Phantasy Star Online 2 (PSO2) New Genesis – How to fix Lag, FPS Drops and Stuttering

PSO2 New Genesis lag fps drops stuttering – A lot of PC players are facing performance issues like lag, fps drops and stuttering in PSO2 New Genesis. Here are some troubleshooting methods you can try to potentially fix your issues.

How to fix Lag, FPS Drops and Stuttering in PSO2 New Genesis

The requirements for PSO2 New Genesis is way higher than vanilla Phantasy Star Online 2

If you didn’t know, the system requirements for PSO2 New Genesis are way different from Phantasy Star Online 2. Previously, PSO2 required you to have just an Intel i5 processor and a GTX 750 ti to be able to play the game at 1080p@60fps. Things have changed after the New Genesis update. Let’s take a look at the difference

#	PHANTASY STAR ONLINE 2		PSO2 NEW GENESIS
#	MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS	RECOMMENDED REQUIREMENTS	MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS	RECOMMENDED REQUIREMENTS
PROCESSOR	Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 and above	i5 6500 and above	Intel ® Core™ i3-4150	Intel ® Core™ i9-10900
RAM	2 GB	2 GB	8 GB RAM	16 GB RAM
GRAPHICS	NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT AMD RADEON HD2900XT or a Graphics Card of the same caliber and above	GeForce GTX 750 Ti or a Graphics Card of the same caliber and above	NVIDIA GeForce® GT430	NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2070 SUPER
STORAGE	80 GB	80 GB	103 GB available space	103 GB available space

As you can see, the difference is quite drastic. It went from 750ti for 1080p@60fps to RTX 2070 Super. Now, some of you might think that it is the same game. New Genesis is just an expansion. You see, apart from the graphics overhaul, the game also allows up to 32 people to play at the same location, at the same time. So you might easily see 32 players pop up on your screen during a boss fight. And that is what these new system requirements are for. So just because PSO2 used to run fine on your PC, that doesn’t mean PSO2 New Genesis would run smoothly as well.

PSO2 New Genesis – Best Graphics Settings

Tweak the graphics settings to squeeze out some extra performance:

• Effect Light Source: Off
• Terrain Lighting: Off
• Camera Lighting: Off
• Screen Edge Darkening: On
• Global Illumination : On
• Bloom: Off
• Light Rays: Off
• Volumetric Fog: Off
• Effect Distortion Rendering: Off
• Fur Rendering: Off
• Blur: Off
• Color Tone Curve: Off
• Depth of Field: On
• Tesselation: Off
• Anti-Aliasing: FXAA
• Specular Antialiasing: Off
• Screen Space Reflection: Off
• Ambient Occlusion: Off
• Screen Space Shadow: Off
• Shadow Quality: 2
• Hide Other Player’s Accessories: Do Not Hide
• Max Detailed Model Display: 18
• Cloud Quality: 2
• Particle Quality: 2
• 3D Rendering Resolution: High (Standard)
• Automatic Resolution Adjustment: Off
• Maximum Frame Rate: Unrestricted
• Texture Filtering: 2x
• Texture Resolution: Low
• Terrain Draw Distance: 3

Basically, apart from few settings, you would have to turn off everything. Let me tell you the reason for that. When you are free-roaming in the world, you would be getting pretty good FPS. But as soon as a good amount of players starts joining a fight, the frame rate starts dropping drastically. I was getting close to 80 FPS on my Ryzen 5 5600x + RTX 3070 setup during a boss fight, as there were around 12 players doing various combos on my screen.

Heavy background applications and services

There are plenty of applications or Windows services that often tend to eat up a huge chunk of RAM without you knowing anything about it. Windows 10 surely has a lot of them. As a result, people start facing stutters and freezes in almost every game.

So check whether you have useless applications running in the background or not. You can also decide which applications you want to automatically start when you boot your system and prevent the useless ones from starting.

1. Open Task Manager
2. Click on the Startup tab
3. Keep the applications that are important, Enabled
4. Disable the rest

For Nvidia Laptop Users

If you are using a laptop that has a dedicated Nvidia GPU, then make sure that your laptop is using the dedicated GPU and not the integrated one.

To do that, just open Nvidia Control Panel, click on Manage 3D Settings and set ‘Preferred graphics processor’ to ‘High-performance Nvidia processor’. Restart your system.

Overlays and Notifications

Turn off Steam overlay if you are playing the game via Steam. If you are playing Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis from Epic Game Launcher, just go to the settings menu of Epic Games Launcher. Scroll down to the “Desktop Notifications” section and uncheck the boxes beside “Show Free Game Notifications” and “Show News and Special Offer Notifications”.

If you have other overlays, like from Nvidia GeForce Experience or AMD Adrenaline, try turning them off as well.

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I do not have any more methods at the moment. But I am constantly keeping an eye on the Forums, looking for new fixes.

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If you think this guide had helped you, then let us know in the comment section below. Also, if you have any addition to make regarding this topic then also you can comment below. Good luck!

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That’s all folks!

Last Updated on June 10, 2021