How to ensure the best performance of SMB3

Thank you a ton to everyone who’s given SMB3 a go!

This post is here to help you get the best performance and experience from SMB3 and to help you help us gather the information we need to address any lingering performance issues.

Dropped frames / inconsistent framerate on consoles (Xbox One, Switch, PS4)

TLDR: Power cycle / reboot your console.

Modern consoles generally enter lower-power states rather than fully reboot when you turn them off via normal means. If you’ve just bought and installed SMB3 but have not fully restarted your console in a long time, a full power cycle / reboot can often help resolve performance issues (this means holding the power button on the console for ~15 seconds). See power cycle instructions for Switch, Xbox One and PS4.

If you are still seeing performance issues in SMB3 on your console after a power cycle / reboot, letting us know the following will help us track down issues:

• Platform you’re playing on
• Stadium and time/weather condition you were playing in when you noticed a framerate drop
• Game mode you were playing
• What type of play you observed the framerate drop on (number of base runners, where the ball went)
• If you have and shared video capture, that is always helpful

Dropped frames / inconsistent framerate issues on PC

There are a lot of variables that affect performance on the PC. The basic things you should look to first are:

• Make sure you’re on the latest version of Windows 10
• Make sure your PC’s drivers are up to date (video card, bios, etc.)
• If playing online, use a wired ethernet connection or make sure your WIFI signal is very strong (lag can resemble framerate problems)

With those basics taken care of, find graphics settings that make sense for your PC. A good strategy is to lower your graphics settings (in Exhibition mode!) so you get a solid 60fps in a demanding ballpark (such as Founders Field in the Night/Fair lighting condition) and then slowly raise your settings back up while making sure that you’re still holding 60fps during all gameplay sequences.

Let’s dig into the options available to you:

• Resolution has a large and direct impact on performance. Higher resolutions will give you a crisper look overall but are more demanding of your GPU.
• Anisotropy has a huge impact on performance. It also becomes more costly the higher the resolution you are using. Higher settings will affect the sharpness of the grass and dirt in particular, but this is a great place to start to lower the load on your GPU.
• Antialiasing also has a major impact on performance and like Anisotropy, becomes more costly with higher resolutions. It helps reduce jagged edges on geometry, such as railings, seating, and character details. This is another good setting to lower to ease load on your GPU.
• Shadow Quality has a more modest impact on performance and you can likely keep this setting fairly high unless you’re on an older GPU or a laptop. It’s best to lower the above settings before this one.
• Crowd Density affects the number of crowd members that are drawn in the stadium. Lowering this can reduce GPU load but is going to be very visually impactful. We’d recommend lowering this only as a last resort on lower spec machines.
• Crowd Variation can have a large impact on performance, especially on your CPU load. It controls how many different animations are used at the same time for the crowd. Higher settings will give you a more organic crowd with less ‘in-sync’ animations.
• Shader Quality can have a large impact on GPU load. It controls rendering quality of the crowd members, field surfaces, and accumulated dirt detail. Lowering it can help a lot on older GPU’s or if you're seeing lower framerates in later innings.

Notable: There was a bug fixed in the Steam Hotfix 2B update (the day after launch day) that fixed problems with graphics settings not being applied immediately, so you may have had unpredictable results tweaking your graphics settings on launch day.

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Edit: Updated for accuracy