7 DAYS TO DIE FPS FIX!
Table Of Contents
Click on the links below to skip straight to that chapter.
Boost Your FPS in 7 Days To Die!
If you’re frustrated by a lagging game and are desperately looking for a 7 Days To Die FPS fix, the 7 Days To Die Wiki has covered you. Since Alpha 18 dropped, many gamers experienced severe FPS drops in their game, and this got a lot worse with the new Alpha 21 update. This article will help ease some of your troubles by showing optimisation settings to fix the 7 Days To Die FPS issues.
Since this game is still in the Alpha stage, the developers’ priority is content and functionality. They don’t get into optimisation as a priority until the Beta stage of the game. Only those with rigs worth over $2500 could play without lagging on medium graphic settings or above. Since so many peeps got affected, the folks at 7D2D worked out minor optimisations to improve the game experience. You may have experienced fps drops while playing since the Alpha 21 release. It happens especially when the number of zombies around you increases, or your game decreases below 30 fps in specific biomes settings. Wasteland is a good example.
New A21 7 Days To Die FPS Video
This video will show you how to implement various optimisation settings that can help boost your FPS while not taking away too much from the game visuals. You can do obvious optimisations, such as using lower resolution and setting all graphics to low. But we’re not talking about those. Instead, you will find different steps from simple to more advanced optimisation here.
Press the F8 button while in-game. This will bring up the FPS display in small green text on the middle left of the screen. Follow the steps in the video to see an increase in FPS.
Turn off Dynamic Mesh
On the 7 Days To Die main menu, go to settings, then Video Settings, and you will see, on the far right, a tab called “Dynamic Mesh Options.” turn this setting off by selecting “No”. Not sure why The Fun Pimps added Dynamic Mesh to a very unoptimized game and enabled it by default. But it causes havoc for most people’s FPS, and deactivating this will help a lot.
Clean Up Your Saved Data
One thing that might be affecting your FPS in 7 Days To Die is the game data. If you haven’t cleaned it up in a while and just upgraded from A20 to A21, you might want to watch this video.
It’s one of the best 7 Days To Die troubleshooting videos. It fixes various issues, not just boosts a 7 Days To Die FPS increase.
7 DAYS TO DIE FPS FIX STEP 1 – OPTIMISE VIDEO SETTING OPTIONS
First, go to the game menu.
Select “Options” > “Video” and then apply the settings given below:
- Let “Gamma” be at “75%”, but reduce the “Water Particles” to “25%“.
- If you want, you can set the “Water Quality” to “High” and “Texture Quality” to “Full Size”.
- Set the “UMA Texture Quality” and “Tree Quality” to “Middle”.
Turn off these:
- “V-Sync”
- “Motion Blur”
- “Reflection Quality”.
Uncheck the following:
- “Sun Shafts”
- “DOF”
- “Reflected Shadows”
- “SSAO”.
Change the following:
- “View Distance” to “10”
- “Field of View” to “70”
- “LOD Distance” to “50%”.
7 DAYS TO DIE FPS FIX STEP 2 – JOIN A DEDICATED SERVER
If you are finding you have low FPS when playing on a public server, chances are it’s because that server is on a shared hosting server. Servers are like computers. If you are having trouble running 7 Days To Die on your own computer, imagine joining a shared hosted server that has 7 Days To Die installed on it over 20 times and selling each instance to server owners for around $40 a month. You can imagine the strain that would have on that server having to share the resources with everyone.
This can affect your FPS and gameplay experience by creating lag which in many ways can be misinterpreted as an FPS drop in itself. There are also a lot of server owners out there claiming to have a dedicated server, which is an entire server just for them and not shared at all. But this isn’t the case. If you want to immediately increase your FPS in multiplayer, I recommend you check out our top 7 Days To Die Servers list. We know these guys run dedicated servers for their 7 Days To Die community. If you are interested in joining an awesome gaming community that runs dedicated 7 Days To Die servers all over the world, we recommend joining Salty Zombies servers.
