Escape From Tarkov MIP Streaming Explained
The Escape From Tarkov MIP Streaming setting has finally returned to the game, but it can be quite confusing to get your head around what it actually does, and whether it is worth using. Escape From Tarkov is a notoriously difficult game to run, so any setting that can help improve your framerate is welcomed by the community. So, to find out all there is to know about the Escape From Tarkov MIP Streaming setting, make sure to keep on reading down below.
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What Is Escape From Tarkov MIP Streaming?
Click to enlargeEscape From Tarkov MIP Streaming is a setting that has been in the game for quite a while, but has recently been reinstated and reworked to hopefully provide a better experience for those that choose to use it.
It is a feature included in the Unity game engine and, according to the Unity website, MIP Streaming 'forces Unity to only load the MIP levels needed to render the current camera position, instead of loading them all by default'.
The effect of this in-game is that full textures will only be loaded when the player gets close enough to them, or is looking at them directly. The effect of this is a huge graphical memory saving, at the cost of a small amount of CPU performance.
One thing you will potentially run into though is a lot of low-detail textures that can either break your immersion, or make it quite distracting to play. In a game like Escape From Tarkov you want to be focused at all times, so this can be quite troubling.
However, Escape From Tarkov MIP streaming has the potential to boost your framerate by a significant amount, which could greatly offset the potential downside of a few blurry textures. It all just depends on the current power of your PC, and whether the trade-off is worth it for you.
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How To Turn On Escape From Tarkov MIP Streaming
Click to enlargeIf you're wanting to turn the Escape From Tarkov MIP Streaming setting on, all you need to do is follow our quick step-by-step guide below.
- Load up Escape From Tarkov and hit the cog icon in the bottom left to open up the settings
- Click on the 'Graphics' tab at the top
- Scroll down the bottom and tick the box next to 'MIP Streaming'
- Adjust the MIP Streaming settings at the bottom of the list
That's all you need to do to enable MIP Streaming in Escape From Tarkov. You will need to restart the game for it to take effect though, and this cannot be turned on or off in the middle of a raid.
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Does Escape From Tarkov MIP Streaming Increase FPS?
Click to enlargeThe answer to the question of whether the Escape From Tarkov MIP Streaming setting increases your FPS isn't a simple one, and depends on a large number of different variables.
To understand a situation where it would absolutely be beneficial, you need to first understand what it does. As explained above, it alleviates pressure on the GPU and VRAM by delaying the loading of textures. Therefore, systems that would benefit from this the most are those that are GPU bottlenecked, or are at/exceeding their VRAM usage limit. You are able to check whether this correlates with your situation by opening up the task manager while playing, heading to the 'Performance' tab, and checking both your GPU utilisation, and graphics memory usage.
We did our own tests though, and they came out with some rather interesting results. For reference, the graphics card we tested on was an Nvidia RTX 3060ti FE, so VRAM and GPU performance isn't a huge deal, but it gives you an idea of where MIP Streaming gives a benefit. The test was done on Lighthouse as it is the most performance intensive map with the highest amount of VRAM needed, and all readings were taken from the same spot on the map.
Click to enlargeAs you can see, strangely, we received a higher FPS - although not by much - when having MIP streaming off compared to on, when detail was set to medium and object visibility and LOD to minimum. This of course also came with the scattered blurriness and texture pop-in of MIP Streaming, so this is definitely not a setting we would want to turn on in this instance.
However, when turning detail up to high and the object visibility and LOD settings to their maximum, we did see a significant improvement. Without these settings, Lighthouse would cause very low performance and rather consistent stuttering, but with them on it was sat at a rather consistent 87 FPS, and in the rain too.
While the 3060ti can generally deal with Tarkov well, pushing the card to its limits with the last set of graphical options shows how MIP Streaming can improve your FPS if your card is struggling. In general, it is not going to be a magic bullet that will always improve your FPS.
What is most certainly true though is that it is worth trying out and playing around with - especially if you are using a lower-end card. Even a couple of extra frames have the potential to give you a competitive advantage, so you're going to want to take as much as you can get.
So, that rounds off everything you need to know about the new implementation of the Escape From Tarkov MIP Streaming feature, which should hopefully up your performance, even if it just by a little bit. For more general FPS improvements in Escape From Tarkov, make sure to delve into our Escape From Tarkov best settings guide.
