Steelrising Performance and Vram Guide

For Steelrising players, this is a detailed guide about performance and vram of the game, let’s check it out

Performance and Vram

Here is a small overview of the Vram consumption of the textures:
Ultra Textures 1080p: 12GB, 1440p: 13 GB, 4k: 15GB
High Textures: 1080p: 7.5GB, 1440p: 8.5 GB, 4k: 12GB
Medium textures: 1080p: 5.5 gb, 1440p: 7.5 gb, 4k: 10 gb

This is the measured vram consumption.

What I also noticed: In some places the ground textures seem to move, almost like an alien. I suspect an error with the surrounding occlusion. Pay close attention to the ground textures.

I’ve now tested several hours, with a variety of settings. Here’s my experience:
Regarding the detail distance: Up to high you lose almost no fps, with ultra then the fps collapse. Gpu consumption suddenly increases by 500mb. Shadow details and distance. No problems up there either, with ultra, no matter which of the two options, the fps drops. The gpu vram increases by 700 mb. If you play with high textures and set the shadow details and distance to low, you first have 7.5 GB of vram, but after about 3 minutes you have over 8 GB. So the vram consumption grows despite the low shadow. The two light options consume about 10 fps each on ultra, no fps loss on half. The only option that really helps permanently is to leave the texture details on medium, because then it doesn’t matter and you can set both shadow options to high. Ingame vsync causes framedrops of about 5-7 fps. Depending on the situation (fight or run, fast camera movement). Without no fps drops.

I let taskamanger run for several hours. CPU usage was mostly at 38%, so steelrising is effectively using 4 cores (I have 10). The only problem is the Vram. The high textures and low shadows between 7.5 gb and then exceeded the 8GB limit after a few minutes. With the medium textures, the vram utilization is then at 90%. It doesn’t matter whether the shadows are low or high.

The main problem for bad performance and ugly textures are the texture settings from high. This becomes noticeable very quickly (1-2 minutes) through ugly ground textures, rocks and trees. None of this happens on medium.

My Performace Tip:

Textures medium!! Don’t forget to set the anisotopic filtering to 16x, then the medium textures will look nice too. Shadow resolution and distance to high and detail distance to high. You can leave the rest at maximum. Dlss: Quality. You must leave the indirect lighting on full. Halfway there are pixel errors with the lighting. Noticeable on the green hedges.

Disable ingame vsync. If you don’t have vsnc or gsync, enable fastsync via the driver. This fixes frame drops.
Steelrising’s own vsync only uses double-buffered vsync (no triple buffering), which leads to these framedros.

I have screen mode on full screen. But please also test the full screen window mode if you notice any differences (micro stutter). Depends on gsync/freesync, vsync mode. Doesn’t work the same for everyone.

System Optimizations:
Set power mode to high performance in windows (10/11). In the Nvidia settings: Power management mode: High performance. Turn on game mode in windows. Go further in these windows settings and also activate hardware accelerated gpu scheduling. Disables the x-box gaming bar in windows. Activate the resizable bar on your gpus via the bios (Only last generation amd and nvidia users can do this). Please inform yourself via google, but with newer boards or bios uodate this has to be activated there. If you have Geforce experience, disable the in-game overlay. Update your chipset driver, audio driver, network driver and gpu driver. For GPU drivers, I always recommend a custom reinstall (complete clean). Only update the motherboard bios if you have the technical knowledge. Deactivated either in the device manager, it is better via the bios, your cpu gpu. For god’s sake don’t use hdd anymore. Sell them to a museum and get a ssd. 1tb is already available for 75 euros. If you switch from hdd to ssd, you will get an extremely speed boost in all areas. Mostly more like upgrading your cpu.

Do you happen to have this screensaver program from steam on your pc… people throw it down. Your gpu and fps will thank you.

I advise against third-party system optimization programs, they can do more harm than good.

Those were just a few taips on how to keep your pc fit and maybe get a few frames out of it. But it doesn’t change the fact that steelrising is very poorly optimized, especially as far as the textures are concerned. This has absolutely nothing to do with your pcs. I guarantee you that. I’ve been playing for over 20 years and I’ve never really experienced anything like this.

I play on 1440p, i9 10850k, 32gb ram, rtx 3070 amp, gsync and 70fps lock (via drivers). I have absolutely no more frame drops and the fps are stable at 70. My minimum fps was 65, but only very rarely.

The most important thing: the vram no longer fills up, and the textures remain beautiful, and no more frame drops as a result. You must set textures to medium.

And as you can see from the screenshoots, the medium textures are consistently pretty.

If you want to save storage space and don’t need this ultra texture pack, I’ve found a way to remove it. Simply go to the pack folder via steamapps/common/steelrising/packs and delete both of the following files:
datapchighres.sdk and datapchighres.txt
You then have + 46 gb.
But note that you can still select the high and ultra textures via the game, but these are no longer available. And then of course there are texture errors. Only the medium textures are then displayed correctly. You would then have to download it again via play/repair.

If the developers can’t fix the textures problem with a good compression, I really recommend them to remove the high and ultra textures from the game. Also leave the shadow resolution and detail distance at high maximum and reduce the two light options to a maximum of half. The game urgently needs an optimization. I don’t understand how you can technically publish such a game. But the thing with the vram really beats everything I’ve seen so far.

Because if you don’t have the resources for such a procedure, this would be a very inexpensive, quick and easy solution to quickly fix the game, get rid of the VRAM problem and boost sales.

Optimized Graphic Settings