If you find when running matches in Football Manager 2021 that you’re encountering issues, such as lagging, slowdowns or poor performance we’d recommend the following troubleshooting steps:
First of all make sure your system meets the minimum specifications to run the game.
If it does, we’d recommend changing the ‘Graphics Quality’ settings via the in-game preferences to see if this has any notable effect. When running even high-end graphics cards in a high resolutions the game may struggle, so it’s always worth lowering the quality slightly to see if that improves performance.
We’d also recommend making sure you’re running the latest Graphics Card drivers and to uninstall and reinstall them. This allows the best opportunity for the drivers to be working correctly.
If you’re still seeing issues, there are additional match options available via the in-game preferences, so try lowering or changing some of the settings (such as lowering/disabling the crowd or pitch quality for instance) and see if that helps.
If you're running on a laptops or Macbook, we'd recommend ensuring that the dedicated GPU is being used to play FM.
We would also recommend disabling HDR, which can be done as follows:
Via Windows, select the Start button, then select Settings > System > Display > Windows HD Color settings. Under 'Use HDR' switch the toggle to 'Off'.
If running via an Nvidia graphics card, in Nvidia settings, ensure that “Select the preferred graphics processor for this program” is set to “High-performance NVIDIA processor” for Football Manager. Also set Power Management Mode to “Prefer maximum performance”, Threaded Optimisation to “On” and Triple Buffering to “Off”.
Failing that you can try limiting your FPS rate as described here (we would recommend trying 60fps) - https://www.engadget.com/amp/2020-01-06-nvidia-geforce-drivers-framerate-cap-ces-2020.html?guccounter=1
We'd also recommend making sure your Anti-Virus Program isn't interfering with the game at all. This can sometimes cause the game to not run with optimal performance.
If you find nothing above helps, please submit a support ticket and our team will try to help