Hey everyone I’m Szymon, engineer at Bonfire, and I wanted to give you all an update on performance & stability work we have been doing.
Earlier this year, we ran an open demo during Steam Next Fest and brought in a big wave of players to try Arkheron for the first time. The idea was to bring more players into our community, gather their feedback, and get sharper insights on what we should be prioritizing before launch.
We learned a lot from this experience. One of the biggest things: FPS was rough on a lot of machines, especially in heavy combat. We knew we still had optimization work to do, but we didn’t realize how far behind we were until we started seeing all the data and sentiment coming in from Discord and the Steam forums. TLDR - it was not good, and it needs to be.
Since then, we’ve spent the last eight weeks going heads-down on performance. A bunch of our devs focused on performance have been put in a bit of a protective bubble - their time is solely dedicated to improving performance, which is one of our top priorities right now.
What We’ve Done So Far
The areas we’re focused on are across the following categories:
-
Visibility (actually being able to track these issues)
-
FPS (CPU and GPU improvements)
-
Loading times (how fast you get into game)
-
Gameplay blockers (crashes and ping)
Visibility
The first thing we did was implement better dashboards and metrics to track how performance changes over time. Each week as a studio, we review things like FPS, load times, matchmaking quality, hitching, mis predicts, to make sure we’re on track. We’re also now gathering better data around CPU performance breakdowns, GPU times, and what’s happening right before crashes. We also added a diagnostic mode for folks who can’t get the game to boot at all, hold shift when the game is booting up to get it.
FPS
The data made it pretty clear: most players are CPU bound - meaning the CPU is having a hard time keeping up, making the game run slow even on machines with good GPUs.
We’ve made a lot of smaller improvements that we hope are starting to add up, but there are two big engine changes in our 0.20 release that we’re really counting on to move the needle for most players.
The big engine changes we’ve made:
-
The first is a completely rewritten VFX system, which we started working on late last year - the old one was running really poorly, so we basically gutted it and rewrote it from scratch to run much more efficiently on multi-core CPUs. We’re already seeing around 4GB less memory usage from this alone, and in-combat performance should feel noticeably better.
-
The second is a big change to how we build the render frame. Previously a lot of that work was getting jammed onto the main CPU thread, blocking everything else from running in parallel. We’ve reworked it so the render work overlaps with game simulation for the next frame - which cuts most of that overhead as long as your machine has enough cores to work with.
We’ve also been chipping away at the micro-stutters and hitches players have been experiencing. This mostly involves reducing ‘garbage collection time’ and unnecessary processing we found our systems would do when the player’s UI states changed.
While CPU usage is one the main culprits, we also identified that GPU usage wasn’t where we wanted it to be. Our art team did a big optimization pass on environmental effects throughout the tower which includes terrain dissolves, lighting, and HLODs (hierarchical level of detail) which basically means meshes further from the camera render at lower detail, reducing draw calls and letting us use simpler, faster materials. This should help both performance and image quality.
One heads up: we’re raising our minimum and recommended specs on Steam to better reflect what you actually need for more consistent 60fps gameplay. 6-core CPUs will be the baseline. GPU requirements are staying roughly the same, and memory requirements are actually going down thanks to the VFX improvements.
Recommended
- Windows 10 or later
- Intel Core i7-9700K (or equivalent 8-core)
- Nvidia RTX 2070 8GB VRAM
- 16GB RAM
- SSD 35Gb
Minimum
- Windows 10 or later
- Intel Core i5-9600K (or equivalent 6-core)
- Nvidia GTX 1060 6Gb VRAM
- 12GB RAM
- SSD 35Gb
We’re planning to launch Arkheron on console which means that our performance will need to run well for these devices too. We are committed to getting there.
Loading
When you first boot up the game, the client does a lot behind the scenes: logging in to our services, preloading all the items and animations for gameplay, warming our materials and effects to reduce gameplay hitches, to name a few.
To cut down on preloading times, we’ve implemented a packing algorithm that brought our file count from 40k files to around 8k files. This should result in faster loading times, especially for lower end storage devices. Patches might run slightly bigger as a tradeoff, but faster load times felt worth it given what we’re seeing.
We’ve also added visual transitions when dropping from the map or teleporting - this should address the issue where you’d spawn in and run around an empty level waiting for the world to stream in. And the new VFX system almost entirely removes the effect warmup step during loading, which takes even more time off the loading time.
Networking / Ping / Matchmaking / Blockers
There were quite a few players who just couldn’t get into the game at all - disconnects, unknown errors, crashes, hangs. We’ve been working through a lot of these instances, though tracking them down has been a challenge as the game keeps evolving.
For players experiencing high ping, we’ve improved our lag compensation systems so that the server does a better job accurately detecting hits from clients. The net outcome of this last push is that more folks should be able to get into the game quicker and have a better frame rate during gameplay while looking less blurry.
What’s Still Left
We still have more work to do on FPS in heavy combat. We expect more gains to come once we’re able to parallelize more systems to use CPU cores better, which will also better leverage our new VFX rendering system. Once that’s done, we should be able to lower the min specs for Arkheron so more players can hit good framerates in combat.
We’re also looking at integrating the latest NVIDIA and AMD SDKs to expose frame generation for high-end GPUs once we get the new runtime settled, so folks will have the option to push more frames on the beefier setups, but that is a few months out.
Crashes and bugs - We made a lot of optimizations to the engine, and as these changes land in the hands of players, we’re expecting to surface some bugs. Between 0.20 and our next release, we will stay vigilant about rolling out fixes to address critical issues you all find. The game should run healthy on NVIDIA cards above our min spec, but we are also working through reducing hangs we see when playing on equivalent AMD GPUs.
Ironing out the remaining kinks on our current specs will take the next couple of months. After that, the focus shifts to lowering the recommended specs while keeping performance solid - probably closer to the end of year.
Our Ongoing Goal
Getting to a solid 60FPS is our baseline. We don’t plan on slowing down these efforts anytime soon. We want to keep lowering the min spec so more players can play, while also unlocking features for high end machines to get more frames. For console, we are aiming for a solid 60fps baseline this year, but will continue working towards 120fps competitive mode options as our goal after that.
How You Can Help
We’re posting this update to forums so we can answer the questions you have and keep track of any performance and stability issues you run into.
If you’re experiencing any of these things, please drop a post in the forum and share the following details about your experience:
-
Crashes / hangs
-
Unable to get into the game
-
Lower than expected FPS / major drops
-
Ping issues
We track logs for most of the above issues. However, if you’re crashing and unable to get into the game, try reloading the client while holding shift and click ‘Diagnostics’. Send us this information as well, it can help.
Thank You!
The community feedback from Next Fest was invaluable, we wouldn’t have had the full picture without it. And to the long-time community members who’ve been hanging with us through all of this, I appreciate you!
