I was flying low over a rain-steep canyon when the frames hiccuped and the world juddered. My heart nudged my hands toward the settings menu before the ship completed its banking turn. You do not need to panic—tiny edits get you back to smooth flight fast.
I play and tweak; I also test on rigs that span from modest to overly generous. Here’s the exact build I used while experimenting so you know the baseline:
- 32 GB DDR4 RAM
- AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
- AMD Radeon RT 9060 XT
When rain turns your HUD into a slideshow — Best Solarpunk graphics settings for no lag and max FPS
I ran through environments and watched for the moments that kill frame stability: storms, foliage-heavy glades, and crowded settlements. I’ll tell you what to set to get steady frames and where to be stingy with detail.
- Quality: Medium preset. It balances visuals and performance on older GPUs without sacrificing the game’s aesthetic. If your PC is modest, medium is the practical sweet spot; higher presets push more than they return.
- Display: Borderless windowed. I saw micro-stutters when switching weather effects on Fullscreen; Borderless keeps the desktop compositor from interrupting frame delivery.
- Vsync: Off by default. Turn it on only if you see tearing and prefer capped-but-smoother frames. Vsync trades raw FPS for steadier output.
- FOV: 80. Lower field of view reduces the GPU work and keeps motion smooth — this isn’t a competitive shooter where you need a wide scan of the horizon.
How do I increase FPS in Solarpunk?
If you want more frames, start outside the game: enable Windows Game Mode, close overlays (Discord, Steam, NVIDIA/AMD overlays), and quit recording tools like OBS when you’re not streaming. Use the AMD Radeon driver panel or NVIDIA Control Panel to set the game profile for performance—lower texture filtering, prefer maximum performance power plan. MSI Afterburner gives you a frame-time readout so you can see where spikes occur.
My laptop went from choppy to smooth after a few small edits — tweaks for low-end rigs
On weaker hardware, the most visible slowdowns happen during rain and foliage sections, not in empty landscapes. Target those moments first.
- Preset choice: Stick with Medium. If you must, choose Low for heavily CPU-bound systems.
- Shadows and post-process: Drop shadows to low or off; they tax both GPU and CPU. Tone down bloom and motion blur if you notice stutter during camera pans.
- Background apps: Kill browser tabs and background sync clients; some games lose frames to disk or network contention.
- Driver updates: Keep AMD or NVIDIA drivers current. I checked each new Radeon driver and noted steady increases in stability for this title.
Should I use Vsync or Borderless for smoother gameplay?
Borderless reduces alt-tab hiccups and keeps the compositor steady; Vsync trades peak FPS for frame pacing. I keep Borderless as default and only enable Vsync when visible tearing bothers me. If you have a FreeSync/Adaptive Sync monitor, let the display handle smoothing and keep Vsync off in-game.
I found that overlays were the real culprit — final practical steps
Overlays and recording tools bite into performance in the places you least expect: cutscenes and weather swaps. Reduce surface area where background tasks can interrupt the loop.
- Disable Steam/Discord overlays during play.
- Use Radeon’s performance tuning to cap power or boost clocks if thermals allow.
- Monitor temps with HWInfo or MSI Afterburner; thermal throttling kills frame rates faster than settings do.
- For streaming, set OBS to use hardware encoding (AMD AMF or NVENC) to lower CPU load.
I treat Solarpunk like swapping to a lighter suit for summer when I want speed, and when I let visuals matter I ride settings like a well-tuned bicycle. The game is forgiving on modern hardware, so small, targeted changes return big improvements — what will you tweak first to chase flawless flight?