[Guide] Optimising single-player performance - Stuttering? Got 8gb RAM? This might help

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At this point I'm assuming the stutter has to do with how the game engine does the tasks it needs to do to create gameplay.

I've done all the recommended tweaks, lowered graphics settings, have 4690k OC'd to 4.4, 1080 GTX, running at lowered resolution, lowered 95% of the graphics settings to low or medium, no other background programs, etc. etc. and still getting stutter in battles.

There's people with 2080 TIs, 9900ks, 32GB RAM experiencing this too so while all the upgrade suggestions will help in some instances of frame drops (not all or even most necessarily), this is clearly a problem within the game's implementation right now.

EDIT: And note: some people don't experience it, which is great! If you're one of those people, I'm glad you don't have this problem and can enjoy battles how they're meant to be. That still leaves many people who meet or exceed system requirements who DO experience this issue.
 
Hello, I am another one of the guys who experience severe stuttering, especially in sieges.
I have a GTX 970 and i7-5820k oc'd@ 4.00Ghz, 16 GB DDR4 Ram and SSD...it has nothing to do with my specs, since I can play large sized battles in custom battle mode without experiencing anything gamebreaking, but the SP just stutters too much it makes it unplayable.
I think it has to do with enemy AI, since even on very low I still experience this stuff...please optimize this!

Hope you can fix this! Stuttering aside, this game is THE dream!
 
Well, I'll be honest with you I'm pretty sure Bannerlord killed one of my RAM sticks. It maxes out my remaining 16GB DRAM and also maxes out my I/O after some playtime. I'd love to play more but I get the feeling whatever's causing this is going to stress the hell out of my components. Hopefully it's something they can patch soon.
 
- Windows 10 - i5 7300HQ - 8RAM - NVIDIA GTX 1050 -
And its impossible to play, even in the lowest quality. Wtf, what's wrong with this setup? ??sad??
1k hours in warband, a dedicated life, a life of waiting. So frustrating.
 
Adding in my situation because I haven't seen many specs similar to mine. I'm getting horrible stuttering in single player on medium settings, dropping to low improves it a bit but I still have issues. I've tried most of the suggestions in this thread. While running the game, my memory usage is instantly at 99%. I'm going to upgrade from 8 to 16g ram tonight, and will share any improvements.

i5-4670k 3.4ghz
8g ram
500g SSD
Radeon HD 7970 3gb

Edit: windows 7
 
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I’ve got the same specs as you, and yeah... it’s not great.

im tempted to get a 16gb ram upgrade tomorrow just to see if that’s going to make a massive difference.

has anyone upgraded yet and noticed a difference?
I have the same cpu, but my video card is gtx1060 and 16gb. And I have stable 60fps most of time, except FPS drops in massive FOREST battles and in some sieges( FPS drop to 12, seems it’s bug).
 
- Windows 10 - i5 7300HQ - 8RAM - NVIDIA GTX 1050 -
And its impossible to play, even in the lowest quality. Wtf, what's wrong with this setup? ??sad??
1k hours in warband, a dedicated life, a life of waiting. So frustrating.
1.Your cpu is worse than min i3 8100.
2.There is unoptimized using of Ram.
 
I'm running a really old rig but here's my specs and FPS I've been getting:
-Win 10 x64
-CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 955
-RAM: 16GB DDR3 11 CAS LAT
-SSD
-GPU: GTX 650 TI Boost 2GB RAM (OC'd to 1110Mhz)
-60hz 1080p 23" monitor


In custom battles I'm consistently getting around 30-34 FPS (at 200 total army size)
At the campaign map I'm consistently getting around 30-45 FPS
In a campaign battle I'm consistently getting around 30-34 FPS (though it seemed to stutter a bit more than the custom battle did, despite only having 28 total soldiers in the battle)

So if anyone else is running really old and or low spec hardware like myself, these specs seem to provide "decent" playability so far...especially for a game that clearly isn't optimized at all. Hopefully I can upgrade my hardware soon.

Due to my old hardware I've set the battle limit to 200.

