Graphics & performance¶
Slipstream draws the world with its own Vulkan renderer, where the graphics card does most of the work. This page explains the graphics settings, what each one costs, and what to lower first when things are slow.
Where to find them:
- Me → Preferences → Graphics: the quality slider, draw distance, avatar limits and presets.
- Me → Preferences → Graphics → Advanced Settings…: every individual setting. Most of this page is about this window.
- Me → Photo Studio… (or F1), Scene section: many of the same settings, grouped for photographers, plus shadow filtering, avatar shadows and god rays.
Presets¶
The first time you run Slipstream (and when you change graphics card) it picks settings for your computer: built-in (integrated) graphics start low, cards without ray tracing start in the middle, and ray-tracing cards with plenty of video memory start high. Reset to recommended settings (on the Graphics tab and at the bottom of Advanced Settings) picks them again.
You can save your own setups with Save settings as a preset… and switch with Load preset…. Presets also remember your FPS limit, Background FPS limit and Enable VSync, so you can make a low-power "idle" preset that caps the frame rate, and a full-speed one for events and photos.
Quick fixes when it's slow¶
Try these in order and stop when it's smooth enough:
- Lower Projector shadow budget to 0–4 (busy clubs with moving stage lights).
- Set Upscaling to FSR Quality or FSR Balanced (a big win on 1440p and 4K monitors).
- Lower Draw distance.
- Set Shadow updates to Balanced, then lower Shadow quality.
- Turn Reflection Detail down to Static+Dynamic, or turn Mirrors off.
- With ray tracing: set RT shadow resolution to Half or Quarter.
If textures are blurry or the video memory readout says Reduced for memory, see Video memory instead: that is a memory problem, not a speed one.
General¶
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Draw distance | How far you can see, from 8 m up to 4096 m. Slipstream loads up to a 5 × 5 block of regions around you. Lower is faster in busy areas. |
| Max. particle count | The most particles (sparkles, smoke, rain) shown at once. |
| Maximum LOD resolution | The sharpest a texture can be loaded: 512, 1024 or 2048 pixels. |
| Enable VSync | Matches the frame rate to your monitor's refresh rate, which avoids tearing. |
| FPS limit | Caps the frame rate (0 = no limit). It only waits when the viewer is already faster than the limit, so it never slows a frame that is below it. With VSync on, the lower of the two wins. |
| Background FPS limit | Caps the frame rate while Slipstream is not the active window (default 25). Saves power and leaves your computer free for other things. 0 = off. |
Hardware¶
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Texture compression | Stores textures in about 4–8× less video memory. See Video memory. |
| Texture memory | Whether to keep extra copies of textures in RAM. See Video memory. |
| Maximum video memory | How much video memory Slipstream may use, with a live readout. See Video memory. |
| Anisotropic Filtering | Keeps textures sharp when you look at them at a steep angle (floors, roads). Cheap on modern cards. |
| Display backend (Linux only) | Auto, Wayland or X11. Auto uses Wayland (sharp at fractional desktop scaling) when the window can get a title bar there, otherwise X11. Needs a restart. |
Anti-aliasing, upscaling and sharpening¶
Upscaling draws the world at a lower resolution and rebuilds it to full resolution using AMD FSR 3.1. It is the biggest single speed-up on high-resolution monitors. Menus, HUDs and text always stay at full, sharp resolution.
| Upscaling option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Off (native) | No upscaling. Anti-aliasing comes from the Antialiasing setting. |
| FSR Native AA (1x) | Full resolution, using FSR only to smooth edges. The best-looking option, no speed gain. |
| FSR Quality (1.5x) | Renders at 1/1.5 of your screen size. Hard to tell from native. |
| FSR Balanced (1.7x) | A bit faster, a bit softer. |
| FSR Performance (2x) | Renders at half size. Good for 4K screens and slower cards. |
| FSR Ultra Performance (3x) | The fastest, clearly softer. For very weak graphics or very large screens. |
While any FSR option is on, it does its own anti-aliasing, so Antialiasing is greyed out.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Antialiasing | Smooths jagged edges when upscaling is off: Disabled, FXAA (cheap, a little soft), SMAA (sharper) or TAA (the smoothest, including fences and foliage; can ghost slightly on fast motion). |
| Antialiasing Quality | How thorough FXAA or SMAA is. Greyed out with TAA or upscaling. |
| Sharpening | Adds back crispness after anti-aliasing or upscaling. |
Advanced
FSR Custom in the list uses the render scale from the debug setting RenderVKRenderScale
(0.25 to 1). The upscaling choice itself is RenderVKUpscaler.
Mesh and terrain¶
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Terrain Mesh Detail, Trees, Objects, Flexiprims | How far away things keep their detailed shape before switching to simpler versions. Each goes up to Ultra. Higher looks better at a distance and costs more. |
| Hex-tile terrain textures | Hides the repeating grid pattern of ground textures by showing each patch at its own offset and rotation. Small cost. |
| Smooth terrain | Draws the ground as a smooth surface instead of flat triangles, with finer detail near you. On by default. |
| Smooth terrain detail (the list next to it) | How fine the smoothing is near the camera: Normals only (smooth shading only), Medium (0.5 m), High (0.25 m) (default) or Ultra (0.125 m). Changes apply straight away. |
| PBR terrain detail | For regions with PBR (modern material) terrain: Full, or skip some texture layers to save GPU time (No emissive, No emissive, AO, Colour + roughness, Colour only). Older terrain isn't affected. |
Smooth terrain and your feet
The region's physics still uses the original flat triangles, so on rough ground your feet and objects can sit a few centimetres above or below the smooth surface you see.
