Performance Presets
The Performance Presets are the fastest way to configure the TrafficTool for your PC and your driving style. Instead of touching dozens of sliders, you pick one performance level (how hard the tool pushes your hardware) and one traffic level (how crowded the road should feel). Under the hood the preset rewrites every graphics, physics, spawn and pedestrian setting at once.
Where to find it
At the top of the Main tab you will see two rows of buttons:
- Performance Level: Low • Mid • High
- Traffic Level: Light • Normal • Heavy
The currently active preset is highlighted. Clicking any button applies that preset immediately.
How the two rows relate
The two rows are not independent. The Performance Level acts as the parent budget — it decides how big the graphics and simulation envelope is. The Traffic Level then sits inside that budget and decides how to spend it.
Concretely: switching Performance changes render distance, LOD distance, headlight brightness, pedestrian cap, how many car models stay loaded in memory, and how aggressively the tool rotates its car pool. Switching Traffic keeps all those graphics values but rewrites spawn distances, car gaps, lateral range and target car count to match the chosen density profile.
That is why Low + Heavy and High + Heavy both feel “heavy” but are very
different experiences: High + Heavy has far more cars, visible much further away, with richer lighting and
animated spectators; Low + Heavy feels dense close-up but fades fast and uses a smaller model pool.
What each Performance Level actually changes
Low — most optimized performance
The Low preset is fine-tuned to deliver the best possible performance. The tool shortens render distance so fewer car shells are drawn per frame, pulls the LOD switch-over closer so cars drop to their low-poly variant earlier, and fades light sources out earlier so the global light count stays small. Pedestrian caps drop and animated crew / spectators use a lower update rate.
More subtle: the active car pool is capped and rotated. Instead of keeping every car type from your list loaded, Low uses a rolling window of 4 types at a time and swaps them every few seconds. Memory pressure stays low, but you also see less model variety in any given minute of driving. The Car List Editor additionally auto-filters roughly half your enabled models on Low — see its chapter for how to override.
Use Low on laptops, older PCs, VR on weaker GPUs, or when you already run heavy visual mods and want the TrafficTool to be the quiet partner.
Mid — the everyday baseline
Mid is what the tool applies the first time you load a new track. Render and LOD distances cover the road you actually look at. Headlights behave like real car lights (useful cones, sensible fade). A healthy slice of pedestrians appears, animated spectators and crew are on, and the active car pool is big enough that two trips around the same block rarely show the exact same model twice.
The point of Mid is that no single visual feature is scaled back far enough to notice. If something still feels too heavy, that is usually a Traffic Level question (too many cars) rather than a Performance Level question.
High — show off the feature
High leans on the GPU. Render distance extends far enough to see oncoming traffic as distant dots; detailed LOD stretches almost to the render horizon so those dots stay as real cars instead of blurry sprites. Headlights are brighter, cones are wider, fade distances are longer. Pedestrian cap rises and they remain animated well into the distance.
Under the hood High also loosens the active car pool: more types stay loaded at once and the rotation is faster, which makes the same road feel visibly more varied. This is why screenshots taken on High look different from Mid — not only further, but populated with a wider cast.
Use High if your GPU has headroom. If the FPS counter starts twitching in dense sections, step down one Traffic Level rather than dropping from High to Mid — you keep the visual polish but the road is less busy.
Traffic Level — how the road is shaped
Light, Normal and Heavy rewrite the road’s character: how fast new cars appear, how tightly they pack together, how wide the spawn band reaches around you. Light keeps the road open and airy; Normal matches real mixed traffic; Heavy tightens everything for rush-hour feel.
The mechanics behind each density profile are covered in detail in the Traffic Density chapter. From the Performance Preset viewpoint, the important thing is that the density itself does not change across Performance Levels — Heavy is Heavy regardless of whether you are on Low or High, the road packs the same way. What changes is how far out you can see that packed traffic: the High preset keeps more cars drawn at longer distances and delays their despawn, so the same density feels visually richer. Low, Mid and High shape the depth of view, not the closeness of the cars around you.
Per-track memory and manual overrides
Your chosen Performance Level and Traffic Level are saved per track. Set High / Normal on Shutoko and Low / Heavy on a small touge — each track remembers its own pair the next time you load.
You can also manually override a single setting after clicking a preset. For example: click Mid / Normal, then drag the Traffic Density slider up to 35. That custom 35 is remembered for this track and survives reloads — until you click a Traffic Level button again, which re-applies the preset’s default and wipes the manual override.
This is why the “my setting keeps resetting” problem usually comes down to clicking a preset after tuning. Do the click first, the tuning second, and the tuning sticks.
Saving your own defaults (Shift-click)
Hold Shift while clicking a preset button to overwrite that preset with the current slider values. The change is written to disk and affects every track. This is how you make your tuned values the “new Normal” for your install — useful if the shipping defaults are off for your hardware or taste.
Shift-click is a power-user feature. It mutates the preset file on disk, so be confident your current values are a better baseline than the shipped ones. There is no built-in revert — keep a backup if you plan to experiment.
Automatic overrides during gameplay
Two features temporarily override parts of your preset without touching your selection:
- Police Chase: while a chase is active, spawn distances briefly switch to the Light profile and the active car limit drops. This prevents civilian traffic from boxing you in. When the chase ends, your preset values come back automatically.
- Race proximity: when an AI racer locks onto you within about 250 m, the car limit is cut to roughly half the road’s physical capacity so the duel stays readable. Normal count resumes once the racer disengages.
Both kick in without a button. They are part of what makes chases and races feel scripted even though the underlying traffic is procedural.
Choosing the right combo
| Situation | Performance | Traffic |
|---|---|---|
| Older PC / VR / laptop | Low | Normal |
| Casual free-roam (default) | Mid | Normal |
| Scenic mountain drive | Mid | Light |
| City rush hour | Mid / High | Heavy |
| Screenshots | High | Normal |
| Maximum immersion, strong GPU | High | Heavy |
Troubleshooting
- FPS drops on High
- Lower Traffic first (fewer cars, same fidelity), then Performance if still unstable. Render distance and pedestrian caps do most of the damage, not the graphics sliders.
- Fewer cars than expected on Heavy
- The track cannot fit more. Either switch to Normal (wider lateral range) or accept the slight shortfall; Heavy prioritises realism over hitting the exact target.
- Car variety feels repetitive
- Low rotates a small pool. Step up to Mid or re-enable filtered cars in the Car List Editor.
- Custom tuning vanishes
- You clicked a Traffic Level after tuning. Click the preset first, then adjust the slider — the manual override will persist on this track.