Icarus Stuttering and FPS Drops issues – How to fix

Icarus stuttering fps drops – This Optimization guide will show you how to take care of the stuttering and fps drops in Icarus. A lot of users are facing these problems. So don’t worry, you are not alone.

Icarus has some serious Performance Issues that need to be fixed as soon as possible

After several delays, the ‘big survival game’ of 2021, has finally been released. Icarus is a session-based PvE survival game for up to eight co-op players or solo. Let’s take a look at the official description about the game:

Confront and conquer a brutal PvE world determined to wear you down or tear you apart. From toxic atmosphere to savage wildlife and game-altering weather events, Icarus is a planet with a temper. Preparation and planning are everything. Whether it’s to find a source of oxygen, stalk your next meal or stock supplies for a long journey into the wilderness.

Master two separate tech trees: planet-side and orbital. Use the planet’s resources to craft handmade tools, buildings and machinery to protect yourself and aid your mission. Then return to orbit with your prize – rare exotic materials that you can engineer into advanced tech. As you progress, choose which tech to take on your next drop so you can travel further, gather faster, automate production or survive longer.

Your time on Icarus is limited, so use every second wisely. The orbital space station waits for no one. If you fail to return to your dropship in time, there is no rescue – your character’s progression and tech is lost to planet Icarus. Drop sessions can vary from hours to days long with varied missions and locations. Every drop has a clear goal and time limit, but how you overcome its challenges is up to you.

All those sound great, right? Unfortunately, not everything in Icarus, is in the ideal condition. The game is stacked with issues at the moment. Performance issues, to be more specific. PC players are experiencing stutters, fps drops and random freezing, left and right. And, without a patch from RocketWerkz, these things could not be fixed permanently.

This guide is a collection of basic fixes and workarounds, that would help you make the situation is a tad bit better.

How to fix Stuttering and FPS Drops in Icarus

Before we start, let me clear one thing. Icarus is one of the most demanding games that have released till date. I don’t know how much of it is true, but that game recommends a whopping 32 GB of RAM! Yes, you saw it right. Even the minimum requirements list recommends a GTX 1060 6 GB, Intel i5 8400, and 16 GB RAM. Those are incredibly high specs, if you ask me. Why don’t you check out the official system requirements by yourself:

• Play Icarus (DX11)
• Play Icarus (DX12 RTX 2070 or better)
  

Pick the first one.

4. Turn on DLSS

DLSS in Icarus, works really well. In fact, the game looks way better with DLSS on, than with AMD FSR on. On the RTX 3060 Ti, I was getting close to 10 FPS extra with DLSS enabled.

So, just turn on DLSS, and set it to ‘Balanced’. Keep the sharpening to 0.40. And you should be good to go.

5. Increase your Field of View to 105 or more

As strange as this might sound, but it actually works. The higher is your FOV, the more FPS you get. For some reason, if you increase your FOV in the game, your camera zooms out. Causing everything on your screen to look a bit less detailed. As a result, you get a significant fps boost. Check out the difference.

In this image, my FOV is set to 80 with everything else set to ‘Epic'(Ray Tracing on, and DLSS set to ‘Balanced’):

And, in this image, my FOV is set to 105, with everything else set to ‘Epic'(Ray Tracing on, and DLSS set to ‘Balanced’):

As you can see, the difference is huge. 74 fps vs 103 fps. That is a free performance boost, if you ask me.

6. Tweak the settings to squeeze out extra performance

Everything, written in this portion, has been recommended by the community. These tweaks come from a Steam user. He managed to make the game run smoothly on his RX 480. Here is what he recommends:

• Go into the game settings
• Under gameplay, turn off enable cloth simulation
• Multiplayer ghost buildings can be On/Off
• Resolution, leave it on your native
• Set frame limit to your average FPS
• VSYNC off
• Motion Blur off (set to 0)
• View distance set to  medium
• Anti Aliasing set to medium
• Post Processing set to low
• Shadows set to low
• Textures set to medium
• Effects set to low
• Foliage set to medium
• Shading set low

7. Tweaking the Icarus Config file

You can tweak the config file of Icarus to get a small performance boost. Again, these tweaks have also been recommended by the community.

Here is what you need to do. Go to this location: C:\Users\[your_username]\AppData\Local\Icarus\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor

The AppData folder maybe hidden for you. Here is how to unhide it:

1. Open any folder on your PC. It can be a new folder or an existing folder.
2. Click on the View option at the top of the folder window
3. There you will find a setting called “Hidden items”
4. Check the box beside it

Inside the WindowsNoEditor folder, Open the ‘GameUserSettings.ini‘ file with notepad. Make a backup of the file before that. Now under ‘[ScalabilityGroups]’, make the following changes:

sg.ResolutionQuality=100.000000
sg.ViewDistanceQuality=0
sg.AntiAliasingQuality=0
sg.ShadowQuality=2
sg.PostProcessQuality=3
sg.TextureQuality=3
sg.EffectsQuality=3
sg.FoliageQuality=0
sg.ShadingQuality=3

Some of these are going to override the in-game settings you just did (hence to do the game settings first). During beta, changing settings in-game didn’t always work out either. That is probably fixed now. I put this as a “base”. If its set to 0, it will look worse (will be on low), if its set to 3 it will be “high” setting.

Once you get FPS you desire, you can start increasing the graphics ever so slightly. You don’t want it to drop below 30.

These are all the fixes that I have for you at the moment. Sure, there are other things like, closing demanding applications, disabling all overlays, increasing the priority of the game via task manager, disabling Nvidia Instant Replay, Windows 10 Background Recording, etc. But I am sure that most of you have already tried all of that. So, I decided to not include them above.

Let’s face the truth, the developers don’t expect low-medium end users to play this game. The game is extremely demanding, and it is going to stay that way. The devs wanted to make Icarus future-proof. So, they ended up making the extremely heavy in the process. Just to show you how demanding Icarus really is, I have uploaded a video on YouTube. Where the game is running at maxed out settings, with Ray Tracing enabled. Check it out, it will give you a good idea of the situation:

If you think this guide has helped you, then let us know in the comment section below. And for more Icarus guides, keep an eye on Frondtech. Good luck!

That’s all folks!

Last Updated on January 5, 2022

Shoaib

Shoaib, 30, is a simple guy who loves to play video games, and enjoys new cuisines sporadically. He has been gaming since he was 7 years old, and with an experience of 22 years, under his belt, there is not a single AAA game in this world, that he hasn’t played. Despite being a MBA Graduate he decided to follow his passion. And because of his love for gaming, Frondtech came into existence.