My system is a Core i7-8700 with 16GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 1070
Performance steadily declines during my playthroughs until I’m getting 3-10fps with 1000 population. It doesn’t seem to be a graphics problem, I get the same frame rate whether I have AA turned off or set to max. The only setting that helped frames was turning off the occlusion outlines on villagers behind buildings.
Do I need more RAM?
I also want to become smoother in the later stages
open up task manager, go to performance, switch to logical cores graph
are some of your CPU cores running at 100% constantly?
is your ram above 90% utilization?
What resolution are you running?
I’ve got a GTX 1080, running @ 3440x1440, and while I haven’t made it to mid or late game yet, these helped me:
The game badly needs optimization. It’s not fun to play when you have around 800-1000 population. The fps is horrible.
Playing on a small map will probably make the biggest difference to fps.
Tried that, makes no difference. Changing graphics settings makes minimal difference (the only setting that seems to improve framerate is turning off foliage).
I am running at 3413x1440 with a GTX 1070.
The only graphics option that seems to make a difference is disabling foliage, I think this is more of a processor issue than a graphics one tbh.
Agreed. Map size doesn’t really matter much, at least not in my case. Turning off Foilage and Occlusion highlights can only improve it slightly.
Try lowering supersampling more and see what happens, that did the trick for me. In early game admittedly.
What is your GPU usage?
Lowering supersampling does very little for preformance and look awful.
GPU “3D” graph looks busy all the time but RAM usage is 50% and honestly I don’t think the GPU is the bottleneck here.
well, for what it’s worth, here are my settings:
I do have a beefy rig, but setting supersampling lower did help my framrate, and doesn’t look too bad in my opinion.
After all, our GPUs are quite a few years old now, I’m having frame drops in other games too now.
Very similar setup and was seeing similar numbers Just replaced the 1070 with a TUF 4080.
Current map around 900 population.
Video settings:
FPS slightly up, CPU utilization the same, GPU utilization way down. 3D rendering was consistently above 75%+, it seldom reaches 50%.
The hiccups are still there, noticed disk swap rate hits 100% when this happens.
Still very playable and no doubt the dev team will have this humming.
Huge FPS (from diashow (300pop) to nearly smoothly running) increase was disabling Steam Overlay in Steam Settings (General) of the game!
I have Steam overlay disabled in main Steam settings, so this is not my issue. When you have 900+ population let us know if you still have the same FPS.
Performance is really bad here, too.
Ryzen 5600X + RTX3080 and I get 20 fps max, dropping down under 10. When paused and in the Wood somestines there are even 40 fps… FHD or 4K doesn’t make a difference. Population 1600+ 
The CPU works at ~30%, one core always a bit more. The GPU is at 50%, RAM used ~75%.
Running Asus R6E (BIOS 3801), i9-10980XE (16 cores @ 46, 2 @ 48), EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra (1950 OC), 128G 3600 DDR4 @ 3400, 1600W PS, multi rads, EK double pump. Other DX12 and RTX games run fine. Even Anno 1800, which is probably the closest match for type of game and mechanics, runs fine as long as I don’t have too many people visible wandering the streets. FF is more CPU dependent (apparently at the moment) partially in the fact that you can click on any of your hundreds of villagers and see who they are (and rename them) AND see exactly what they are in the middle of doing. And if you have even 500 or more villagers with their labels turned on you will see FPS plummet (regardless of what graphics card you use because the CPU is tracking this (again, apparently at the moment.) This type of processing could be put on the GPU with DLSS and the upcoming technologies. BUT it would take some ingenious re-coding and a lot of it. This would have to happen outside the realm of the Unity engine and probably best coded in C++ (with some assembler routines handling the repetitive tasks.) Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying … I love the game and proud of the work gone into it thus far. But Anno 1800 went through a similar phase early on and RTX and DLSS helped those folks. This game is (and will continue to be) VERY process intensive and will get better frame rates when that processing is handed off to the more powerful GPUs. Of course, this is all IMHO. We’ll just anxiously wait and see what Crate developers come up with next. Either they will add more “bling” or really concentrate on the thread-intensive nature of this product. And it is a FINE product with much potential. Sorry for being long-winded but it seems no one is stating the obvious. Good luck with this one Crate! Oh, could you maybe give us more granularity with the population limit? instead of just 200, 500, 1000 & unlimited Maybe have options every 100 (100, 200, 300 … up to 1000, or let us just type in a number.) This would give us more choices and flexibility in handling larger populations and the respective FPS drops.
I did find that the snow, rain & birds flying effects FPS a little, 2-5. I also found that turning off all widgets (icons above buildings, people and resources) gains 5 or so FPS most of the time. I just turn them on temporarily when I’m hunting for something specific.
I think the seed of the man might also have some influence on that.
I also think farm fields and too many walls around your village has something to do with fps issues.
Overall, game still needs a bit of optimization.
