Internal Testing Heat

Work

Another quick blog from me. Another day of developer graft as we continue ticking off little fixes between us, and the biggest decision was to postpone some Store integration work in favor of more performance tuning of the engine. We have some early results back and although half our test systems report super smooth and silky 60 fps on low-end hardware, we are getting reports of dreadful fps on what looks like mid-range systems. Very odd. Thursday will be about running multiple performance tests in parallel as we drill down to the root cause of performance drains from system to system. The good is that the core team are starting to see some nice smooth zero-stutter performances, we just need to convey those results to the other test systems now which means understanding them inside and out.

I had suspected the CPU power was the crucial factor, but this seems not to be the case at this early stage. My favorite gremlin is the 'shaders on low-end cards' as the major cause of all performance drains, but we will soon see if this is so as we augment the engine with some aggressive debugging options and extra logging features to really get to the bottom of where the gremlins are hiding!