Tips to Improve Rust Game Performance

[Aurora]

Cap your FPS so it doesn't work harder trying to achieve unrealistic goals. Personally, using unlimited FPS versus capping it to my average FPS on the server was a huge improvement.This seriously helpful tip has been provided many times in the Discord, so I thought I'd collect Death's comments on the topic and post it here as well:

Death: There are a few things you can do to your settings to help. First thing would be to turn shadows all the way down and cap your fps to a sensible number. 60 is a good start. Capping your FPS is wise for any game, especially Rust. You will not benefit from anything over 60 -- instead, your computer will constantly work full throttle to keep up.

• Ingame, press F1 to open your console.
• In console, copy and paste (or type) fps.limit 60
• Then, click ESC to bring up the menu. 
• Click the cogwheel (settings) and turn down anything that says shader or shadow

Edited August 20, 2020 by Aurora

[Sararainmaker]

If you don't have a super-expensive monitor, it can't actually display anything over 60 FPS anyway...

...also an interesting article on framerates and the human eyes.

 The benefits of having the FPS so high is not as much as people might think, and in reality is more for bragging rights than anything else.

[Aurora]

Another tip is to use the in game performance indicator to test what game settings will decrease FPS issues on your system.

Performance Indicator: Display values in bottom left of screen. 

Ingame, press F1 to open your console. In console type: perf value (where value = 0 to 6)

• perf 0    Turn off all counters
• perf 1    Display FPS
• perf 2    Display FPS and latency
• perf 3    Display FPS, latency and RAM usage
• perf 4    Display FPS, latency, RAM usage and garbage collection
• perf 5    Display FPS, latency, RAM usage, garbage collection and ping
• perf 6    Display FPS, latency, RAM usage, garbage collection, ping and tasks

(Note: Perf List can be found here)

With the indicator enabled, you will see details about latency, FPS and so on. If you have issues, it can be helpful to turn on perf, walk around areas of the map with many large builds. Once you take a performance hit, you can adjust or disable high impact settings in your graphics options menu (one at a time) to see which changes will help stabilize values.

Some settings to tweak include the following:

• Graphics Quality
• Water Quality
• Shader Level
• Draw Distance
• Anisotropic Filtering
• Max Tree Meshes
• Anti-aliasing
• Depth of Field
• Max Gibs
• Motion Blur

After you adjust a setting, move around and go back to the area where you had the performance issue to test for improvements. It might take some time to tweak settings, but it's worth taking the time to do, if you have issues!