Hello! This guide will help you with improving performance in Garry's Mod by setting launch options.

Launch options are like commands that you use together when launching a game, which in this case is Garry's Mod. To access Gmod's launch options, follow this guide:

First, click the little gear or cog to the right of the "PLAY" button.




After, click the "Properties" button.




After that, at the bottom of the "Properties" tab there will be a empty box, where you can put launch options.




Tada! That's how you set launch options for Garry's Mod! (or any other steam game)

Here are the following launch options to set which should increase fps (not counting + commands, because it counts as a convar and not a launch option.) Credits to the Valve Developer Wiki page
about launch options for helping me out to write this guide.

-gl_enablesamplerobjects | (Linux only!) Uses OpenGL Sampler Objects for better texture preloading.
-gl_texclientstorage | (MacOS only!) Reduce memory usage by relying on GPU memory instead of a host copy

-high | Sets the game's priority high, which basically tells your operating system to focus computer resources more onto the game instead of other applications. Great if you have lots of background apps, or a video playing in the background. May cause in rare cases stability issues, but only in very rare cases.

-nohltv | Disables SourceTV. If you don't know what SourceTV is, you can enable this option.

-nojoy | Disables joystick support. If you are using a controller (Like an Xbox 360, or maybe? steam deck) you shouldn't disable this.

-nosteamcontroller | Disables the Steam Input system. If you are using a controller, and/or using Steam's utility to map buttons to controllers, don't disable this.

-particles 512 | Lowers the amount of particles to 512 (minimum). Particles are things like fire effects, smoke effects, etc. Changing this to 512 ensures that low amounts of particles are used for an effect, improving performance.

-preload | Loads game assets and files before launch. May cause a slight delay or lag when starting the game, but will increase FPS as new assets and models (like props) don't need to be loaded in during a game session, as they have been loaded previously.

-r_emulate_gl | (Windows only!) This emulates OpenGL on Windows, giving a performance boost for most GPUs. A note is that the Valve Developer Wiki says that this launch option doesn't work at all, as other apps report Garry's Mod and other source games as running with DirectX. This isn't confirmed though, so if someone tested this that would be superb.

-softparticlesdefaultoff | Disables particle blending by default. Uses lower quality particles for performance.

-threads | Set the amount of threads the game can use. Let's say I have 16 threads. It would be a good idea to use 8 (half of my threads), to allow the game to use more resources while leaving over some for other applications. Default is 3.

I'm lazy, and don't want to read all of this! Can you compile it in a list for me?

Copy these to your launch options if you don't want to write it out manually. (Note, this does not account for any launch option that is platform-specific (like launch options for windows, linux or macos only) or things like threads (system specific)

-preload -particles 512 -nojoy -nohltv -nosteamcontroller -high -softparticlesdefaultoff

Thanks for reading my guide! If you have any suggestions or improvements I can do, please tell me via the comments section in this guide.

I will soon be releasing a guide for FPS via autoexec (or console commands) but that will be a lot later (as it's hard to compile a list of console commands)

If you are feeling generous, give a steam award. Thanks!