Lunarium Best Settings Guide: Graphics & FPS Optimization

Getting Lunarium best settings right means the difference between a stunning, immersive experience and a stuttering mess that pulls you out of the action every five minutes. Built on Unity, Lunarium delivers rich environments and atmospheric lighting—but those visual treats demand careful configuration on mid-range and older hardware. This guide walks you through every category of settings, from graphics presets to display options, so you can tailor Lunarium to your exact PC without sacrificing the feel the developers intended.

Lunarium Graphics Presets Explained

The first decision every player faces in Lunarium's settings menu is choosing between Low, Medium, High, and Epic presets. Each preset bundles multiple individual settings together, giving you a quick baseline—but knowing which slider moves which lever lets you customize far more effectively than the simple four-button approach.

The preset system in Lunarium scales primarily through shadow resolution, foliage density, texture streaming, and post-processing effects. An Epic preset activates volumetric fog, screen-space reflections on all surfaces, and dynamic global illumination via Lumen, while a Low preset strips those down to baked alternatives. Players with a GTX 1050 Ti—the official minimum GPU—should expect to run at Low or Medium with occasional dips below 60 FPS in open areas, whereas a GTX 1080 Ti recommended card handles High consistently above 60 FPS at 1080p.

If you own the recommended GTX 1080 Ti, you can safely start at High and fine-tune individual sliders from there. The jump from High to Epic typically costs 15–25% of your framerate, so the tradeoff rarely feels worth it on a single-monitor setup.

Display and Resolution Settings

Display configuration in Lunarium affects both visual fidelity and raw performance more directly than most players realize. Resolution Scale, found under the Display heading, multiplies your render resolution relative to your monitor's native output. Running at 100% renders every pixel; dropping to 75% renders at three-quarters the pixel count, which dramatically lightens GPU load while keeping the UI sharp.

The relationship between Resolution Scale and framerate is non-linear. Reducing from 100% to 75% on a 1080p display (rendering at 1440×810 instead of 1920×1080) cuts the total pixel count by roughly 44%, which typically translates to a 30–40% FPS boost on modern hardware. For players running the minimum GTX 1050 Ti, setting Resolution Scale to 70–80% is often the single most impactful change you can make before touching any other slider.

Aspect Ratio and Screen Mode deserve attention on ultrawide monitors. Lunarium supports 21:9 and 32:9 aspect ratios natively, but the engine's UI scaling can feel cramped at extreme widths. The Fullscreen mode provides the lowest input latency and best performance, while Borderless Window offers quick Alt-Tab convenience at a marginal cost of 1–3 FPS depending on your GPU and driver version.

VSync is disabled by default in Lunarium's optimal configuration for competitive and casual play alike. Vertical sync eliminates screen tearing but introduces 1–3 frames of input lag and can clamp framerates unevenly. If tearing bothers you on an uncapped framerate, Adaptive VSync (available in Lunarium's advanced display menu) enables VSync only when your framerate exceeds your monitor's refresh rate, avoiding the worst of the lag penalty.

Frame Rate Cap Strategy

Setting a Frame Rate Cap in Lunarium serves two purposes: it prevents your GPU from working harder than necessary in CPU-bound scenarios, and it stabilizes frametime variance that causes micro-stuttering. The optimal cap depends on your monitor's refresh rate. On a 60Hz display, capping at 60 FPS eliminates wasted GPU cycles. On a 144Hz gaming monitor paired with a GTX 1080 Ti, allowing 144 FPS gives you the smoothness benefit without straining the CPU unnecessarily.

Players running the minimum spec should cap at 30 FPS as a floor—the game remains playable at this rate, and it prevents the GPU from chasing framerates it cannot sustain in open environments.

Advanced Rendering Options in Lunarium

Beyond the bundled presets, Lunarium exposes granular controls that let you isolate exactly which visual elements strain your system. Understanding each toggle helps you preserve the best graphics for your budget rather than accepting a generic Low/High binary.

Shadow Quality

Shadows are among the most GPU-intensive features in Lunarium's rendering pipeline. The Shadow Quality slider ranges from Off to Ultra, controlling shadow map resolution, the number of dynamic light sources casting shadows, and whether cascaded shadow maps (CSMs) are used for the directional sun light. Setting Shadow Quality to Low removes character self-shadowing and shortens shadow draw distance, which many players find acceptable given how rarely you stare at the floor. For GTX 1050 Ti owners, keeping shadows at Off or Very Low recovers 8–15% of available framerate with minimal gameplay impact.