In-Game Settings:

Audio
-Sound Device = Speakers
-Sound Channels = 128
-Sound Output = Stereo

Performance
-Shader = Medium
-Texture Streaming = Medium
-Texture Quality = Medium
-Shadow Quality = Medium
-Shadow Type = Static
-Shadow Filtering = PCF
-Particle Detail = Medium
-Foliage Quality = Low
-Character Detail = Medium
-Environment Detail = Low
-Terrain Quality = Low
-No. of Rag Dolls = 3
-Occlusion Method = TSAO
-Texture Filtering = Anisotropic 8x
-Water Quality = Medium
-AA = SMAA
-Lighting Quality = High
-Decal Quality = Medium

Disabled Options: Interactive Grass, Sun Shafts, Tesselation, Motion Blur

V-Sync = Full
 
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I'm running a really old rig but here's my specs and FPS I've been getting:
-Win 10 x64
-CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 955
-RAM: 16GB DDR3 11 CAS LAT
-SSD
-GPU: GTX 650 TI Boost 2GB RAM (OC'd to 1110Mhz)
-60hz 1080p 23" monitor


In custom battles I'm consistently getting around 30-34 FPS (at 200 total army size)
At the campaign map I'm consistently getting around 30-45 FPS
In a campaign battle I'm consistently getting around 30-34 FPS (though it seemed to stutter a bit more than the custom battle did, despite only having 28 total soldiers in the battle)

So if anyone else is running really old and or low spec hardware like myself, these specs seem to provide "decent" playability so far...especially for a game that clearly isn't optimized at all. Hopefully I can upgrade my hardware soon.

Due to my old hardware I've set the battle limit to 200.

In-Game Settings:

Audio
-Sound Device = Speakers
-Sound Channels = 128
-Sound Output = Stereo

Performance
-Shader = Medium
-Texture Streaming = Medium
-Texture Quality = Medium
-Shadow Quality = Medium
-Shadow Type = Static
-Shadow Filtering = PCF
-Particle Detail = Medium
-Foliage Quality = Low
-Character Detail = Medium
-Environment Detail = Low
-Terrain Quality = Low
-No. of Rag Dolls = 3
-Occlusion Method = TSAO
-Texture Filtering = Anisotropic 8x
-Water Quality = Medium
-AA = SMAA
-Lighting Quality = High
-Decal Quality = Medium

Disabled Options: Interactive Grass, Sun Shafts, Tesselation, Motion Blur

V-Sync = Full
I have almost the same specs as you apart of having windows 7 x64,CPU is Intel Xeon E3-1230 v3 and 8GB of RAM.Settings on very low and low, character details on medium, just a potato graphics... battles limited to 200 men. I get very serious stuttering during campaign battles with 10 men in battle, on campaign map the stuttering is pretty huge aswell, long loading screens, when I go to inventory or any other UI I get stutter. Custom battles are pretty much without any stuttering tho, only when there are lots of projectiles around me and cavalry fights. So it's very unplayable for me. There needs to be optimization soon... if I can play Kingdom come: Deliverance without major stuttering on pretty decent (medium) graphics, I would expect to run Bannerlord well aswell, atleast on lower graphics settings.
 
As much as this is useful to everyone, thank you OP, I feel like it's more the game's fault atm, cuz only then ew updates are what caused the heavy shutters.
I can turn my game back to version 1.0.0. or 1.0.1. and it will run smooth as butter, but if I update to any of the newerr versions, my game literally shats itself even in campaign menu. Playing multiplayer on any version is completely fine.
 
Adding in my situation because I haven't seen many specs similar to mine. I'm getting horrible stuttering in single player on medium settings, dropping to low improves it a bit but I still have issues. I've tried most of the suggestions in this thread. While running the game, my memory usage is instantly at 99%. I'm going to upgrade from 8 to 16g ram tonight, and will share any improvements.

i5-4670k 3.4ghz
8g ram
500g SSD
Radeon HD 7970 3gb

Edit: windows 7


So, the 16g upgrade made a huge difference in single player for me. It still memory leaks to capacity after awhile, but the game is now totally playable on medium settings.
 
i5 6500 gtx 1060 16gb 2666mhz ram. Everything max with medium shadows and motion blur disabled. Runs like butter except 500 people battles. Now, those are too much until people start to die.
 
Intel Core I5-7500 3.40GHZ
8GB RAM
NVIDIA geforce GTX 1060 OC 6GB
Seagate BarraCuda, 1 To

Campaign battle are unplayable, even in VERY LOW. Gonna upgrade to 16GB in few days. Hope it will fix it.

UPDATE :

I moved from 8 to 16GB. Huge improvement. Battles are fine in the solo campaign (MEDIUM settings). The speed of all the loading transitions has increase by 30-50%.
Pretty happy with this. I expect to be able to play in HIGH settings in the future, after some optimisations made by the developpers.
 
Anyone tested with Patch e.1.0.4? It contains a memory leak fix.

In my experience, is has improved the performance A LOT! It's not perfect yet, specially when you're loading a battle and now there are some small freezing points in the battle map, but it runs way better now...And the issue is indeed memory leak,is still present but is has been fixed by far!!!
 
The purpose of this thread is to compile any settings, tweaks and other solutions to mitigate the performance issues currently plaguing the game with lower-end systems.

