[2020] Does anyone get a frame drop for every bot you kill in the range? It doesn't happen all the time as you can see in this video but it happens more often than not when a new bot spawns in. Doesn't happen to me at all in actual games.

We try to get in fixes for performance in the shooting range, but generally we keep it at a lower priority than the main game mode.

This issue is probably related to a sort of consequence of the game's architecture. We need to do something called "garbage collection" periodically, which is where we tell the game to kick out stuff that's loaded into memory that doesn't need to be there anymore. In normal modes, we force this to be done on the round resets so that it doesn't impact gameplay at all (which is also why you might see your graphs dipping when the round swaps over to a new one). This is why you might get this issue in the range but not in actual games.

In the Shooting range, there's never a round reset, you're just chillin' there. Eventually you'll get to a place where memory is capped out, so when something needs memory, the game needs to dynamically kick something out and replace it with the new thing, which can cause dips like these. They aren't usually this bad, so I'm not really sure why it's like this for you. We will eventually run garbage collection while you're in the range, but I believe it's on a timer or something, I'm not 100% certain what triggers it.

If this is happening to you, a simple workaround is to leave the range and re-enter it (like go back to the main menu). This should force garbage collection to happen and let you re-enter the range for a while before this starts happening again.

We're working on some performance work that takes a long time right now, so we don't have any updates to provide until that's done. We used to have a lot of updates in the patch notes because we were cleaning out "low hanging fruit" types of improvements that weren't too hard to make. Now we're at the point that a lot of the perf work we need to do will require refactoring existing systems, which carries with it a lot of engineering time and testing time.

However, we did recently spend a ton of time digging into the hitch on death that turned out to be related to the act rank triangles on death recap, and we also put in a good chunk of time to build out Nvidia Reflex support so that players can take advantage of the low latency mode that it provides.

Every team on VAL is responsible for performance. We do have a team that's more dedicated to it than others, but we also spend a decent amount of our time on live performance maintenance. It takes a lot of work to just make sure performance doesn't get worse over time!