Framerate

[AndrewTilley]

There are several performance improvements in development, two of which are highlighted below; the first from the February 26th dev stream, and the second was announced alongside the UI improvements coming:

@AndrewTilley

Q: When are you doing some big performance pass?

A: Yes, okay, there is a ton of performance stuff that’s going on behind the scenes that we’ve been working on for quite a long time. If you’ve been with us for a little while you’ve been hearing about it. We keep saying ‘we’re working on performance guys’. It is happening, it is coming. There’s a ton of performance stuff that is happening. Recently, so look at my character for a second and when I cast this ability there’ll be an effect that appears around him and it’s like that ice that comes in before the ice shoots out – that’s the cast visual effects. Without getting into the details of what was happening, basically that little tiny visual effect is way more performant that it ever used to be. Now this doesn’t have a huge impact on the game as it doesn’t happen that often and not a ton of enemies have cast VFX, you’re not using eight abilities at the same time so this isn’t a huge impact on performance. However, we have already seen slight improvements from this. Now this system can be extended all the way to the little spikes that come out…it’s a lot harder to do it for those but the way the system was built it was designed to work with the little spikes that came out as well. So there’s abilities like, for example, Avalanche that have huge boulders crashing down – there’s a ton of stuff happening – all of those things need to be switched into this new system where it will be way better.

This last patch was a bit of a test to make sure that this new system is stable and it’s working well and to catch bugs that are happening with the cast VFX right now. Once we’re happy with how this is working and we’ve worked out the bugs here – because it’s not as big a deal if you Teleport and you see the Fireball casting VFX as opposed to the Teleport VFX than it is if you use Avalanche and see Fireball…it’s a big disconnect. Once we’ve got all the bugs worked out – and it’s working great so I mean, hopefully soon – we’ll be looking to extend this system to more things. That performance improvement is coming, we are working on it very hard, and hopefully it’ll be in next patch…but I can’t say it’s going to be next patch. However, when it does arrive it’s going to be great because it’s the big thing…like every once in a while I’ll see a forum post that’s like I have an RTX3080 and I’m struggling to reach a certain frame rate and someone will be like ‘oh, I’ve got a GTX970’ and it’s the same frame rate. It’s got nothing to do with the video card really, it’s a CPU bottleneck and it’s something that’s not really going to be improved by more hardware it’s going to be improved by better software – so we have to write that better software. We’re working on it, it’s definitely getting there.
Timestamp: 55:35-58:48

@Sarno

LOOT LABEL OPTIMIZATION

In Patch 0.8.2 we’ll be updating the organization of loot labels to be more efficient. We do not anticipate any perceivable changes to their behaviour. This change will be most pronounced when a large number of loot labels are present on the screen close together.

To offer an example, when there are 140 items on the ground close together the update will cause their loot labels to take approximately 85% less frame time, heavily improving their impact on framerate. In other words, this process will be approximately 5-6 times faster.

Hopefully these, and future optimization passes, will address the games performance issues.