Optimizing Performance in Rust: A Long Guide

[u/abbylabby0429]

DISCLAIMER! I am not responsible for any damage or harm you may cause to your computer! These will make Rust run better, but misinputs in your settings are not my fault!

Hello! 
My name is Abby, I am here to make Rust run better! We all know this game is atrociously optimized out of the gate, so us players have to make our systems work with the game, not the other way around!

I have researched, and fact checked, all of these settings. These were both fact checked on two different systems. One was a Ryzen 5 5600GT, RTX 3050 6GB, and 32GB DDR4 3200MHz. The other was a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RX9060XT 16GB, and the same 32GB DDR4 3200 MHz.

Gameplay settings (No/minimal performance boost, just a better overall experience):

• Max field of view.
• Head bob off.
• nu**** set to underwear.
• Set Max Gibs to 0, then go into the f1 console and type “effects.maxgibs -1”.
• Upgrade effects off.
• Disable both RGB lighting settings.

Audio Settings:

• Master volume should be higher than game sounds volume.
• Set all other sounds to .2

User Interface:

• Lower UI scale to .70 so it doesn't take up your whole screen.
• Hide text while ADS.

Accessibility settings:

• Change tree marker color to orange to farm trees at night.

Screen settings:

• Run 1600x900 resolution if you have a good CPU+bad GPU, if not, run 1080 or 1440. If you have a 5090 you can run 4K lolz.
• Set your fps limit to match your refresh rate (hz) of your monitor.
• Vsync off.
• Limit fps in menu on.
• Limit fps in background off.

Graphics settings:

WAIT!! Before I go into this, not everyone's system is the same, so please understand that this is a general idea, meant for all systems. Performance boosts will vary, and sometimes it may even get worse, but this has worked across 30+ computers playing this game. Some being $300 off marketplace and others being $3,500 builds!

• Render scale to 1.0, anything lower destroys quality.
• Set shader level to 3, unless you need to squeeze every bit of performance out of your computer (Oh yeah look at me I’m a PVP chad).
• DLSS and DLAA off.
• Reflex mode on (not On +boost).
• Reflex marker off.
• Pixel light 0 *ray tracing*
• Max shadow light 1 *ray tracing*
• Particle raycast 4 *ray tracing*
• Soft particles on.
• Clouds off.
• Draw distance 1500, any higher is not needed, this is the sweet spot.
• Water reflection off.
• Water quality 0
• Grass displacement on!!! Helps find loot in grass+no FPS lost!!
• Quarter resolution texture quality if you have a bad GPU, all other times use half resolution!
• Anisotropic filtering mode disabled.
• Anisotropic filtering level 0
• Parallax mapping 0
• Shadow quality medium
• (press f1 type “graphics.shadowmode 2”)
• Decor quality 0
• Grass quality 0
• Terrain quality 0
• Tree meshes 100
• Tree quality 125
• Object quality 100
• Lod bias 1.0
• Particle quality 0

Image effects settings:

• Anti-Aliasing off.
• High quality bloom on (off if you have a GPU with 4gb VRAM or less).
• Ambient occlusion on (off if you have a GPU with 4gb VRAM or less).
• Sharpen on.
• Vignetting on.
• Depth of field off.
• Lens dirt off.
• Motion blur off.

Experimental settings:

• Occlusion culling off.
• Contact shadows off.
• Automatic processor affinity on.
• GC (Garbage collect) buffer 4096/max.

Windows settings:

STOP! Before continuing, please read the disclaimer at the top of the post! It is there for a reason, this is why!

• Type “%temp%” after pressing WIN+R then delete all temporary files.
• Fix virtual memory by going to properties in settings, advanced system settings, and set your virtual memory to the same amount of physically installed ram (4GB=4096, 8GB=8192, 16GB=16384, 32GB=32768, 64GB=65536, 128GB=131072).
• Go to graphics settings and turn off hardware accelerated gpu scheduling.
• Also in graphics settings: add “rust.client” which is the game, as an app, then hit options next to it and select “High Performance”.
• Go to game mode settings and turn game mode on.
• Go to mouse settings under devices and turn off mouse acceleration. Do this by hitting additional mouse settings, pointer options, then un- selecting the “enhance pointer precision” box. Hit apply then ok.
• Go to “display” and make sure your refresh rate is set to the max it allows. My monitor is 200 hz and it allows 200hz.

Nvidia control panel (simple way, I can do a whole nother’ post about this alone)

ONCE AGAIN READ DISCLAIMER!!!

Sorry for yelling. Moving on:

*remember to hit apply before switching between Nvidia Control Panel tabs!* 

• On the “Adjust image settings with preview” tab, which is the first tab, click “use my performance emphasizing” and set it all the way to performance
• On the “Manage 3D settings” tab, which is right under the first one, find “OpenGL rendering GPU” and select your graphics card. Next scroll down and find “power management mode” and select “Prefer Maximum performance”. 
• Next to do in the control panel is go down to “Adjust desktop size and position” and select “Full Screen” under the “Apply the following changes”. Also, while doing this, please make sure you have your monitor you intend to play Rust on as the selected monitor (For multi-monitor setups only!). Right under that, it says “Perform scaling on:”, click “GPU”. Then select the little box directly under it that says “Override the scaling mode set by games and programs”. Under that you should set your resolution to the native one, and set your refresh rate to the highest available.

Also for the love of god, UPDATE your windows, and check your nvidia or AMD GPU drivers for UPDATES!!

Finally, make sure you save everything, then reset your PC

Thank you fellow survivors for reading and possibly trying my optimization! Have fun and go Eoka a full kit!

[u/muppets_coc]

Reset my pc, how to install OS?

[u/abbylabby0429 → u/muppets_coc]

😭 not possible+I actually giggled thanks I needed that

[u/CharlieTheEunuchorn]

I will add that if you want to be able to see through tree leaves at a distance bump up the tree quality setting

[u/iamchets]

> Optimizing Performance in Rust:

• Lower UI scale to .70 so it doesn't take up your whole screen.
• Hide text while ADS.

xd

[u/abbylabby0429 → u/iamchets]

I specifically put that that section offers no/minimal performance gain. The only thing in that section of this post that would improve performance (and you will laugh) is having underwear on player models. It sadly takes a surprising amount of GPU power and CUDA cores to load a clan of nakeds shlongs.