Shadows¶
Shadows are usually the biggest single cost in busy places.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Shadows | None, Sun/Moon, or Sun/Moon + Projectors (projectors are spotlights that cast light and shadow). |
| Shadow quality | Low to Ultra. With shadow maps, the shadow sharpness (resolution). With ray-traced shadows, how many rays each pixel uses, which makes soft edges smoother. |
| Shadow updates | Realtime redraws all shadows every frame. Balanced and Performance redraw distant shadows less often; shadows near you, nearby avatars and your vehicle stay realtime. Far-away moving shadows may lag a little. |
| Sun/moon shadows | Shadow maps (the classic method) or Ray traced (see below). |
| Translucent | Glass and other see-through objects cast lighter shadows tinted by their colour, so stained glass throws coloured light. Off: they cast hard, solid shadows, which is cheaper. |
| Projector shadows | Off, Shadow maps or Ray traced. Needs Shadows set to Sun/Moon + Projectors. |
| Shadow softness | How soft the edges of ray-traced shadows are. 0 is razor sharp. |
| Projector shadow budget | How many spotlights can cast shadow-map shadows at once (brightest and closest first). 0 = none. Moving stage lights are expensive, so lower this first in clubs. Values above 16 need a restart. |
| RT shadow resolution | How finely ray-traced shadows are traced: Full, Three quarter, Half (default) or Quarter. Half looks the same as Full in most scenes and is much faster. |
In Photo Studio → Scene → Shadows & AO you'll also find:
- Filtering: how shadow-map edges are softened, Low to Ultra (contact hardening). Ultra makes shadows sharp where an object touches the ground and softer further away.
- Avatar shadows: Opaque only, Alpha masked or Full. Lower settings help in crowds.
- God rays: light shafts from the sun and moon through gaps in trees and windows (Off to High).
Ray tracing¶
On NVIDIA RTX 20-series, AMD RX 6000-series, Intel Arc and newer, sun, moon and spotlight shadows can be ray traced: pixel-exact, with soft edges, no light leaking through walls and no shimmering seams. Choose Ray traced for Sun/moon shadows and/or Projector shadows, then use Shadow softness and RT shadow resolution to taste.
Without a supported card (or driver), the Ray traced options are greyed out and everything else still works. Hover over them to see why ray tracing isn't available; Help → About Slipstream says too.
Advanced
Debug settings: RenderVKSunShadows (1 maps, 2 ray traced), RenderVKProjectorShadows
(0 off, 1 maps, 2 ray traced), RenderVKRTShadowSoftness, RenderVKRTShadowMaskScale
(RT shadow resolution), RenderVKProjShadowMax (projector budget). RenderVKRayTracing 0 turns
ray tracing off entirely (needs a restart).
Ambient occlusion and depth of field¶
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Screen Space Ambient Occlusion | Soft contact shadows in corners, creases and where objects meet. |
| Standard AO strength | On (default): ambient occlusion darkens ambient light the way modern games do. Off: the subtler look of Alchemy and the official viewer. |
| Specular occlusion | Ambient occlusion also dims reflections in crevices and contact areas (most visible on shiny and metal surfaces). |
| Depth of Field | Blurs what's out of focus, like a camera lens. Fine-tune it in Photo Studio. |
Reflections and mirrors¶
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Screen Space Reflections | Adds reflections of things that are on screen (wet floors, shiny surfaces). |
| Reflection probes | Turns environment reflections (sky, surroundings, placed probes) on or off. The settings below only apply when it's on. |
| Reflection Detail | How often reflections update: Static Only, Static+Dynamic, Realtime (expensive) or Raytraced (like Realtime, but traced with ray tracing on supported cards; falls back to Realtime otherwise). |
| Reflection Coverage | Which probes are used: None, Manual only (placed by builders), Manual + terrain, or Full scene. |
| Max Reflection Probes | How many probes can be active at once (None to Ultra). |
| Probe resolution (the list next to it) | 64 px to 512 px. Only mirror-like, glossy surfaces look sharper at higher values. 256 and 512 px use a lot of video memory (the list shows how much at Ultra). |
| Mirrors | Draws mirror surfaces. A mirror you can't see costs nothing. |
| Mirror Resolution | How sharp mirrors are (256 to 2048). |
| Mirror Update Rate | How often mirrors redraw (Low to Ultra). |
| Mirror distance | How far, in metres, mirrors reflect the scene. Shorter is faster. |
Tone mapping and exposure¶
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Exposure | Overall brightness (also on the Graphics tab as Brightness (exposure)). |
| Tone Mapper | How bright colours are fitted to your screen: Khronos Neutral, ACES (Hill), ACES (Boosted), Reinhard, Filmic, Uchimura (GT) or AgX. More looks, colour grading and film effects are in Photo Studio. |
| Tone Mapping Mix | Blends between untouched and tone-mapped colours. |
High-DPI displays¶
Slipstream renders at your monitor's full resolution and scales the interface by your desktop's scale factor. If the interface is too big or small, adjust Me → Preferences → Advanced → UI size.
Measuring performance¶
Turn on the debug setting RenderVKGpuTimers (see how to change a debug setting) for a minute
in the slow spot, then turn it off again and attach your Slipstream.log to a bug report. It records
how long each part of the frame takes on the graphics card, which tells us exactly what to optimise.