Hey there!

I initially wrote this as a direct response on the Insurgency Steam forums, for someone who was having issues getting a consistent framerate for their easily sufficient hardwear.

Hence the general lack of fancy formatting, or shiny pictures. But if you're looking to tweak your game for better preformance, most of what you'll want to try changing can be found below.


For each setting I'll list it's name. My preffered value - and then a breif description and any hints or tips for finding your ideal value. You could just simply use all the ones I do - but It's highly unlikely our machines are precisley the same, so I urge you to take your time, read each section - and then make changes to your game.

Audio:

• Sound Quality - Medium - This one is dictated by your system. If you know you have a dedicated sound card, you can set it to 'High', otherwise stick to 'Medium' or 'Low'. May have some impact on framerate depending on your system, and whether your cpu has to take over audio processing duties.

Video:

• Resolution - 1600x900 fullscreen - Rendering resolution can have a fairly big impact on prefomance. Generally speaking if you're getting low framerates with your displays native resolution - you want to try lowering it. Although lower resolutions will impact overall visual quality in a very noticable way. Regardless of what you choose - always go with fullscreen if you're having issues with preformance.
  
  
• Laptop Power Savings - Disabled - Unless you're trying to play on battery power leave this off.
  
  
• Field of View - 100 - Can have a fairly minor impact on framerate, but generally it's fairly negligable. Set according to preference.
  
  
• Scope Detail - Medium - A major preformance hog, but only when looking through an optic. The double rendering used to acheive the realistic scope view is very nice - but takes a toll on framerate. Older / less powerful machines will notice the impact exponentially more. The medium option is a good compromise between visual clarity and prefomance. Low tends to pixelate targets so much they can be indestinguishable from shadows and at long range.

Advanced Video Options:

• Global Shadow Quality - Very Low - Depending on your gpu this is either a moderate prefomance drain - or a negligable one. Generally speaking there is very little visual difference in insurgency between High and Very Low. Shadows will loose a lot of their sharpness and some contrast, but they're still there, and still fairly distinct.
  
  
• Model / Texture Detail - High - I hope these two are someday seperated into two distinct options, as they are in other source games. Some gpu's handle geometry better than texture detail and visa versa, so it would be nice to be able to independantly adjust these without having to resort to the console.
  
  
• Shader Detail - High - Anything less than high will disable the enviroment mapping which gives weapons and other objects that lovely metallic sheen to them. Feel free to go down to Medium or Low if this isn't of concern to you.
  
  
• Effect Detail - Low - This primarily affects particle effect density in Insurgency. As most of the particle effects are rediculously dense, leave this on low unless you have a fetish for walls spraying billions of paint flecks at you. Or molotovs slowing down time itself.
  
  
• Multicore Rendering - Enabled - Another context-sensitive option. If you have a system with a multicore cpu, it is generally advisable to enable this option as it threads the rendering process and improves preformance. Note: The engine does not correctly identify some mobile cpu's as a result of issues with hyperthreading. So this setting may produce no noticable benefit or even a preformance detrement on some laptop / notebooks.
  
  
• Anti-Aliasing Mode - Disabled - Generally best left disabled unless you know your particular card has a preference for this over Fxaa. Or you're an eye candy conesseuir.
  
  
• FXAA Antialiasing - Enabled - FXAA is generally a better option than other anti-aliasing solutions. Faster, less demanding, and generally producing a similar level of visual quality. This option should be disabled if another form of Anti-aliaising is being used. Be it in-game, forced via your gpu's control panel, or injected via a post-process injector. Some people find FXAA to be too blurry for their liking. But it will generally be faster than other "true" antialiasing methods.
  
  
• Vertical Sync - Disabled - Generally it is advisable to leave this off. Vertical sync prevents 'screentearing' by forcing your gpu and display to remain in sync. Some people prefer it, It dosn't usually bother me. Leave it off if you're trying to get the best prefomance.
  
  
• Motion Blur - Disabled - So cinematic! Much Hollywood! Leave it off if your looking for prefomance.
  
  
• Paged Pool Memory Usage - High - This is generally best left to high, unless you run into error messages along the lines of "os paged pool memory low". Then you'll want to consider turning this down.

That concludes the in-game options. Save your changes and close your game so we can proceed to:

Launch options are special parameters the game sets before, or during startup. A lot of these are system-specific, I will list the parameters I myself use, and provide guidance on how to set them for your own specific machine.


First - open up your steam game library. Navigate to insurgency's name/icon and right click on it:
Here's an image of the menu you're looking for:



Then click on 'properties'.



