To prevent major lags with Nvidia, go into Nvidia control panel, and in SpaceEngine's profile set Threaded optimization to off.

Open config/main-user.cfg and change this parameter to true:

PlanetVSFetching true // planet mesh rendering mode

Note that this is an experimental feuture and may cause glitches; collision detection also works incorrectly in this mode.
Also, read Fixing common issues #3.

Install the latest driver for Intel HD.

Disable comet tails. Go to the main menu, then Settings -> View, and uncheck "comet tails". If you even don't see the main menu, close SE, delete the file config/main-user.cfg, and try again.

These are the most frequent errors found in SE. You will get a popup window with one of these following messages:

- "You have old OpenGL version (2.1.1). Update your graphics card driver or install compatible hardware"

- "You have old GLSL version (1.2). Update your graphics card driver or install compatible hardware"

- "Critical extensions missing: GL_ARB_vertex_program GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object"

- "Error loading surface generator shaders. Press YES to run program with procedural planets disabled. Press NO to exit"

To fix that, download and install latest drivers for your video card. If you still get this message, it could be that you have an incompatible video card (see next paragraph).

But you still can try and run SpaceEngine by disabling checking of critical errors at startup. Open main-user.cfg and change value of this parameter to 'true':

IgnoreCriticalCheck true // ignore checking of OpenGL version and critical extensions supporting

NOTE: I can give no guaranties that SpaceEngine will be stable and work correctly if you do make this change.

If you have an "Error loading surface generator shaders" error and press Yes, SpaceEngine can run, but it will not be able to render procedural planetary landscapes.

After updating or rollback of the drivers, you must delete the cache folder in the SpaceEngine directory.

SpaceEngine needs a modern "gaming" graphics card to run. Weak cards like Intel Graphics (many laptops have it) or 10 year old devices like GeForce 5700 will not run SpaceEngine. There is no way but to update your hardware. There are no plans to make a second version of the engine for weaker systems with simplified graphics, CPU texture generation, etc. It would be like coding another engine from scratch. Once again, I would remind everyone that the minimum system requirements can be found on the Home page, but I will mention it here as well:

CPU - 2.0 GHz
RAM - 2 GB
Video - GeForce or Radeon with at least 1 GB of dedicated video memory

I stress the special role played by graphics card's onboard memory (VRAM), and 1 GB is the absolute minimum. The engine uses a large amount of data that must be in video memory (textures, meshes etc). The good performance will be only with a dedicated video card with 1024+ MB of onboard memory. Almost all modern $100+ devices can run SE smoothly. CPU power is not so important for SE, but having many cores could improve performance on fast interstellar and intergalactic flights. CPU does not significantly affect the landscape generation speed because it is done completely on the graphics chip.

If you're running SE on a laptop with dual graphics, make sure SE runs on NVidia or ATI chip instead of Intel HD. You may see it in the beginning of the SpaceEngine/system/se.log file. If it says:

Vendor: Intel
Renderer: Intel® HD Graphics 4000

then you should open Nvidia Control Panel or ATI Catalyst and force SpaceEngine.exe run on NVidia/ATI chip. If you can't find a SpaceEngine profile there, create a new one.

If you get missing landscape blocks, blurry or blinking textures, random spikes sticking out of surface, check out these recommendations here:

a) If you have a laptop with hybrid graphics, read item #3.

b) Make sure that you make a "clean" installation of SE (if it is a full version, not a patch!). If you install a new version overwriting the old one, you may get many bugs and glitches.

c) Just restart SE. It helps in 99% of cases.

If you have frequent crashes on planets, or get an "OUT OF MEMORY" message on screen, or "Unexpected deleting of child node" in the log file, try taking these steps first:

- Close any other programs that can consume the video memory (games, video players, graphics editors, etc.). The video memory is the most important resource for SpaceEngine. It may help to disable the Windows Aero theme too, as it consumes a lot of video memory.
- Reduce "Landscape LOD" to -2 in Graphics settings (Ctrl+F4)
- Set up the amount of video memory in the config/main-user.cfg file:

VideoMemorySize 2048 // graphics card onboard memory (VRAM) in megabytes

The value must not be less than 1024, but not more than the total amount of physical video memory plus amount of RAM. For example, if you have a graphics card with 1024 MB of video memory, and more than 2 GB of RAM, you can increase VideoMemorySize to 2048.

This is not a bug. Our Solar system planets and its satellites have no procedural textures, they use real ones with limited level-of-detail. You can download addons with high resolution textures to increase the level of detail of real planets. But don't expect 1 cm level of detail; these addons also have limited size, and thus limited resolution (up to 150 meters per pixel for some bodies).

If you're using a very high display resolution and have problems selecting things with the cursor, or your screenshots are being output at a lower resolution than you're using, try the following:

a) Open Windows Control Panel, navigate to Display, and set the DPI scaling to "Smaller - 100% (default)" - it should look like this.

b) If you want to adjust the DPI scaling, click on "Set custom text size (DPI)" in the sidebar and change its value to suit your preference.

- Star mode "points" and "sprites" look the same. This is right! This switch changes the rendering technology, not the visual appearance
- Star catalog has many errors in star classification, so there are many "giant dwarfs" and "dwarf giants"
- Many real binary stars rendered as single, and many single rendered as binary - SE simply have incomplete catalog of binary stars
- Galaxy/nebula sprites will rotate when seen from certain angles
- Lens flares are distorted by gravitational lensing (black holes and ship warp drive effect)
- Solar system moons don't have extremely accurate orbits (requires implementation of custom orbit models, e.g. VSOP-87)
- Solar eclipses on Earth, Moon, Jupiter and other real planets are inaccurate (the same as above)
- Sunspot distribution is not always realistic
- Ocean tag not yet implemented in planet editor
- Rounding errors (e.g. 30° in catalog rounds to 29°59'59.99" displayed on HUD)
- Many HIP and HD stars do not appear in the search menu, as well as procedural objects (RS xxxx)
- Camera sometimes falling through the surface
- Collisions detection between ships is not implemented yet; and between ship and planet is inaccurate

- Lines or junctures are visible on planetary surface of real planets
- GUI response issues with some users (interface items glitchy or not respond easily)
- Flickering flare color in close binary systems [example]
- Auto-exposure does not react when a sun is blocked while diffraction spikes are set to normal or super
- Level horizon command (End key) doesn't work properly on oblate objects
- Weird behavior of movement keys in tracking mode (T) and after releasing it
- If a galaxy model is selected, the camera is not following any object, and the program is in Edit Mode, closing and restarting the program will cause the WASDRF movement keys to behave incorrectly until the camera is set to follow an object
- Problems when releasing Left + Right click
- Music player will unpause when SE window is minimized and restored, or when entering and exiting the main menu
- Switching to fullscreen doesn't work sometimes
- 3D water fog sometimes starts above or below the water surface
- Visual atmosphere heights are inconsistently and unrealistically generated
- Physical atmosphere properties are inconsistently and unrealistically generated, and are not tied to the visual models
- Shimmering bloom splotch when very close to the surface of a planet [example]
- Lighting errors in system browser when viewing from outside the system
- "Sky lighting shadow" in the subsolar region of atmospheres
- Problems with the skybox export interface, and with the planetarium after using it, for some users
- Camera will be set to 90° FOV when returning from fisheye or cubemap view sometimes
- If spacecraft .sss Length is very different from its .cfg length, there may be rendering glitches
- VSync doesn't work after usage of Oculus Rift in the Direct mode, sometimes it doesn't work at startup when Oculus Rift is connected.