How To Fix Planet Zoo FPS Lag

Planet Zoo is a Zoo simulator developed and published by Frontier Developments. Frontier is also the developer for well-known games such as Planet Coaster and Zoo Tycoon. The game was released as beta some time back and there were a lot of good reviews. The game has finally been released for public and you can download it from steam.

The Game is currently sitting in Top Seller and Trending Steam lists. Planet Zoo has gathered around 700 reviews, most of them being “most positive”.

Some players have reported lagging and FPS drops related issues with their game. In this article, we will find out how to fix them.

How To Fix Planet Zoo FPS Lag

Below are the System Requirements of the game:

Minimum Requirements

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows 7 (SP1+)/8.1/10 64bit
• Processor: Intel i5-2500 / AMD FX-6350
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 (2GB) / AMD Radeon R9 270X (2GB)
• Storage: 16 GB available space

Recommend Requirements

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows 10 64bit
• Processor: Intel i7-4770k / AMD Ryzen 5 1600
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB) or AMD Radeon RX 580 (8GB)
• Storage: 16 GB available space

First look at the settings tell us that the game is pretty demanding, you need a good gaming RIG to run this game at recommended settings. If your PC hardware falls in between these, then you should not have any trouble running the game.

Change Graphic Card Settings

Below are the settings for AMD and Nvidia graphics card users, apply these settings for the best performance.

For Nvidia Users

• Open up Nvidia’s Control Panel. Right-click on desktop > click Nvidia control panel
• Click Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings
• Find “Planet Zoo”, you can manually add the game if it’s not in the list
• Now, make the following changes:

Monitor Tech: G-Sync (If available)
Maximum Pre-rendered frames: 2
Threaded optimization: On
Power Management: Prefer Maximum Performance
Texture Filtering – Quality:  Performance

For AMD Users

• Anti-Aliasing Mode: Use Application settings
• Anti-aliasing Method: Multisampling
• Morphological Filtering: Off
• Anisotropic Filtering Mode: Use application settings
• Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
• Surface Format Optimization: On
• Wait for V-sync: Off
• OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
• Shader Cache: AMD optimized
• Tesselation Mode: Override application settings
• Maximum Tesselation Level: Off
• GPU Workload: Graphics
• Chill: Off
• Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled

These settings should be good enough for you. Try tweaking a bit with the priority of the application, this also tends to give a little FPS boost.

Update Device Drivers

Whenever a new game makes it’s arrival, especially when it’s a AAA title, Nvidia is known for pushing their optimized updates for the best performance with their graphic cards. I am not sure about AMD because I’ve never used an AMD card. Below are the links for downloading the latest drivers.

• Nvidia Drivers Download
• AMD Drivers Download
• Updated DirectX Drivers

Planet Zoo PC 2019 Stuttering Fix

Another thing to check is, open up the task manager and check your memory and disk usage. Close all applications (non-windows) that are eating your memory and using disk drive. If you are still stuttering with everything looking fine then you should probably wait for the hotfix update, which should be pushed out shortly.

These problems are mostly caused due to high disk usage and can be fixed immediately by moving the game to SSD or closing apps that are using “disk”.

Disable Full-Screen Optimization & High DPI in Windows 10

Full-screen optimization and DPI settings come pre-configured with Windows 10. These are known for causing trouble with games leading to several issues. To disable:

• Locate the game installation
• Find the .exe file of the game
• Right-click > Properties > Compatibility Tab
• Tick the “Disable Full-Screen Optimizations” tab
• Now, click the “Change high DPI settings” button
• Tick “Override high DPI scaling behavior” and select “Application” from the drop-down menu
• Save Settings.

Tone Down Game Settings

The general rule of thumb for every game is if you are lagging it is always recommended to tone down the settings. Play around a little bit with the settings, turn down shadows and textures, this should help.

I will be posting my exact settings once the game is unlocked on November 5, 2019.

Turn off Game Mode

Windows says that the Game mode helps in optimizing all-around windows processes, windows updates and other windows related stuff while running games if you have the game mode enabled. But this isn’t factually true, the game bar has been known for causing issues related to FPS. So it’s better to turn it off if you are not using it.

• Click Start > Settings > Gaming
• On the Game Bar, set “Record game clips, screenshots, and broadcast using Game bar” to off.
• Now head to the Captures tab set the “Record the background while I’m playing a game” to Off.
• Lastly, click on the Game Mode tab, and turn it off.

P.S. Nvidia’s Shadowplay is better for capturing game clips.

Update Windows

The recent couple updates were weird and broke a lot of games, to fix those issues, Windows has already pushed out hotfixes and you can download them right away. If you are running an older version of Windows, I’d recommend you to download the updated version.

There was also an update that caused windows to use up a lot of RAM for its search bar’s function called Cortana. This also has been fixed, you just have to update.

Disable Discord in-game overlay

If you are using Discord like me, then I’d recommend you to change a few things. One such thing is, discord overlay, it’s not really something you need at all times. I use a two-monitor setup, so the overlay is useless for me. It is known for causing FPS related issues.

Disable Hardware Acceleration in Discord

• Open Discord
• Click on User Settings > Appearance
• Click on the Hardware Acceleration radio, this will turn it off.

Disable Discord in-game Overlay

• Open Discord
• Go to Overlay under App Settings
• Click on the radio next to “Enable in-game overlay”, this will turn it off.

Increase Game Priority

This is an old-school method of boosting FPS in certain games, this only affects the CPU relying Games.

• Press CTLR + Shift + ESC to open task manager
• Find Planet Zoo and right-click > go to details
• Now right-click on the process’s .exe file and set priority to “high”.

This will prioritize your game over other windows applications and provide you with a little boost.

Hopefully, these settings will help you in boosting your game’s performance. Do comment below your PC hardware details if it didn’t.