How to improve XCOM 2’s performance

We’ve seen a lot of concerns about the performance of XCOM 2 since it launched and it’s taken a few days for the community to figure out ways to improve things for gamers who are experiencing performance issues.

Having been playing the game on an I7, GTX 980 with 16Gb of RAM it’s not been too much of a problem but there are periods where performance takes a hit. So how can you improve things ahead of some kind of official update? Here’s some tips including disabling the intro screens.

Get rid of the annoying intro sequences

• Open the Steam Library
• Right Click on XCOM 2 and select properties
• Click the launch option button and enter -nostartupmovies
• Click OK and launch the game.

Fix Stuttering

• Open the XCOM 2 configuration folder and find XcomEngine.ini (c:\users\yourname\My documents\my games\XCOM2\XComGame\Config\XcomEngine.ini )
• Make a backup of the file before making the changes below
• Find the following settings and make the following changes:
  • Find bUseTextureStreaming and make sure it says “bUseTextureStreaming=True”.
  • Find bUseBackgroundLevelStreaming and change it to “bUseBackgroundLevelStreaming=True”
  • Find “MipFadeInSpeed0” and change it to “MipFadeInSpeed0=0”
  • Find “MipFadeOutSpeed0” and change it to “MipFadeOutSpeed0=0”
  • Find “MipFadeInSpeed1” and change it to “MipFadeInSpeed1=0”
  • Find “MipFadeOutSpeed1” and change it to “MipFadeOutSpeed1=0”
  • Find “PhysXGpuHeapSize” and change it to “PhysXGpuHeapSize=64”.
  • Find “PhysXMeshCacheSize” and change it to “PhysXMeshCacheSize=16”.
  • Find “bInitializeShadersOnDemand” and change it to “bInitializeShadersOnDemand=True”
  • Find “DisableATITextureFilterOptimizationChecks” and set it to “DisableATITextureFilterOptimizationChecks=False”
  • Find “UseMinimalNVIDIADriverShaderOptimization” and set it to “UseMinimalNVIDIADriverShaderOptimization=False”
  • Find “PoolSize” and set it to “PoolSize=X” (X depends on the amount of VRAM you have, 512MB, set it to 128, 1GB set it to 256, 2GB set it to 512, 3GB and higher set it to 768.)
  • Find “bAllowMultiThreadedShaderCompile” and change it to “bAllowMultiThreadedShaderCompile=True”
  • Find “ThreadedShaderCompileThreshold” and change it to “ThreadedShaderCompileThreshold=Y” (Where Y is the amount of PHYSICAL CPU-cores your CPU have.
  • Find “OnlyStreamInTextures” and change it to “OnlyStreamInTextures=True”

This was the solution for the original XCOM and it also works for XCOM 2 and was provided by MGSD.

There’s a stack of settings that can be messed with in this file but you should try disabling anti-aliasing, depth of field and action camera too. These can be found in the in-game settings under Gameplay and Graphics.

If you have discovered anything else then do share it in the comments.