7 DAYS TO DIE FPS FIX STEP 3 – THE IN-GAME CONSOLE FIX
Alright, it’s time to get a bit more technical. The next step to improve your 7 Days To Die FPS involves doing an in-game optimisation. When you’re in the game, open up the console by pressing F1. Now type in the following commands into the console. You can also copy/past it into the console, but you’ll have to do it one line at a time.
- gfx pp enable 0 (This Disable post-processing for fps gain)
- gfx af enable 0
- gfx dt enable 0 (disable distant terrain for better fps outdoors)
7 DAYS TO DIE FPS FIX STEP 4 – USE LAUNCHER INSTEAD OF 7D2D SHORTCUT
Another trick you can do to save up on your system resources is to run the game using its launcher.exe instead of through Steam. To do this, right-click on 7D2D in Steam. Then go to Properties > Local FIles > Browse Local Files. Double click on 7Dlauncher.exe. Then set the following:
- Tick [X] on Exclusive Fullscreen Mode
- Tick [X] on Unity Screen Selector
- -force-d39d – This one is optional. Not sure if the Aditional Parameters actually work.
- When the Unity Launcher pops up, go for the lowest resolution that you can manage. Later, you can increase it to check to what resolution you get decent FPS.
7 DAYS TO DIE FPS FIX STEP 5 – CUSTOMIZING YOUR GRAPHICS CARD
By completing Step 1 – 5 of 7 Days To Die FPS fix, you should already be seeing a boost in your game FPS. But if those steps didn’t do the trick and your game is still lagging, then perhaps we need to get into a bit of complex optimisation. Continue reading to find out how you can apply these optimisations. Note that this is a 2-step process where first we customise the graphic card and then customise the game itself.
CUSTOMISING THE GRAPHICS CARD
- To begin with, start your Graphic Card Control Panel, such as Nvidia, for example.
- Go to Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings. Click on ‘Add’ and select 7 Days To Die.
- Under ‘Select the Preferred Graphics Processor for This Program’, select ‘High-performance NVIDIA processor’ (This is for those who have NVidia, select the option as per your Graphics card)
- Set the following as shown:
- Maximum Pre-rendered Frames = 4
- ‘Power Management Mode’ as ‘Prefer Maximum Performance
- ‘Threaded Optimization’ to ‘On’
- ‘Vertical Sync’ to ‘On’
CUSTOMISING THE GAME
First, of course, start the game. Check the FPS by pressing F8. It should be approximately 60. It usually ranges from 40-80 FPS and, in some rare cases, goes below 10. Below we’ve given a list of game tweaks that have helped increase our FPS from 30-50 to 60-80 FPS. Your experience will, of course, depend upon the kind of system you got. Also, tweaking the system to increase the game FPS will somewhat compromise the graphic quality. But then, you’ll have a lag-free game!
CHANGING THE STORM VALUES
- Start Steam. Right-click on 7D2D, then select Properties > Local FIles > Browse Local Files > Data > Config > biomes.xml > Open with text editor
- Find the following lines:
- “<ParticleEffect prefab=”ParticleEffects/p_sandstorm” ChunkMargin=”7″/>”
- “<ParticleEffect prefab=”ParticleEffects/p_smokestorm” ChunkMargin=”7″/>”
- “<ParticleEffect prefab=”ParticleEffects/p_snowstorm1″ ChunkMargin=”7″/>”
- Update the value in the above 3 lines from “7” to 80 or more.
How’s your FPS showing now? By completing all the 5 steps above for the 7 Days To Die FPS fix, you should see a significant improvement in your game. Although, as we mentioned before, tweaking the game and graphic card to increase the FPS will, unfortunately, lower the graphics quality of the game, as we mentioned before, tweaking the game and graphic card. But then hey, what’s the point of mind-blowing graphics if the game lags like hell! Your aim is, after all, to play and not just watch. So if your game could use some performance boost, give the 7 Days To Die FPS Fix mentioned above a try and see how the game-play improves.