anyone have any tips for minimizing frame drops?

[Aronthaer]

My town is starting to get severe frame drops in some areas, and I've been desperately trying to fix it for about a week. however, no matter what items I might deem as problematic and replace, I'm still getting 10-15 frames in probably a quarter of my town. does anyone have any tips on reducing frame lag?

 

[Bluebellie]

I think removing flowers helps. Every once in a while I go around and start digging up the extra flowers that grew randomly. When I do the cleanup, it feels a lot smoother afterwards. I’ve never had issues where the items disappear from view though.

 

[Aronthaer]

I think removing flowers helps. Every once in a while I go around and start digging up the extra flowers that grew randomly. When I do the cleanup, it feels a lot smoother afterwards. I’ve never had issues where the items disappear from view though.

It's weird, because I do have large swathes of my town taken over by flowers, and you would think since they're animated and at least somewhat 3d rendered that they would cause performance issues. but actually, I think my problem is more with high-poly furniture items. the place where it really lags for me is my gnome forest, which has a lot of mush furniture and dollhouses. I tried cutting that section down to about half the size it was prior, which helped for a bit, but then I built a park next to it with literally only like 5 furniture items and it immediately started lagging again.

 

[Dantia]

From my own experience:

1. Elevated areas "in front of your island" cause a lot of fps issues. To give you an example: I had my "town" part of my island (the one with the shops etc) elevated to the 2nd floor right next to my plaza (very close to my airport) and it started causing some crazy FPS issues every time I ran past it. I decided to bring it all down to ground level and suddenly the fps issues were gone. I actually tried to recreate this by making a 3 story hill right behind the plaza and once again it started lagging every time I ran past it. Now instead I only have elevated areas on the back of my island. Or at least, once I have an elevated area, I make sure there is no "ground level" behind it. Not sure I'm explaining it correctly. I suspect it's because once you are at an elevated area, the game thinks you are able to see more of your island to the horizon and so is forced to render further out than it normally does. So elevated area on the front of your island equals the game thinking it has to render more of the rest of your island behind it. Again, I might be horrible at explaining this, my apologies.

2. Another issue I've noticed is that cramming all your villagers' houses in one area of your island will inevitably make that area laggy. I believe the reason to this being two-fold: first, your villagers are more prone to spending time around their houses (thus more villagers in one spot) and secondly, if you decorate your villagers' houses' exteriors, you are bound to use a bunch of items. A lot of items in a specific area equals more lag. I imagine the houses themselves also somehow cause a lot of lag for some reason.

3. Playing in docked mode causes the game to lag more. Docked mode renders the game at a higher resolution, thus requiring more power and resulting in more fps drops. Handheld renders the game at a lower resolution and so has an easier time keeping a steady fps.

Incidentally: Flowers and trees have never really caused much trouble for me.

Obviously there are more factors that come into play here and different people will experience what I mentioned differently but from my point of view these were the biggest culprits in my island lagging from time to time.

Edit: The most obvious reason is of course the amount of items you place down at a location but that goes without saying.

 

[kayleee]

I’ve recently added more elevated areas to my island and I found that made the frame rate drops much worse - I also dug up a ton of flowers and put away many furniture items, but that didn’t seem to help at all. I think cliffs/waterfalls seem to be the real culprits for me, which is really unfortunate. I haven’t found a way to fix it unfortunately.

 

[nightglow]

When I had my island I noticed cliffs, custom designs, and waterfalls encouraged lag.
That was waaay before the 2.0.x update.
I thought this article was interesting. It discusses lag in NH and variables that could be causing it.
https://github-wiki-see.page/m/katubug/ACNH/wiki/Lag-in-Animal-Crossing-New-Horizons

 

[QueenOpossum]

Walking instead of running helps me.