[2021] On FPS and performance issues.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for jumping into the new Update. We’re really excited to roll out these fundamental changes to the feel of the game.

I’ve said it elsewhere, but it’s the culmination of a huge amount of work for the entire team, and is a really exciting step forward to us achieving a quality we’re happy with.

That said, we’re aware that FPS and performance issues are being experienced on Carentan.

As we always like to do, we prefer to be as transparent as possible about the issues, so I’ll lay them out below.

• Carentan is a hugely dense map, with millions of objects in the map and often 80,000+ rendered in a single frame. Interior lighting and shadow casting, as well as the light from the sun in the map all generate milliseconds of draw time as they seek to create proper shadows wherever you’d expect them.

• alongside shadows, draw calls have been a huge challenge - simply because of the amount of different materials and objects in each scene. We’ve spent huge amounts of time instancing many of the objects in the map, but we know that there is lots more work to do here.

Those are our two largest performance issues, and while we worked as hard and fast to improve both aspects, there is significantly more we can do. Much of our testing across a wide variety of machines saw FPS counts similar to Hill 400. While not optimal, we felt that this was an acceptable benchmark on the proviso that significant optimisations across all maps will follow shortly. That said, we are receiving reports from machines we profiled with - that they are receiving worse frames now on full servers in ways that we don’t see in Hill 400. We’re investigating why this is the case at the moment.

The future:

As part of the way we handle buildings and objects in the server, we’ve got a huge amount of finer settings to tune that will allow us to increase the performance in Carentan in a way that will roll out to all other maps. We have set goals for the average performance with every kind of rig (minimum settings to recommended settings) and will be focusing the immediate future in achieving all of them.

TLDR: We are aware of performance trouble spots affecting Carentan. There are more performance gains to come on Carentan and all maps, and now that the animation systems and ballistics overhauls are complete, optimisation is now at the top of our list.

We really thank you for your patience with this and look forward to gathering more feedback.