RUST FPS Boost Guide

Nothing is more annoying than being in the fight of your life and suddenly having significant FPS drops. Next thing you know, you see a guy, shoot at him, and suddenly, you are dead. You tried lowing your graphics, but that helped a bit, but now the trees look like a solid mesh, and you can’t see anything past them. You tried playing with some settings, but still, you are getting nailed at every turn. In this RUST FPS article, I will show you some unique reasons and their solution as to why your FPS on RUST sucks.

In this RUST FPS Boosting article, I will make you aware of some FPS issues that might even be about you and your hardware, but the type of server and its hardware that you are playing on, then we will go with some basic windows settings that will help with FPS on all your games. Then we will start going through RUST specific FPS tutorials. Use the table of content section to quickly go to each chapter of your choosing.

Step 1 of Boosting your RUST FPS

Stop playing on A2S Query Caching servers.

What’s the first thing you do when you look for a RUST server to play on? You put it in Ping order, starting from lowest to highest, and then check for the popular ones. But have you ever noticed in the modded and community server list that the first 100+ servers seem to have almost identical Ping? No matter whether it is in Germany, the UK, the USA, and Australia. All these servers have practically the same ping, and it’s very low! If you know anything about how Ping works, you know this is impossible, and you would be correct. It’s not.

This image is what I see living in Asia when I put all the servers in ping order. Notice the pings are almost identical, but these servers are in the EU, USA, New Zealand, and Australia. This is because 98% of RUST servers use a cheat system called A2S query catching. You think you are joining a server with 34 ping, but in reality, it’s 167.

Your FPS might be okay. It could be because your ping is nearly 150+ when you were told on the server listing it would be 34. But now your character is jittery and has laggy frames due to high ping, which can easily be mistaken for having FPS issues or FPS bottlenecking.

How to find a non A2S query caching server?

Well, to be honest, I am not sure, since literally every server under official, modded, and community are using it. The best thing you can do is know, that if you are in the USA, then join a server that’s tagged as the USA. Then once you are in there, press F1 and type “ping”, then press enter. This will tell you what your actual ping is. Alternatively, you could join our servers. Our servers are dedicated machines, not $30 shared hosting servers as most people use, I am talking about $350 a month beastly servers, and we have over 6 of these machines to host all our games, located in the EU, Asia and USA. So we never needed the scam people with A2S query caching.

Step 2 of optimizing your FPS on RUST

$30 a month server compared to a $350 a month server

You probably think I am joking, or this is some ploy just to get more people on our servers. But actually, it’s not. If you are a long term player of RUST, you have probably experienced, on multiple occasions the toxic little kid admins who rent a $30 a month server and have no idea how to run it or optimize it. They usually spend most of their time using abusing admin powers for their friends. You know the ones I mean.

At Salty Zombies, we are literally spending $2,000+ a month on nothing but the best-dedicated servers. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to tell you that there will be a huge FPS performance boost for our players, playing on one of our $350 a month servers compared to the admin kid’s $30 a month server.

Step 3 for optimal RUST FPS

Configuring Windows OS for a better RUST FPS experience. 

Now onto the actual configurations. Believe it or not, Windows has a few settings that are not switched on by default that can help you with your game’s FPS performance. For example, it has a “Game Mode” and a “Hardware accelerated GPU” setting that will increase your computer’s performance. Easy to do but will require you to reboot your computer afterwards. 

To do this, type in “Game Mode” in your windows search bar and select the option “Game Mode Settings”. From there, you will see the menu with a switch that says “Game Mode”, Switch it on. Next, you will want to go to the right of the screen and click on “Graphic Settings”. On that page, you will see another switch to turn on Hardware Accelerated GPU scheduling”. Turn it on, and it will prompt you to reboot your computer.

After that, you have to go back to the windows search bar and type in “power plan” or “power options”, and select the “edit power plan” tab. Here you will see the 3 main choices, “Balanced”, “High Performance”, and “Power Saver”. First, make sure your power plan is on “High Performance”. If you have a gaming laptop, you might need to check this regularly since laptops tend to auto-switch back to a power saver when the battery gets low. But once connected to the mains, it doesn’t revert to “High Performance”, so you will have to go back and do it manually.