instance, in the QV central atrium room with the large fire, I find that the game runs very choppy unless I set maxfps to 45 and then it runs smoothly. Third Party App Settings Discord User Settings - Advanced - Disable Hardware Acceleration (might gain about 10 FPS on your graphics card - depends on your hardware) Did you try these settings? Did they help? Do you have questions? Do you have feedback or know of some other settings that can help? Let me know below!