Performance Tips
Restarting Often
Thanks to the poorly optimised Unity engine, vanilla code and other memory related unpleasantness, even large amounts of RAM will be quickly filled. To mitigate this we suggest the game be restarted every few hours or every few mission. This can vary depending on the capability of your system, but running the game for more than six hours has been known to cause very bad things to happen.
Configuration Tips
General Tips
Advice from a 9700k + 64Gb + RTX2080 user who was still getting performance drops:
1. Turn off VSync in Battletech settings and turn on "fast" VSync in Nvidia control panel.
2. Add the Battletech folder to exclusion list for windows defender.
3. Add the battletech.exe process to exclusion list for windows defender.
4. Do not manually overclock your GPU beyond its factory settings. Let the GPU drivers handle that. Manually OC'ing your GPU will cause problems with Battletech.
Process Lasso
Get process lasso: https://bitsum.com/get-lasso-pro/ (you only need the free version). Make sure it auto starts.
Select Battletech, remove CPU affinity 0 and 1 (for always). Set priorities to high (i/o and priority class).
Borderless Window
To play in full screen borderless window mode, set your in game video options to WINDOWED, and resolution to your desktop resolution. Exit the game.
Now add -popupwindow to the Battletech launch options, and if you're getting it on the wrong monitor, add -adapter N where N = your monitor number - 1, so monitor 1 is 0, 2 is 1, etc.
Change The Size Of Your Paging File
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/increase-page-file-size-virtual-memory-windows
This link will tell you how to change the paging file size, but what size does it need to be?
It helps to make sure you set a custom size that is 1.5x your PC's RAM e.g 16gb RAM would be 24000mb min and max for the paging file. Doing this well help with the unity memory leak and some CTD's that happen when you run out of memory. It only needs to be on one drive, preferably a HDD not a SSD, a HDD doesn't have a limited number of read/writes that it can go through, whereas an SSD wears out faster if used for paging files.
Moving Battletech
Moving Battletech off of your operating system drive will help, especially if it is moved to a SSD. You'll mostly see improvement to installing/updating an installed game with some improvement to loading. It wont be instant, but it will be faster. But keep in mind that moving any game from a HDD to a SSD or SATA SSD to NVME you are limited to the speed of the slower drive only while moving the install.
This guide: this https://www.howtogeek.com/269515/how-to-move-a-steam-game-to-another-drive-without-re-downloading-it/ will tell you how to move the game.
BTA Launcher Settings
There are two options that can be enabled in the BTA Launcher during installation that may help improve performance of BTA. It would have more impact on a newer system but can still help an older one.
When installing BTA or after you've hit the update/install button on the launcher, while choosing the optional modules to add there are two options in that popup: multi-threaded rendering and Corgi's Performance Fix.
Multi-threaded rendering will let Unity leverage the other cores your GPU/CPU has to split the jobs of running the game up so more of it can get done faster.
Corgi's Performance Fix is a collection of game optimizations that should help improve performance. If you find that it's not providing any benefits on your system however, make sure to disable it.
Game Settings Tips
While in game, go to Options > Video > Advanced for the following options:
Slowdowns or crashes in Urban Biomes (City Maps)
Urban Biome Reduce Props
This will remove civilian cars and other cosmetic litter which can provide significant performance increases in Urban biomes.
Graphics Settings
These settings can be adjusted to increase overall game performance. Experiment to find the right balance for you, or set everything to lowest/disabled for maximum performance.
- Bloom Quality - Low
- Ambient Occlusion - Disabled
- AntiAliasing - Disabled
- Motion Blur - Disabled
- Reflection - Disabled
- VSync - Disabled