Texture Detail and Streaming

Lunarium's Texture Detail setting governs mipmap levels and streaming pool size. At Medium, the game streams textures up to 2K resolution, which fits comfortably within the 8 GB RAM minimum requirement. Pushing to Epic loads 4K textures across the board, demanding more VRAM and system memory simultaneously. If you notice texture pop-in during fast travel or zone transitions, the streaming budget is saturated—lower Texture Detail or increase the Texture Streaming Pool in Lunarium's advanced graphics menu.

The game requires 8 GB RAM and 5 GB of storage, according to the official Steam listing. For the GTX 1050 Ti with 4 GB VRAM, High texture detail pushes into dangerous territory, and Epic will cause texture streaming failures and stuttering on that card.

Post-Processing Effects

Post-processing in Lunarium encompasses ambient occlusion, bloom, chromatic aberration, lens flares, depth of field, and motion blur. Each toggle is independent, giving you surgical control. The heaviest hitters for performance are Bloom (particularly bloom on emissive surfaces in dark environments) and Depth of Field in cinematic mode, both of which run expensive screen-space computations on every frame.

Players prioritizing Lunarium performance over visual spectacle should disable Chromatic Aberration and Lens Flares entirely—these effects are purely aesthetic and consume measurable GPU time. Ambient Occlusion set to SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) provides most of the visual depth benefit at a fraction of the cost of HBAO+ or Ray-Traced AO, making it the most efficient toggle in the post-processing stack.

Volumetric Effects

Unity's volumetric fog system powers Lunarium's atmospheric scenes, but it comes at a steep performance price. Volumetric Fog and Volumetric Clouds both require per-frame ray marching through the scene volume, costing 10–20% of your FPS depending on scene complexity. The GTX 1080 Ti can manage Volumetric Fog at Medium density, but Volumetric Clouds at any setting above Low will push even that card into the danger zone on complex maps.

For players who want volumetric atmosphere without the FPS hit, reducing Particle Quality and Foliage Density under the Effects quality section often provides a better visual-to-performance ratio than simply turning off all post-processing.

Lunarium FPS Optimization Guide

Optimizing Lunarium FPS is a layered process. After establishing your baseline with the preset selector, iterate through these five areas in order of impact. This systematic approach ensures you extract maximum performance before making compromises you might later regret.

Step 1: Calibrate Resolution Scale First

Before touching any quality slider, set your Resolution Scale to 75% and run an in-game benchmark scene or fast-travel through the game's busiest area. This single change gives you an immediate performance baseline. If you still hit 60+ FPS comfortably, push to 80–90%. If you dip below 50 FPS, drop to 60–70%. This iterative approach prevents overshooting into unplayable territory or undershooting and leaving performance on the table.

Step 2: Adjust Shadow and Foliage Together

Shadows and foliage are the two settings most players underestimate. Foliage Density controls how many instances of grass, bushes, and small vegetation populate the world, and at Epic density, each blade can cast an individual shadow. Reducing foliage to Medium drops both the geometry count and shadow casting work simultaneously. For minimum-spec players, Low foliage combined with Off shadows recovers enough headroom to push other settings higher.

Step 3: Lock Your Frame Rate

Set a Frame Rate Cap at your monitor's refresh rate or slightly below it. On a 60Hz display, capping at 60 FPS stops your GPU from rendering frames that your monitor cannot display. This not only saves power and heat but also reduces the judder caused by frametime spikes—Lunarium's engine rewards stable frametimes as much as raw throughput.

Step 4: Disable Unnecessary Post-Processing

Go through the post-processing list methodically. Motion Blur offers zero gameplay advantage and costs 2–5 FPS. Chromatic Aberration and Film Grain are stylistic choices that subtract performance without adding functional value. Disable these three first, then evaluate your framerate before touching Bloom or Ambient Occlusion.

Step 5: Manage Background Processes

This step lives outside the game settings menu but matters enormously for Lunarium performance. Close browser tabs running video, disable Discord overlay or NVIDIA broadcast features, and ensure your GPU drivers are up to date. Unity games are particularly sensitive to driver versions, and the GTX 1080 Ti has seen multiple driver updates that specifically optimize Unity titles.