Generally, stuttering occurs most severely for players as new assets are being loaded in - when transitioning into scenes (battles, town), loading UI elements, sounds, models and textures. For most players, the stuttering will decrease over time as these assets are loaded into memory.

Most players reporting these issues so far have been on systems with 8gb RAM - myself included. Though the system requirements list 8gb as "recommended", at this time it's clearly not adequate to run the single-player campaign at an acceptable level of performance. That said, if you've more than 8gb RAM and otherwise meet or exceed the recommended system specs, you may benefit from following this guide too.

Note: It's apparent that the single-player campaign game currently has a memory leak. If this is a universal problem, against which I've seen no indication, this is likely the root of many such reports.
Whatever your specs, game performance will most likely diminish the longer you play. Restarting the game every ~1h30 is recommended.
Patch 1.0.4 contains "a" memory-leak fix - whether this means the leaks' been entirely eliminated remains to be seen


Disclaimer:
Nothing presented here is guaranteed to make a noticeable difference to performance - but will generally be worth trying.
Short of waiting and hoping for optimisation passes by Taleworlds, upgrading your RAM beyond 8gb is going to be the most reliable and comprehensive means of addressing the game's performance for the end-user (you).
Most people who are having such issues will already be conscious of this, but are unable and/or unwilling to do so. Comments along the lines of "Just upgrade ur ram lol" only confirm to everyone that you're an asshat.
I take no responsibility for damage caused to your PC, game installation, person, property or sanity through the application of this guide or use of third-party software linked to in this thread.

With all that said, I've been able to get the game running near-flawlessly (bar the memory leak) through some of the following methods.

Anything marked with ✅ is something I've done personally and seen significant benefit from.

Minimise overall RAM usage ✅
Use Windows' task-manager (Ctrl+alt+del > Start Task Manager > Processes) to identify and close down any non-essential background processes that may be consuming RAM. Web browsers in particular are RAM-hungry these days. Ideally the only things that will be running while you play Bannerlord are Steam anything essential to Windows, as well as any software that may help enhance performance.

Launch Steam with -no-browser ✅
Steam contains its own browser. If you've ever looked at Task-manager while running it, you'll have noticed multiple instances of "Steamwebhelper.exe", each eating a non-trivial amount of RAM.
Steam can be launched with its browser disabled - preventing use of the store, library, community etc (Friends list and chat still works) - by launching it with the command line parameter -no-browser - The steam client its self will then be the only process it starts, minimising its RAM usage.

I advise creating a new shortcut to Steam. Right-click this new shortcut, click Properties > Shortcut, and in "Target" append -no-browser, as such:
Code:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe" -no-browser

You can make this shortcut start Bannerlord directly by appending -applaunch 261550, as such:
Code:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe" -no-browser -applaunch 261550

With this shortcut set up, you will close Steam and launch it via the shortcut when going to play Bannerlord. You could even rename it and/or set its icon to that of the game to avoid confusion.

Note: I can't tell you whether this affects multiplayer - I'd appreciate someone (who knows they can already login without issue) testing it out.

Restart the game frequently ✅
It's pretty clear by now that the campaign suffers from memory leaks. Reloading save-games, playing through multiple battles/scenes seem to increase RAM usage over time. If the game's performance feels significantly worse after an hour or so, restarting once it reaches this point should keep it within the realm of playability.

Install Bannerlord on an SSD ✅
SSDs are read much faster than regular hard-drives. This means it takes less time to access things like textures, models, sounds and other game assets. If you have one and can free the space, installing/moving Bannerlord to an SSD as opposed to a HDD is almost guaranteed to significantly decrease load-times and mitigate or even eliminate stutter. In my case it was the single biggest improvement.
120gb SSDs go for relatively cheap (Around £30-50) these days, and are probably the most bang-for-your-buck if you currently only have an HDD.

Check your page-file ✅
Windows' Pagefile is essentially an extension of RAM by way of your Hard-Drive/SSD. The pagefile can be dynamic in its size - as it's increased or decreased, RAM and CPU are used to perform this operation.
As such, I'd advise setting the minimum and maximum page-file sizes to the same value. As to what that value should be, most sources indicate 1.5x the size of RAM - That makes it a 12gb (12,288mb) pagefile for a system with 8gb RAM.

For Windows 7:
Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced System Settings > Advanced > Performance > Advanced > Virtual Memory.
Uncheck "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives"
Click "Custom size", put 12288 in both boxes, click "Set" then "Apply".

If you have an SSD, moving the pagefile over to it (and reducing the one(s) on your hard-drive(s) to ~500mb) may also make a significant difference.

