I have a beam that is supposed to look like this:
However, it sometimes look like this:
At first I thought the texture just needed time to load, since it usually happens for ~2 seconds when joining new server. But as you can see from the video that person has played for a while. I’m wondering if it might be caused by some of my beam settings and not by lag?
IIRC, beams and trails may use fewer segments if either your graphics setting is lowered, or framerate is not on target. I’m pretty sure I’ve observed this with trails even with my graphics setting manually maxed out.
Aghh, why is this the case? It can really ruin a lot of effects and make things look much less smooth than they should. Why have a Segments property if it’s going to change anyway and the effect shown isn’t guaranteed? Maybe a MinSegments and MaxSegments property would be better.
I don’t like this 
this makes beam only useful for stretchable textures
It’s worth a look into, to see if it’s a bug in this case, or if it’s dropping to fewer segments unnecessarily. When I’ve noticed it happen on trails, it’s been at times when a game was definitely dropping to a lower framerate, but I don’t see that in your video clip, and I don’t know off the top of my head what metric is actually used to decide, apart from the obvious cases like how the lowest quality graphics setting can get you beams that are no longer curved.
