Developer Diary 10 – Performance

Nice, eh? Since this is now in proper 3D, you can zoom and rotate the map as you like.

I assure you we’re open! — Dante Hicks

It’s been a few months since the last diary entry, so frankly you’d be excused to think we’ve all gone AWOL or something. BUT! – we were in fact cheerfully working on various low level systems, and actually managed to get a lot of work done. The screenshots below show you approximately where we are with the rendering engine, that is, almost everything works now.

I was happy enough to load the game onto a laptop and start showing it, somewhat gingerly, to other developers at the Reboot Develop conference last week in Dubrovnik. We got a lot of positive feedback, which may or may not be down to devs being a supportive bunch and all. It did feel good to have a working game again.

Since we were showing the game on a proper gaming laptop (cheers to Admir from Croteam for providing it), this was a chance to compare laptop performance to our desktops (both the laptop and the desktops are running the game at about HD resolution).

Desktop

Our desktop machines have either Nvidia GTX 970 or equivalent ATI cards (well, slightly slower but thereabouts). The game renders at 150-250 FPS, and currently it looks like it will never be able to tax this class of GPU to the fullest.

We are looking at some optional effects, but basically this is just because we can, not because it’s necessary, or a priority.

Laptop

This laptop had a Nvidia GTX 960M card, which was able to render the game at 66-110 FPS. Despite a substantially weaker GPU, the game was running just fine. We then tried turning off the 960M, and running the game on the integrated Intel HD 530, but that gave us only about 20 FPS.

There are quite a few optimization options still on the table, so I am hopeful that integrated graphics will end up as a fully supported option. A low-cost mobile GPU like the 960M is a sure thing on the other hand, though even that will benefit from optimizations – less work for the GPU means longer battery life.

As usual, feel free to comment or ask questions below.

Cheers,

Tomislav