Auto Light System

[EmreTLN]

It seems like there's a variable FPS optimization issue on the server. In my home area, I get 15-30 FPS, but when I go to loot places, I'm seeing 60-70-80 FPS. This is probably related to the plugins, skins, and the ambient lighting in the environment.

Is it possible to adjust the settings for lights like searching lights, industrial lights, and similar lights to only turn on at night? Ceiling lights and heaters for farming can stay on continuously.

[MetaSamsara]

bad idea for people living in a cave to turn off industrial lights during the day. especially since they want to rework caves in a future update. facepunch hired a new dev specialized in optimization software engineering. give it a few months and hopefully this stuff will lag a lot less.

Edited January 24 by MetaSamsara

[Theodore Baggins]

So when I last asked, @Death said that, at least server-side, it did not make a difference whether your lights were on or off—only the complexity of the circuitry. In this case, industrial lights and ceiling lights—as is true with windmills—are often a marker for where there will be lag, but not the cause of the lag in and of itself. Likely there is additional complexity hiding insidr that base, running unchecked by the limits of a single battery.

The reality is that while monuments seem to have complex meshes and lighting, they have been heavily optimized for PvP play after years of gameplay. This process was seen in real-time over the last year as GE has been continuously refined. 

In contrast, base lighting, circuitry, industrial, and water—while fundamental to PvE—has not had the same pressure on FP, and therefore hasn't been optimized to nearly the same extent. Nor, I would imagine, could it be. After all, you can place as many lights on one ceiling as the physics engine will allow and your GPU just has to deal with the outcome. But on a refinery, lights will always be where they will be. And at night, at the monuments, you can see the compromises that were made when using a weapon flashlight—some places will just appear black. 

The caveat is that your personal (client) Rust settings will very much affect your fps in areas with lots of players' lighting, simply because of the amount of lighting calculations. 

If you are having trouble at your base, I would suggest that you first do a check Rust's reported values to see your fps and also see how much VRAM/RAM Rust is using with the in-game fps counter set to "advanced". (The VRAM/RAM usage will give you an idea if the complexity/amount of the objects are a factor—note how close they are to your VRAM max and the Rust default of 16GB* max of RAM).

Then stand in one problematic place for 30 secs (to make sure everything is loaded into RAM/VRAM). First, try radically reducing your shadow distance. Then systematically attack everything to do with lighting such as water reflections, etc. one by one. Note any changes in fps. Also go into experimental and make sure shadow "layering" (can't remember the exact wording) is unchecked. Basically try to strip down parts of the lighting/shadow workload on your GPU. 

If your fps doesn't change much, then you are likely not facing lighting as a bottleneck. With lighting comes power, and with power comes all manner of other things—sprinkler particles, timers, conveyors, furnaces, etc. In this case, it may be important to a. increase your garbage collection size (in experimental), b. make sure occlusion culling is turned on (also in experimental), and c. lower your render distance. 

But I feel you—if your neighbors have open windows or roofs to their groweries, then this *will* be a problem, and one that you can't solve unless they wall in their chaos. Until we all commit to enclosing our refineries, furnaces, electrical, etc, then populated areas will always see dramatic drops in perform that are disproportionate to simply the amount of "building" in the area. 

For context, years ago before electrical, all lights (including the ceiling light) ran on low grade. When consumption was stopped for VIP, even that was enough to cripple performance for some people. Imagine being able to plop down a lantern or a tuna lamp anywhere... but never having to even wire it. Chaos ensued

*I have found it essential both through my own experimentation and others' to manually set RAM usage. If you have 16GB of RAM, you'll have to sacrifice some settings until you can get below ~12GB and then manually cap that in startup options for Rust (-Xmx00G where 00 is the amount you want). If you have above 16GB, Rust seems to want to artificially limit your usage to 16GB unless you tell it to use more. When I'm taking screenshots, I'm on Ultra settings with everything maxed out, and I will commonly see RAM go up to 24GB and VRAM hit my 12GB max. 

[BigDave]

Yeah rust optimisation is .

My old PC was a i5 4670 with 16gb RAM and a GTX 970 (4gb VRAM) running from SSD. A lot of modern games I could still play at 1080p with FPS around 50 - 60 ish on a 60hz monitor, very playable. 10 years old and mid-range PC at best when new.

In rust though there were areas I just couldn't fly a mini at all, but the game was "playable" away from big farms or player "towns". Around 17 FPS was my average, from memory, and I tried all the tips for optimisation from my side.

Upgraded to an i7 13700F with 32gb RAM and RTX 4070ti (12gb VRAM) running from M.2 drive, basically a mid-range build. I haven't had any problems with playability on the smaller population AU servers and Elysium. Mostly I don't notice anything, just get a drop in an FPS number, but it averages in mid 100's with a low 1% around 85ish.

I'm not that tech savvy but I think there's not much that Death can do when the games isn't optimised (although I noticed a lot of the updates target optimisation).

From my experience, if you have a   for a PC, a hardware upgrade to brute force it might be the only option unfortunately, although I understand that can be cost prohibited.