I've seen some reports and bad reviews based on poor performance which are very unfortunate and I want to address. I want to have the game run as well as I can. It honestly surprised me because the game has been testing pretty well for a year in Early Access.
I can only apologise for these issues, I totally understand the frustration to have unexpected frame drops in a new game which looks like it should be fine.
The fix
After some testing i think can now be sure the problem was related to a recent issue that I accidentally introduced in the final 1.0 update. After 4 years work I am extremely gutted this has happened, as it has had a great cooling effect on the launch.
The upshot of the error was the game was set to a very high Render Scale value. The actually was creating a huge hit on performance, almost doubling intended GPU load, and causing GPU fans to roar, for minimal benefit.
In this build I have fixed that, setting a reasonable value in line with the development (and actually, I removed this setting both to help with testing and because it was not useful). For reference the last hotfix was not effectively doing this in existing installs.
With the update you can expect roughly twice the performance across the board, including on Deck. This graph (thanks Fank!) shows the change, with the line settling at the new performance with this change implemented.
To 4k or not 4k?
I want to emphasize that this game is a low poly indie game, designed for 1920x1080 resolutions or their aspect equivalent.
Unlike like some AAA games like say Cyberpunk, it's not aiming to be a graphical powerhouse and does not benefit much from higher resolution. It's not at all necessary to put it above 4k resolutions. By all means you can, but on some (and I do mean older) systems you may experience worse performance. Because of this I added a note in the graphics options.
For those users who for are experiencing low FPS (I mean very low < 30) I strongly suggest you go to Options > Graphics and set the resolution to 1920x1080 or aspect ratio equivalent.
But in most modern rigs, this really shouldn't be necessary.
Reference values
For some information I gathered some reference values, this is just baseline test at spawn.
Many of these values are from people commenting in Discord:
- 3070Ti - 1920x1080 - 180 fps, capped by monitor vsync
- 3070Ti - 2560x1440 - 120 fps
- 3080 - 1440p, AA off, MSAA 2x, Shadow res 1020, shadow dist 0.1 - user limits at 60 to preserve gpu lifespan but reaches around 120
- 3090 Founders - Ultrawide 5140x1440 (32:9) - 120fps capped, 143.7 FPS avg uncapped
- Steam Deck - 720x - 48 to 60 fps
More Settings Than Most Indies Games?
I also wanted to highlight that you can change many graphical settings, either for better performance or for you own visual preferences. Improvements are slight, but on very low spec systems this may help.
- Vsync On (caps your FPS to your monitor refresh rate). If you toggle it off you can manually cap your fps if its running too fast. An unchecked max fps can set your GPU fans.
- Antialiasing - toggle FXAA or off
- MSAA quality - 2x 4x 8x off
- Shadow resolution - set lower for better performance
- Shadow draw distance - reduce for better performance
And finally, you will have seen the option to select a low texture build. For older systems or potentially the Steam Deck you will get even more benefit, considering this build uses half the VRAM as the main build, again not often offered to players.
Thanks again for everyone who already posted a review. If this post or update helps you and/or fixes your issue, I would very much appreciate you adjusting your negative review. If you like the game and want to help support indie games please do consider dropping us a review! It makes a huge difference to small 2 person dev teams like us.
Al (and Sarah)
Changelog 1.1:
-bix render scale and remove slider
-add resolution notes
