Performance

Every player runs a full copy of the game, so a split-screen session asks a lot more of your PC than playing alone. Most of what follows is about sharing that load fairly.

Stretched or blurry windows

1. Set display scaling to 100 % (Windows Settings › System › Display › Scale), or let Nucleus do it for each session with Settings › General › Set desktop scale to 100% during sessions.

2. Add custom resolutions that match the player windows. Games often only offer the resolutions your monitor advertises, so a 1920 × 540 window gets a 1920 × 1080 image squeezed into it. In the NVIDIA, AMD or Intel control panel, or with Custom Resolution Utility, add the sizes your layout uses. For a 1920 × 1080 screen:

   Layout	Window size to add
   Top and bottom	1920 × 540
   Side by side	960 × 1080
   2 × 2	960 × 540

   Not every game accepts custom or ultra-wide resolutions.

3. Put the windows back with Ctrl+R if a game moved or resized its window during the session.

Low or uneven frame rate

• Lower the settings in game: textures, shadows and view distance cost the most. Every copy runs them.
• Cap the frame rate in game or in your graphics driver, for example to 60 or 30 per copy. Forcing V-Sync in the driver can help too.
• Even out the windows. The window with the focus often gets more resources. Press Ctrl+H (Guide + Y on a controller) to unfocus all the game windows, or Win+B, or Alt+Tab to the Nucleus window: the game windows stay on top.
• Close the rest: browsers, overlays, recording tools, launchers you don't need.
• Laptops: plug in the charger, use the best performance power mode, and make sure the games run on the dedicated graphics card (Windows Settings › System › Display › Graphics).
• Processor priority and affinity can be set per player in the settings of a profile, for games where one copy starves the others.

Slow launches

Nucleus starts the copies one after the other and waits for each window, so a four-player launch takes a while. Settings › General › Fast launch (experimental) waits for each copy to be ready instead of fixed delays, and can cut launch times a lot. If a game misbehaves with it, turn it off again.

Some handlers deliberately pause between copies because the game needs it: don't shorten those pauses in a profile unless you know the game copes.

Audio

Each copy plays sound on the default output. To send each player's sound to their own headset, choose an audio output per player in the lobby's side panel (or in Settings › Audio). This doesn't work with every game.