Under the general tab click the button entitled "Set Launch Options" and a box similar to this should pop up:




If you have any text in your box, clear it, so we can start from a fresh slate.
Here's a run down of the launch options that I personally use in Insurgency:

• -console - Intended to force the console to open at the main menu. As of last update it no longer appears to function. Only useful for those who often find themselves entering console comands often.
  
  
• -noforcemaccel -noforcemprams -noforcemspd - All of these force Source to override Window's default mouse acceleration, effectivley disabling it. Most source games these days now have an option in their mouse settings for 'Raw Input' which appears to do largely the same thing. Note -noforcemprams will also prevent the cursor from clicking outside of the games window - if you run in window mode and are sick of clicking on your desktop instead of in-game.
  
  
• -heapsize 2097152 - This command tells Source how much memory (RAM) it should allocate to the system heap. This improves loading times / stutter by caching game assets in RAM rather than on the hard-drive. The units are in kb. If you have 2GB or more of RAM you may wish to set this setting to 524288 (kb) which is 512mb. Generally speaking it is best not to exceed half your phyiscal RAM amount. So if you have 8gb. 4gb or less is best. And even that is pretty excessive. Try my setting (2048mb) if you have more than 4GB.
  
  
• -noborder - Simply forces borderless mode when running in a window. Largley defunct but throw it in there if you like.
  
  
• -d3d - This one is a little more complex. It forces Source to do its rendering using the Direct3D API. If you have no clue what that means, don't worry. There are basically three renderers you can force. Direct3D (-d3d) - OpenGL (-gl) - and software (-soft). Generally you'll want to try either Direct3D or OpenGL to see which gives you the better framerate. Most often it will be Direct3D as thats what most gpu's run best. But your specific card may do better under OpenGL. Try running around a co-op match with -d3d, -gl, and neither in your launch options, and keep an eye on your fps to see which suits you best. You'll have to restart the game entirley to switch rendering modes though.
  
  
• There are a couple of other launch commands that are commonly recommended for Source games. Things like '-threads' or '-dxlevel'. While both can provide significant preformance benfits I will only be breifly covering them, as the latest builds of Source are pretty competent at picking the best options for your machine.
  
  ~ First -threads. It's purpose is to tell Source how many threads (cores) of your multicore cpu it should use. The default is 3. You can override it to 4 for a quad-core cpu or 8 for a octa-core. But it can cause issues such as audio desync so test it out before making it a permenant addition.
  
  ~ And -dxlevel. This one simply forces Source to run at a particular DirectX level.
  
  • -dxlevel 90 > DirectX 9
    
  • -dxlevel 81 > DirectX 8.1
    
  • -dxlevel 80 > DirectX 8
    
  • -dxlevel 70 > DirectX 7
    
  • -dxlevel 60 > DirectX 6
  If you know your particular GPU prefers a particular DirectX level you can force it. But be aware that you will loose certain visual effects that are dependant on certain DirectX versions:
  
  
  
  That concludes Launch options, we can finally move on to:

Before dabbling about in the console, there are a few preperations that have to be made. First off we have to make an autoexec.cfg, to store any of the tweaks we want to keep. If following instructions via text isn't you thing, there's a handy video over here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7vah-B9kao

That explains the process. Take note that you'll have to change your paths to those of insurgency, not CSS though.

• First, navigate to your 'steamapps' folder. From there, find the 'Insurgency2' folder, double click it, and open up the 'Insurgency' folder inside it.
  
  
• Once there you'll see a folder named 'cfg' - open that and duplicate the file within named 'config.cfg'.
  
  
• Open the copy of 'config.cfg you just made with notepad or notepad++ if you have it. (Mac users, textedit will work for you.) Once in the document, clear all the text and save it as "autoexec.cfg" in the same folder as all the other .cfgs. Be SURE to save it with the file type set to 'All Files *.*" and not as a regular text file.
  
  
• Once you have your autoexec.cfg, you can delete the copy of config.cfg you made.

Leave your autoexec.cfg open. You'll want to alt-tab out to it to enter any tweaks you find increase your framerate.




By default the console is disabled in Insurgency. Open up the game and navigate to the game options menu. Set 'Console' to 'Enable'.

Now when you press the tilde key on your keyboard "~" - the Source engine console should pop up. It's into this that you will enter your commands to tweak your game.

When tweaking to improve preformance, you want your game to be rendering high density scenes. Gunfights between multiple players, where the most has to be rendered on screen at once. As such it is generally best to join a server with a high player count, and go spectator. Pressing space will allow you to cycle your view, and you're best off staying in first person view while tweaking.

Once you're on a server, and spectating someone from behind their own eyes. Open up your console and enter:

net_graph 1 followed by enter.



