Transport Fever 3 Best Settings: Graphics, Presets and CPU Limits

Find the bottleneck first

This guide covers the Transport Fever 3 PC release. Urban Games’ official settings manual (reproduced by an independent guide) and community reports were reviewed on 29 October 2026. We have not measured frame rates in a running client.

Transport Fever 3 is demanding for two different reasons, and the right fix depends on which one you are hitting:

Bottleneck test: load your largest save, look over a busy city, note the FPS, then lower shadows, reflections, grass and resolution and retest the same view. A big improvement means keep tuning graphics; little change means the simulation is the limit.

What the presets change

The Graphics tab has four presets. Per the official manual, this is what each sets:

Very High only raises the two texture settings over High. Textures mostly cost video memory, so with plenty of VRAM Very High costs little over High. The Show Video Memory Usage Warning option tells you when your settings are too high for your card.

The order to lower settings

If you are graphics-limited, start from High and work down. This is general PC tuning advice rather than an official Urban Games ranking:

1. Resolution Scale — usually the single biggest lever; it reduces the rendering resolution of the main viewport.
2. Anti-aliasing — drop from 4x to 2x.
3. Reflections (SSR) — to Medium, then Off.
4. Shadows — to Medium.
5. Ambient occlusion (SSAO) — Off recovers performance at the cost of depth.
6. Grass — to Medium or Off; matters most when zoomed into busy countryside.

What loads the CPU

Late-game slowdown in a transport sim is usually simulation load, not graphics. These choices, made when you create a Free Game, matter more than any graphics slider:

• Map size — bigger maps mean more towns, industries and vehicles to simulate.
• Population — the official manual states that “increasing the population has an impact on the simulation performance.”
• Town and industry density — industries keep spawning as towns grow, so busy maps get heavier over time.

Population and density are fixed per map, so decide before you start a long save.

Hidden settings in settings.lua

On PC, advanced options live in settings.lua in the user data folder (Settings → Advanced → Open User Data Folder). Edit it with a text editor only while the game is closed; Urban Games marks these for advanced users, “at your own risk”:

• debugInfoShowFps = true — shows your frame rate in the corner, which makes tuning much easier.
• bloomQuality = 0 — turns off the emissive bloom effect entirely (1 and 2 are higher quality).

Storage

An SSD is a listed requirement, not a recommendation. Installing on a mechanical drive causes stutter during camera panning and autosaves, because the game streams texture and terrain data as the camera moves.

What we have not confirmed

These are the official settings manual (via an independent reproduction) plus community reports, not measured benchmarks, and we have not tested them in a running client. Preset contents and option names can shift between patches, so match by name rather than position. If you suspect the CPU is the limit, see the low FPS and stuttering guide for the patch and driver side.