Fix Natural Selection 2 Poor FPS, Crashes, Pre-cache, Black Screen, Cannot install, Menu Glitch

The Crash Wiki team has come up with a consolidated list of the most popular game fixes for Natural Selection 2 errors, glitches, crashes, and more.

[OneAboveAll]

This game is pretty un-optimized. Now people who see a nice new PC should be saying "But can it run Natural-Selecton" as I can run Crysis max but this game makes my PC smell like melting plastic.

[ninjahunter]

The game itself is actually really optimized, but the coding language it uses is just cpu intensive. Most college laptops can probably run this game fairly well since its GPU requirements are dirt low.

If your having Performance issues some things i find that help are:
1. set the frames rendered ahead in control panel to application controlled, this gave me a 10 fps boost.
2. Disable AO,AA, and atmosphere, and set creep detail to minimum, these 4 settings can degrade CPU performance in an already CPU demanding game.
3. Experiment with Texture streaming and Multicore processing settings. They help on some machines and hurt others.
4. If your comfortable with managing services you can try disabling superfetch all together, and temporarily turn off windows defender while playing.
5.If you experience large amounts of stuttering past the first 5 min of a match lower Texture size to medium.

On a dual core i5 2.7ghz (hyperthreaded)
I went from 23-34fps in an empty lobby to 35-60fps by doing all the above steps.