Paul Jeffrey
Premium
Bugbear Entertainment have confirmed performance updates are heading to the game as part of the next update.
Having gone through quite the impressive development journey over recent months, Bugbear Entertainment have today confirmed their Wreckfest title is about to receive some rather solid looking performance improvements as part of the next build - which in a game where lots of things happen at the same time is certainly a good thing!
In other Wreckfest news, and certainly a cheeky tag into this thread, but we are delighted to welcome a new staff member here at RaceDepartment - @TTupsi has joined our staff to take the lead of our RaceDepartment Wreckfest Racing Club! Yes, you got it.. smash 'em and crash 'em racing is returning to RaceDepartment! More information on that one in the coming days...
So, back on topic, let's here what Bugbear have to say about the upcoming new build release...
Howdy friends,
As you know, we've been working with the console versions of Wreckfest ever since the launch of the game's PC version. One major task that we've been keeping ourselves busy with is improving the performance on both console and on PC. Needless to say that whatever your platform, maintaining a smashing framerate is almost as critical in a fast-paced racing game as it is in a first-person shooter, and sure enough, improvements in this regard is something that we know many of you have been looking forward.
We're happy to let you know that much work has been completed already. For instance, the optimization of the rendering engine has yielded immediate gains in the raw rendering performance, instancing is now used for billboard trees as well as spectators, saving valuable memory, and vehicles now have multiple levels of detail that are used based on the distance to the camera – and the new vehicle detail setting that you can change according to how much grunt your gaming rig has.
While optimization is an on-going process, and yes, we know that there are still further gains to be had, we thought this would be a good opportunity to take a look what kind of performance improvements you can expect in future. To do that, we decided that the best way to show you the goods is to go old-school and simply compare the Minimum, Maximum and Average framerate between the latest Steam release and our current internal developer build.
The comparison was performed by doing three laps with exactly the same event settings: Midwest Motocenter, manually selected Mixed Class AI Set, 24 cars and Noon time of day, and while doing our best to ape the gameplay in both runs. The graphics quality options were set to Medium with V-Sync naturally disabled. This is of course not a scientific analysis at all (just look at how hardcore the lads over at Digital Foundry are doing it), but nevertheless, we'll let the numbers speak for themselves:
As you know, we've been working with the console versions of Wreckfest ever since the launch of the game's PC version. One major task that we've been keeping ourselves busy with is improving the performance on both console and on PC. Needless to say that whatever your platform, maintaining a smashing framerate is almost as critical in a fast-paced racing game as it is in a first-person shooter, and sure enough, improvements in this regard is something that we know many of you have been looking forward.
We're happy to let you know that much work has been completed already. For instance, the optimization of the rendering engine has yielded immediate gains in the raw rendering performance, instancing is now used for billboard trees as well as spectators, saving valuable memory, and vehicles now have multiple levels of detail that are used based on the distance to the camera – and the new vehicle detail setting that you can change according to how much grunt your gaming rig has.
While optimization is an on-going process, and yes, we know that there are still further gains to be had, we thought this would be a good opportunity to take a look what kind of performance improvements you can expect in future. To do that, we decided that the best way to show you the goods is to go old-school and simply compare the Minimum, Maximum and Average framerate between the latest Steam release and our current internal developer build.
The comparison was performed by doing three laps with exactly the same event settings: Midwest Motocenter, manually selected Mixed Class AI Set, 24 cars and Noon time of day, and while doing our best to ape the gameplay in both runs. The graphics quality options were set to Medium with V-Sync naturally disabled. This is of course not a scientific analysis at all (just look at how hardcore the lads over at Digital Foundry are doing it), but nevertheless, we'll let the numbers speak for themselves:
As you can see, there's a considerable performance improvement with the average framerate seeing a whopping 37% increase after switching to the new build. The minimum framerate naturally occurs at the race start with most of the other cars still in the viewport, and while it's still a taxing situation, the new numbers look much healthier with almost a 50% improvement over the Steam build. The best part of all this is that all this improvement is gained without needing to dial back the game's visuals.
While we were at it, we also compared the system and video memory usage between the Steam build and latest developer build, with results as follows:
While we were at it, we also compared the system and video memory usage between the Steam build and latest developer build, with results as follows:
The difference is not as striking as was the case with framerate, but even so we can see roughly a 10% reduction in the memory consumption, no doubt thanks to instancing support and track specific optimizations that we've been doing. This track is probably one of the tracks benefiting the least from the latter, seeing as it has never been very resource hungry compared to certain other tracks. Incidentally, this track was chosen for this performance comparison exactly because it's one of the tracks that has not seen much work done on it since the last Steam release due to not really needing much optimization.
This comparison was performed in single-player, with proper multiplayer benchmarking with a full grid being obviously much more difficult to arrange. That said, we expect most gains here to trickle down to online side of things as well and help with performance. Furthermore, we have implemented certain multiplayer specific optimizations like dead reckoning for remote cars which will reduce the CPU load in multiplayer, something we know is a sore point for most players. Also consider that this test was performed on a single system, and naturally your mileage will vary depending on what your rig is bottlenecked by. All things considered, we're hopeful that these improvements will make the game more accessible and make it possible for more players to enjoy the game the way it was meant, no matter what kind of system they have.
So – that's that, folks. As for the release of the next update (yes, we know that's what everyone is hoping for soon), we need to ask for more patience. The console versions are nearing a critical stage, and rushing out a PC update right now would not only mean using time to make that happen in the first place but also that we would need to do post-update support to address the bugs – especially with so many changes to the game, and multiplayer in particular, no doubt there will be some nasties we won't be able to catch before the release. So, our thinking is that, seeing as the current build is pretty robust, it's best to stay on that until we're sure we have the resources to attack the new issues and support the update properly. That being said, we expect to be able to share more news and a rough target soon so please stay tuned.
This comparison was performed in single-player, with proper multiplayer benchmarking with a full grid being obviously much more difficult to arrange. That said, we expect most gains here to trickle down to online side of things as well and help with performance. Furthermore, we have implemented certain multiplayer specific optimizations like dead reckoning for remote cars which will reduce the CPU load in multiplayer, something we know is a sore point for most players. Also consider that this test was performed on a single system, and naturally your mileage will vary depending on what your rig is bottlenecked by. All things considered, we're hopeful that these improvements will make the game more accessible and make it possible for more players to enjoy the game the way it was meant, no matter what kind of system they have.
So – that's that, folks. As for the release of the next update (yes, we know that's what everyone is hoping for soon), we need to ask for more patience. The console versions are nearing a critical stage, and rushing out a PC update right now would not only mean using time to make that happen in the first place but also that we would need to do post-update support to address the bugs – especially with so many changes to the game, and multiplayer in particular, no doubt there will be some nasties we won't be able to catch before the release. So, our thinking is that, seeing as the current build is pretty robust, it's best to stay on that until we're sure we have the resources to attack the new issues and support the update properly. That being said, we expect to be able to share more news and a rough target soon so please stay tuned.
Wreckfest is available now on PC, with console release expected to follow during 2019.
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Like what you see here at RaceDepartment? Don't forget to like, subscribe and follow us on social media!
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I thought it has pretty good performance even now...