For players experiencing consistent stuttering despite correct in-game settings, the culprit is often the texture streaming pool. In Lunarium's Engine.ini configuration file (located in your user save directory), you can manually increase the streaming pool size by adding the following line under the [SystemSettings] section: r.Streaming.PoolSize=2048. This allocates 2 GB of additional texture streaming memory, reducing pop-in but requiring adequate system RAM above the 8 GB minimum.

Unity-Specific Optimization Notes

Lunarium's Unity foundation introduces Lumen for global illumination and Nanite for virtualized geometry. Both systems are disabled or scaled automatically by the game's quality presets, but manual control exists in the Scalability.ini files. Players comfortable editing configuration files can force Lumen to Software Ray Tracing mode (which uses the GPU compute pipeline rather than dedicated RT cores) for a middle ground between visual quality and hardware demand.

Nanite, by contrast, is an asset-based optimization—static meshes below a certain polygon threshold are automatically simplified. You cannot manually disable Nanite without breaking the visual quality of many environments, so it is best treated as a free performance gift from the engine rather than a setting to tweak.

For a complete breakdown of Lunarium's engine requirements and how Unity features impact hardware demands, see our Lunarium Unity Engine Notes guide.

Recommended Settings by Hardware Tier

Different hardware tiers call for different in-game setting choices. The list below summarizes the recommended baseline for each tier.

• Entry-level hardware: medium presets, no ray tracing, DLSS/FSR on Balanced.
• Mid-tier hardware: high presets, ray tracing on Low, DLSS/FSR on Quality.
• High-end hardware: epic presets, ray tracing on High, native resolution.
• Streaming capture setups: drop one preset tier to maintain smooth capture frame rates.
• Laptop users: enable the Battery Saver preset when on battery.

Settings That Hide Performance Cost

A small set of settings look great but cost almost no performance. The list below captures the highest-impact visual upgrades for minimal FPS loss.

• Ambient occlusion: visual upgrade with minimal FPS cost on most GPUs.
• Volumetric lighting: small cost, large atmosphere improvement.
• Post-processing bloom: small cost, large atmosphere improvement.
• Texture quality: only costs meaningful FPS at 4K and above.
• Anti-aliasing: TAA offers the best balance between cost and visual smoothness.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Lunarium support DLSS or FSR upscaling?

Lunarium includes built-in support for both NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR 2.x upscaling, accessible under the Display settings menu. Enable whichever technology matches your GPU—DLSS for NVIDIA cards, FSR for AMD or as a universal fallback. These upscalers render the game at a lower internal resolution and reconstruct the image at your display resolution, delivering 40–60% higher FPS with minimal visible quality loss. On a GTX 1050 Ti (no DLSS support), FSR 2 Quality mode is your best option for hitting stable 60 FPS.

What is the best Lunarium graphics settings combo for 60 FPS on a mid-range PC?

For a PC with an Intel i5 Quad-Core 3.0 GHz CPU and GTX 1080 Ti GPU, start with the High preset, set Resolution Scale to 100%, disable Volumetric Clouds, set Volumetric Fog to Medium, turn Ambient Occlusion to SSAO, and cap your framerate at 60 FPS. This configuration consistently delivers 60 FPS in open areas and exceeds it in enclosed zones. Adjust Shadow Quality to Low and Foliage Density to Medium if you encounter dips during busy scenes.

Should I enable Ray Tracing in Lunarium for better visuals?

Ray Tracing in Lunarium is best treated as a bonus tier rather than a default setting. On the recommended GTX 1080 Ti, enabling even RTX Reflections at Medium forces a 30–40% FPS reduction that most players find unacceptable in gameplay. If you own a newer GPU with dedicated ray tracing cores—such as an RTX 3070 or higher—enabling RTX Reflections at Low combined with RTX Shadows at Medium provides meaningful visual improvement with manageable performance cost. For GTX 1080 Ti and below, ray tracing remains out of reach within comfortable framerate targets.

How do I fix stuttering and texture pop-in in Lunarium?

Stuttering in Lunarium typically stems from two causes: insufficient texture streaming memory or CPU bottleneck. For texture pop-in, increase the Texture Streaming Pool in Engine.ini as described in the optimization section above, and ensure your system has at least 8 GB RAM available (the game's minimum). For CPU-related stuttering—often characterized by framerate drops that worsen as the play session extends—lower Physics Quality and Foliage Density first, as these settings are heavily CPU-dependent in Unity titles. Closing background applications that consume CPU cycles also helps significantly.