i know this isnt a setting in game but would lowering the render distance actualy improve fps? since i see the render distance is very big and that could introduce lag
That could be a possibility. It's not really necessary for my PC, but for others that could be very useful.
wel iam playing beamng with 15/30 fps max (30 is rare haha) --- Post updated --- lower render distance would help alot in maps with alot of trees i suppose since it doesnt have to render all those green bastards
lower render distance would help alot in maps with alot of trees i suppose since it doesnt have to render all those green bastartds iam playing on a laptop but it isnt realy a bad spec laptops (exepct the gpu) iam using a i5 with 12 gb ram and 500 gb 850 evo ssd sadly the hd3000 is just enough to get a "playable" game
Lower render distance would be nice for maps like Tennessee USA where looking in certain directions can cause my fps to go from 100+ to 20 because you can see for miles
Fog doesn't change performance, but visibleDistance does. It literally doesn't render anything beyond visibleDistance's value, which I assume is in meters from camera. So if you want a lower render distance for better performance, reduce visibleDistance. But you'll need to increase fog to hide the ugly cutoff border.
As I have written here (look for how to double fps from first post, there is even videos about it) https://www.beamng.com/threads/your-performance-testing-results.37866/ on some maps it has huge effect, mostly on maps that are causing high CPU load, quite often related to shadows and because of that number of stuff needed to draw goes quite high and then even fastest CPU starts becoming limiting factor. Especially with several headlights you can get to situation no upgrade to hardware is going to help. However it has less effect on some vanilla maps, GPU load is managed really well on vanilla maps, surely lowering visual distance is helping there too, but it's only so much you can lower before world becomes like movie called Mist. Keep HDR, SSAO and shadows off, don't use high mesh quality, that is what helps. If I can run 60fps most of the time with Intel HD530, when accepting hardware limitations and lowering details, I don't see much other issue than CPU limits there really affecting performance. Of course if details are kept at high level without hardware to back that up, there is no way to have good FPS. Keep texture quality at Normal or high and some AF , drop everything else to keep somewhat tolerable visual quality, shadows in this game do require fast CPU and also some GPU power too.
Visual distance is render distance, it sets radius where from rendering is cut off. Ctrl+F searches stuff from page, hit that then type double and you find spoiler which contains what you need.