Star Citizen is one of the most hardware-demanding games available. Getting the right settings is the difference between a smooth session and constant stutter — and the wrong choice on a single setting can cost you 20+ FPS.
This is a breakdown of which settings matter most for performance, based on community testing.
Settings With the Biggest Performance Impact
Object View Distance
Keep this at Medium or High. Ultra causes significant frame jitter and stuttering for most hardware. The visual difference between High and Ultra is minimal in motion.
Planet Volumetric Clouds
One of the biggest FPS costs in atmosphere. If you are dropping frames near planets, this is the first thing to lower. Low vs High here can be a 20+ FPS difference on mid-range hardware.
Gas Clouds
Set to Low. The visual difference between Low and Very High is nearly undetectable in motion, but the performance cost of Very High is real.
Shading
Medium is the sweet spot. The difference between Medium and Very High is subtle and not worth the performance cost.
Post Effects
Low. Minimal visible difference, noticeable performance recovery.
Settings That Are Mostly VRAM-Limited
These affect how much VRAM your GPU uses more than raw FPS. Set them based on your card:
- Texture Quality
- Texture Detail
- Texture Ground
- Texture Filtering
If you have 12GB+ VRAM, set these to whatever looks best. If you are under 8GB, keeping these at Medium prevents the stuttering that happens when the game runs out of VRAM.
Settings That Have Almost No FPS Impact
- Shadows
- Screen Space Shadows
- Fog
- Water Caustics
- Video Comms
Set these based on preference — they are not meaningfully affecting your frame rate.
Object Detail
Keep at High minimum. Setting this to Low causes surface rendering issues on planets — terrain becomes invisible in some areas.
GPU-Specific Notes
Nvidia users — increasing Shader Cache size in Nvidia Control Panel (Profile Inspector or global settings) from default to 10GB can improve performance noticeably in large areas.
Vulkan vs DX11 — Vulkan performs better on most modern hardware, but a subset of users see worse performance with no clear reason. If Vulkan is underperforming on your system, switch to DX11 for now.
ReBAR / Resizable BAR
If your CPU and GPU both support it (most hardware from 2021 onward), enable both Resizable BAR and Above 4G Decoding in your BIOS. This can improve GPU performance in memory-intensive scenarios like Star Citizen.
Community Presets
If you want to see what other players with similar hardware are running, BestSettingsFor.com has community-submitted game settings presets with upvotes. Useful for cross-referencing against what is working for other people.
