Optizimations for all Hardware Classes

Back again today with another optimization patch. The game's physics engine and enemy AI have been optimized significantly in the past, so there shouldn't be any significant CPU bottlenecks but if you run into some definitely let me know! I'm very curious to hear from anyone trying to play on CPUs 5 to 10 years old if you're out there!

Overview

Three major areas have been improved or optimized in some way:

• Character shader texture fetches have been significantly reduced, several effects were using triplanar mapping for simplicity but have been converted to basic UVs without any degradation in visual quality

• Offscreen render buffers downscale when needed (picture in picture camera for switches, portrait and others, briefly touched on in previous post)

• Framerate caps are more intelligently set in an effort to support displays with vastly differing refresh rates

Steam Deck / Laptops / Integrated GPUs

For users playing on these devices, the character shader optimizations and offscreen buffers should significantly improve your experience. These devices tend to have a lower amount of GPU ram available, and can have slower access to that RAM (often shared with the main RAM pool). The character shader improvements reduce the number of texture samples per pixel. While this is unlikely to change much for higher end hardware, players in this category will see the biggest improvements.

Higher End GPUs / High Refresh Rates

If you're in this category, you're running into something I hadn't initially planned for. The game is a high action game with a constantly panning camera. This makes it very prone to screen tearing if framerates aren't calculated correctly. The best way to play is likely to have vsync on, but when turning it off I've tried to make it tear-less as possible.

This was previously achieved by enabling single refresh vsync when vsync is on, and capping framerate to 2x monitor refresh when vsync is off. On all tested devices (a small sample set) this meant that vsync performed very well, and vsync off provided a "less capped" but still relatively tame frame render time.

What I had not accounted for was monitors with 160hz refresh or higher. These monitors result in frame rate caps that are way higher than intended. To compensate for this, the game will now be more intelligent about choosing the caps or vsync rates based on the incoming refresh rate and setting reasonable clamping when disabled.

Vsync on will still be the best experience, but you should see a significant improvement now.

If you're playing the game on a 144hz monitor just under the limit, your experience might still not be great, so let me know how it's working for you and I'll take a look.

Ultimately the best solution here is to add options for how to control the vsync rate and the frame cap, but due to this game being built on an old version of my game framework changing the rendering options right now might not be possible without significant porting from the new framework (which is tied to Unity 6 at this point).