Forum Discussion
Dynamically calculating quality settings for optimum perf.
Many PC gamers are used to playing with quality settings and making choices such as choosing resolution or AA over framerate etc. But, that's not appropriate in VR due to the necessity of VSync and 75...
The problem with this approach is that the cause of an FPS drop could be any number of things, and will vary from one PC to another. As game designer, you do not know which quality settings should be changed to maximize performance. Not unless you have tested every single video card on the market.
Just measuring FPS will not tell you what you need to know, and the experiments you would need to do are not possible to run in real time because they will affect performance themselves and it takes time for GPU caches to settle. Modern engines get a lot of their performance from the fact that things do not change much from one frame to the next.
For smooth gameplay you should focus on changing your content to fit performance, not changing performance to fit content. Focus on making your game run consistently. The goal of optimization is to figure out the worst case performance, get that running at an acceptable speed, and then make sure nothing in your game exceeds it. Establish strict budgets for things like draw calls and vertex counts and layers of transparency, budgets that your target hardware can handle, then carefully measure your game while it is running to make sure you never go over.
Just measuring FPS will not tell you what you need to know, and the experiments you would need to do are not possible to run in real time because they will affect performance themselves and it takes time for GPU caches to settle. Modern engines get a lot of their performance from the fact that things do not change much from one frame to the next.
For smooth gameplay you should focus on changing your content to fit performance, not changing performance to fit content. Focus on making your game run consistently. The goal of optimization is to figure out the worst case performance, get that running at an acceptable speed, and then make sure nothing in your game exceeds it. Establish strict budgets for things like draw calls and vertex counts and layers of transparency, budgets that your target hardware can handle, then carefully measure your game while it is running to make sure you never go over.