What setting causes this graphical issue?

Quote from vinehold

In the new version, I chopped a few trees to the right of the start position. When I approach the tree indicated it 'shimmers' and disappears then reappears roughly when I get to the first boulder

Probably you mean the "fading" between different LOD levels? I.e. the closer you get to the tree, the more detailed it will be. In the new version, trees are getting replaced with lower-detailed versions the further you go away from them. At some point, they're replaced with a 2D billboard, and if you travel even further, they will become fully invisible. This is basically done for performance reasons, but in most cases it shouldn't be that much noticeable.

However, this behaviour is controlled by the "LOD Bias" slider in the graphics settings in the "View Distance" section: The lower the value, the sooner the tree gets replaced by a 2D version (or culled completely). The default value is 100%, but if you set it to a very low value (< 40-50%), you will mostly just see 2D trees (unless you get very close to them), and small trees may get culled very quickly.

To improve this situation, you can set a higher value for "LOD Bias" (for instance, at 100% that shouldn't be a big issue anymore), but the higher the value, the bigger the impact on performance.

"LOD Cross-Fade" in the graphics settings is indeed responsible for the "shimmering" - it tries to achieve a smoother transition between different LODs - disabling this may even slightly improve the performance, but this will result in popping (i.e. abrupt switchovers between different LODs).

Quote from vinehold

Incidentally, the performance seems much worse on my PC than many comparable 3D games - I have to turn off almost all visual effects but most especially grass which absolutely kills the framerate. I have an AMD Ryzen 5 2600, Radeon RX7 8gb, 16gb RAM running MX Linux. Not exactly cutting edge but even lowering the resolution, performance isn't good. Any help/suggestions welcome!

Your CPU and RAM are totally fine, but the bottleneck is the graphics adapter. It is an integrated RX Vega 7 graphics adapter? In this case, it doesn't meet the minium requirements of the game unfortunately

The game requires a graphics card which is at least comparable to a NVIDIA GT 1030 (or the much older GTX 650 Ti) in terms of performance. Or more precisely, a graphics card which has a score of at least ~ 2500 on passmark (the Vega 7 isn't listed there unfortunately, but a Vega 6 has a score of 1000, while the Vega 8 has a score of 1500, so the Vega 7 probably has a score between 1000 and 1500).

Our low-end test rig has a GT 1030 (+ a 12 years old Phenom II X4 955 CPU and 8 GB RAM) and we achieve roughly 30-40 FPS on low/medium settings (shadows and grass enabled) on Linux Mint - but the GT 1030 is twice as fast as the integrated Radeon, which makes a big difference

Unlike the Java version, the new version has an upfront cost - this enables the game to achieve much better framerates on larger view distances or complex scenes (i.e. consisting of very detailed buildings). In other words, you lose a lot less FPS compared to the Java version if the scene gets more complex. But the downside is that it runs terrible on low end graphics adapters...

Unfortunately it's also a bit difficult to compare it with other 3D games. Due to the randomly generated voxel terrain, there is a lot less room for optimizations from a technical point of view. A game with a static, pre-designed world, for example, could run a lot better (even if it has better graphics), simply because a lot more optimizations can be done in that case and less things need to be rendered in realtime. But even if you compare the game with another voxel game (like Minecraft), i.e. a game with a fully modifiable terrain, it still depends on various factors

Do you have any plans to get a newer graphics card in the near future? That will certainly give you a major FPS boost. But other than that, I'm afraid there isn't much you could do to improve the framerate, except disabling most visual effects - when hovering various graphics settings, the game shows a tooltip indicating the estimated impact on performance (according to your screenshot, you could disable volumetric clouds and shadows - they still have a considerable impact on performance)...

However, it is our intention to add support for AMD FSR in the near future (for both DirectX and Vulkan), which will probably give you a small FPS boost. Probably it won't make a huge difference with that graphics adapter, but it could possibly improve the framerate by 10-30%.

Quote from vinehold

Thank you for the detailed reply, I'm afraid I wasted some of your time due to a typo: my card is a Radeon RX570 (ie not integrated and quite adequate I should think at passmark 8097) I've no idea how I ended up typing RX7! Sorry

Oh, I see Yeah the RX 570 is definitely fast enough. You should be able to get decent framerates with that rig, at least on Medium settings (and there shouldn't be a need to disable grass), so if you're running into performance problems, it could be caused by another issue.

What Linux distro do you use exactly? Did you try to run the game via Proton? I'm curious if this makes a difference in terms of performance (Unitys Vulkan implementation is unfortunately inferior to their DirectX11 implementation).

Are you really having a low framerate, or is maybe something else causing these issues (e.g. input delay etc)?

Maybe you could also send us a report: To do that, load a world until you experience the performance issues, then open the console (usually that can be done by pressing key ~ or `, but on some Linux distros, it may be necessary to rebind the key in the controls settings) and type "report". That should bring up a dialog where you could add some additional information (e.g. just type "Performance issues"), then send the report

Quote from vinehold

With regard to volumetric clouds, I noticed the effect in this screenshot - many have a darkened edge and quite often there's a horizontal band in which the 'shimmering' occurs (look at left edge and near pickaxe head). I'm not at all bothered about having fancy clouds and will happily turn them off completely!

You can reduce the artifacts by increasing the volumetric cloud quality - but this has performance implications. But you won't get fully rid of the slightly darkened edge below the clouds - it's a limitation by design. It's our intention to improve that, but currently this has a low priority because these edges are usually only visible if you're at the same altitude as the clouds. This happens quite frequently atm, because the demo world actually consists of a relatively tall mountain - after the world generation update, most areas will be at a much lower altitude, so there should be a lot less situations where the dark edges really become visible But as mentioned, it's our intention to fix that in the long run^^

Quote from vinehold

There doesn't seem to be particular lag with in game movement or in the menus except the scroll-wheel is exceptionally laggy

This is indeed annoying, currently this is by design, but fixing this is still on our to-do-list

Quote from vinehold

in the setting menu for example, it scrolls the window contents so slowly that it's unusable for that purpose, I end up dragging the scrollbar.

This is unfortuantely a known bug in Unitys UI Toolkit (their new UI framework) and only happens on Linux... It was fixed in a previous Unity version, but a newer release broke it again... UI Toolkit is still riddled with bugs... most of these things are out of our control unfortunately

Quote from vinehold

OK, I'm getting good performance with clouds off (grass and some fancy effects on) if I reduce the resolution to 720p (HD). It'll probably be acceptable at slightly higher res if I tone down some of the effects

This is probably a situation where AMD FSR could be quite helpful once it's implemented.

But if you still run into performance issues, please send us a report so we can take a closer look at what's going on there