Disable Audio Enhancements - Use regular headphones/speakers ✅
Don't know why this works, but I'm not gonna complain.
Go to Control Panel > Sound > Playback devices
Right click > Properties > Enhancements on your speakers/headphones
Check "Disable all enhancements". Apply.

In my case, swapping from my USB headset with integrated soundcard to a regular pair of headphones reduced stuttering quite a bit.

Thanks to reddit users ZeppKfw and Gaben_money

Optimise game settings ✅
Ultimately, every system's going to be different in some way - There's no fix-all set of settings that will work better for everyone. However, some settings are more RAM-intensive than others. Here's the key settings I use to minimise stuttering while largely preserving graphical fidelity:
Shader Quality, LightingHigh
Texture Streaming BudgetVery High
Textures, Shadows, Environment, Terrain, Decals, WaterLow
Shadow TypeStatic Only
Particle Detail, Particle Quality, Foliage Quality, Character DetailMedium
AntialiasingSMAA
Texture FilteringAnisotropic 16x
OcclusionTSAO
Shadow FilteringPCF
Sound Channels128

Enabled:
Depth of Field
Screen-space Reflection
Sunshafts
Subsurface scattering
Tesselation
Bloom
Film Grain

Edit: Since moving to an SSD, I was able to put up all the settings listed as Low to Medium with no issue.

It's been reported that using Fullscreen instead of Windowed Fullscreen, and also setting your resolution manually (instead of "Desktop Resolution") also has a significant effect on improving performance. It made no noticeable difference for me.

In any case, I recommend playing around with the settings to find what works best for you. You might be able to get away with increasing some settings, and/or you may need to decrease some for optimal performance. Trial and error is the name of the game.

My specs for reference:


Thanks @nemesis234 and @Askorti

Windows Readyboost
This is probably grasping at a straw, but every little helps right? Windows Readyboost requires the use of a USB/Flash drive, essentially using it as additional RAM. Flash memory is quicker than reading/writing to the HDD, as is the case with the page-file, but is still no replacement for RAM, and likely isn't as efficient as an SSD's page-file.
Plug in your flash drive.
Clear any unnecessary files
On Autoplay, click "Speed up my system using Windows Readyboost"

Defragment your Hard-Drive
If, like me, you've had the same HDD for multiple years, chances are it's fragmented to hell and back. As my understanding goes, this means it will take longer for your system to read from the drive, as such compromising performance.
I recommend using Defraggler for this process. Note, it can take up to days to fully defragment a HDD.

Update your GPU drivers

Overclock your RAM
See the last paragraph of the disclaimer.
Ultimately, this is unlikely to make a significant difference, and may well reduce the lifespan of your RAM for the effort, but might just be the push your system needs to get the game running at a level of performance closer to what you find acceptable.

Use 3rd-party software to optimise RAM/CPU/Power usage

Memorycleaner ✅

Memorycleaner is an application that can help cut down on unnecessary RAM usage. In my case, it has helped lengthen the time before the memory-leak becomes a significant issue - however it may contribute to an issue I've had with troops being invisible for the first few seconds of a battle.

Thanks @Nekolacek

Process Lasso ✅
Process Lasso is essentially an extended task-manager, allowing you to set default rules regarding CPU and I/O priority for each application on your PC. I personally set both to "High" for Bannerlord. Note that some features are unavailable in the free version, but they (probably) have little value in this context.

Intelligent Stanby List Cleaner ✅
"The application will monitor and clear the memory standby list according to the configured options parameter you set."


Thanks @TOC1775

Razer Cortex
According to TechRadar:
Razer Cortex [...] performs the usual housework (deleting temporary files, emptying the Recycle Bin, checking for broken registry entries and so on), it also suspends non-essential processes to free up RAM while you're gaming.


Thanks @uncnzrd


If you've any other such tweaks throw them in here and I'll add them to the OP. Corrections are also welcome, I don't have much more than a layman's understanding of computer hardware/software, and might have parroted something incorrect. In any case, I hope this helps some of you - Either way, please respond with your specs, the parts of this guide you followed (and anything else you may have done), and whether it made a difference.
Your specs are really close to mine. We share the same processor and ram. I'll try it out hopefully it works. Through personal tweaking, I've managed to get the game running with no lag on the campaign map. But as you said, after a while it starts to get laggy and I was very confused as to why it's happening. I'll be trying your methods now and I'll let you now the end result - thanks!
 
After the patch yesterday, I played a match of mp, captain mode, went smoothly without any stuttering. Then there was an issue with EU servers so I switched to sp to try out the memory leak fix, if it will help. It... helped a bit for around 15-20 mins, then it started to be unplayable again. But I am glad Taleworlds are trying their best to fix it.
 
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