You should now be able to track your framerate in the lower right corner of your screen. Now on to the commands. Simply enter each one, first without a number following the command - the console will print the default value. Keep note of it before entering the suggested value and checking to see if there is an improvment in framerate.

• mat_queue_mode 2 - Default value '-1' - This setting multithreads material and textures. Users with multicore cpu's often report a notable preformance boost when set to '2' or '1'. The default setting of '-1' attempts to autodetect what is best for you hardware, but it never hurts to try forcing a different mode.
  
  
• cl_forcepreload 1 - Default value '0' - If set to '1' this forces all information to preload reducing loading pauses and stuttering by not loading files on the go.
  
  
• rope_smooth 0 - Default value '1' - If set to '0' this setting removes smoothing of 'ropes' physics entites - which so far in Insurgency is limited to the wires on telephone poles. A minor visual effect which can be descreased for a small preformance gain.
  
  
• rope_subdiv 1 - Default value '2 or 3' - If set to '1' this setting reduces the amount of segments in rope physics entities, further lowering their prefomance cost.
  
  
• mat_reduceparticles 1 - Default '0' - If set to '1' this option limits the amount of particles drawn on-screen at once. As insurgency has particularly dense particle effects this can help preformance when smoke, molotovs, dust, debris, gunsmoke or other particle effects are drawn.
  
  
• mat_picmip 0 - No default - This is the same as the in-game 'texture detail' option. However here you can adjust it independantly of the model detail. 0 is high. -1 is very high. 1 is medium, and 2 is low. Be careful. Changing this in-game may cause long freezes or even a crash.
  
  
• r_propsmaxdist 1000 - Check your own default - This setting determines the maximum distance at which props (detail objects like clutter, grass, piles of rubbish etc) - are drawn. Lowering this can help improve preformance, But avoid going much lower than 1000 to prevent stuff suddenly 'popping' into existence.
  
  
• r_shadowmaxrendered 20 - Default '32' - This limits the maximum amount of shadows drawn by living entities. The default is set to 32 to match the maximum player count - but if you find shadows are something your machine struggles with - you can lower it to 20. I have found you will rarley see 20 people all together in a match. So the missing shadows is rarley noticed.
  
  
• r_decals 100 - Default varies. Mine was '150' - Limits the amount of decals (primarily wall marks from bullets) are drawn per frame. Lowering this to 100 will provide a small boost with minimal visual quality loss, as the speed at which marks fade is unaffected.
  
  
• r_fastzreject -1 - Default '0' - A setting which enables extended hardware features for zreject algorithms. Usually provides a significant to medium preformance boost depending on your specific hardware, with no visible quality loss. A setting of '-1' will autodetect which option is best for your hardware. No clue why NWE sets it to '0' or completely disabled by default.
  
  
• snd_mix_async 1 - Default '0' - This command allows multicore processors to run most of the sound engine in parrelel with the renderer, which can improve prefomance and decrease audio stutter. If you have a multicore processor - try enabling it.
  
  
• mem_max_heapsize 512 - Default unknown - This command forces a limit on the maximum amount of memory used by the system heap. If you're using the -heapsize launch option you should consider increasing this to 512 or 1024 to allow for the caching of certain larger assets.
  
  
• r_threaded_particles 1 - Default '1' - This simply allows for multithreading of the particles rendering process. On by default, you may want to turn it off if you don't have a multicore cpu (WHY?!)
  
  
• r_threadeddetailprops 1 - Default '0' - Similar to the above but for detail props (clutter and such). Off by default, try turning it on if you have a multicore cpu.

And that pretty much covers everything of note to Insurgency. If you'd like some other options to mess around with that may or may not help check out the excellent guide over at: https://tweakguides.pcgamingwiki.com/HL2_4.html
It's a bit out of date by now. But the majority of the commands still work in Insurgency. Just be aware that some may cause a preformance decrease and keep track of the origional values so you can quickly switch back.



Doing so is simply a matter of typing them into you .cfg and then saving it. The commands will then be set and run everytime you launch the game. You can still change them in-game from the console, but they will always default to values in your autoexec.cfg.

Be sure to enter the numerical values in your autoexec.cfg in quotations. Otherwise they won't be recognised, refer to this sample from my own autoexec:

Well I think that's pretty much everything for now! There are a few things I left out for simplicities sake. So if you have any issues or get tangled up in imposing tower of words, just let me know, and I'll do my best to point you in the right direction.

As I stated in the intro this isn't meant to be a whollistic guide, but rather a quick checklist of things you can try, should your framerate in Insurgency be lower than comparable source games. Please understand that many of the maps are still poorly optimized and the particle system in particular could do with a serious revision, but it's still entirley possible to get above 60fps with mediocre hardware.