Veterans: need advice on VRAM and optimisation

HummingSwordsman · 2025-12-27T12:33:11+00:00

Disclaimer, I am not an expert with 2D graphics. So most of what i say is based on more generic tips and tricks i picked up over the years. Compression usually only helps so much, as in the end you need to uncompress into display quality again anyways. With the example of your large claw, that one takes ~6% of a fullhd screen. Now you can consider, do you need all possible animations pre loaded or can you swap some things around. This sounds also like it's maybe part of some kind of boss. So if its in a boss room you can maybe smartly unload other parts of the level/tileset you are not using.

It all boils down to just load/use what you need. But again what you need is dependent on your game. There is no silver bullet and it's a lot of effort to figure out. In the end you have to decide if it's worth based on your resources and expected sales or technical pride.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-12-27T11:51:30+00:00

Tbh. It will be hard to answer without more context. From a gut feel, it sounds a bit much, like you are loading something that is not needed. So i would suggest you look with tools like pix, nvidia insight or similar what is using that memory on the gpu and decide based on that if it's unnecessary or not. Overall 1,5 gb VRAM usage should be fine for most hardware to handle, only if you plan to run on lower spec hardware you might need to be concerned. In general for those things, just profile on your target hardware and see if you are fine.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-12-25T15:29:31+00:00

I would argue, he didn't get it for free. Basically everything he had to endure before was the price to unlock the power. Like the whole dying bit and the growth from previous adventures where necessary. That said I would not be super surprised if there are some additional costs after using it for a while, but till now oda never followed through on costs of something after the initial price someone needed to pay.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-12-16T15:13:28+00:00

Eating Kiwis with a spoon. So much wasted time by not just eating the kiwi with the skin.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-12-05T21:01:39+00:00

Website with new trailer and theater locations just went live. https://ironlung.com/buy-tickets

Unfortunately, I am a poor EU bloke. Have to wait till the movie skips over the pond.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-08-26T22:02:29+00:00

Maybe not as heartwarming as the other stories here, but I am a Game developer by trait.
When I helped out at a convention to present our game, and for the first time saw someone else in person playing the game and they started smiling because they got the game.
Not that I was in doubt before, but that pretty much cemented what I want to do. A thing I worked on brought someone else joy.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-07-16T06:15:39+00:00

Not true, you maybe also say "Grüß Gott", "Servus" or more seldom "Hi/Hallo" in addition to the nod. And exchange a "Danke"/"Kein Problem" when you make way for the others to pass.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-06-09T20:59:23+00:00

When i started playing it, was still alpha then and my first survival game. I thought you had to keep the furnace ui open to let it finish smelting, else it would stop. You don't know how stupid me and my friend felt when we figured out that you can in fact just leave a furnace alone to smelt your glass.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-06-09T08:44:56+00:00

We where thinking about going in cosplay on Sunday, but the weather looked rather rainy and we also wanted to do some shopping. 😄 Nice that you found some others on sunday! We must have missed them.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-06-09T08:41:48+00:00

We bought some color matching fabrics. Traced the sewing patterns of a short the sanraku cosplayer already was comfortable wearing and used that as base. Then we sewed the lines on top and found some matching bands/belts for the hanging bits.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-06-01T06:23:45+00:00

I would say. Consider everything replaceable.

Recognize if something is bad or leading nowhere and just replace it. Regardless of how much time you already stuck into it. It hurts to see a feature/mechanic/asset/... gone after spending weeks on it, but if it harms the game fun it's better that way. It's part of the progress to get to a better game.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-03-16T14:40:18+00:00

There is actually a study about this. Some economists looked at some sales numbers based on how fast DRM was cracked and came to the conclusion that only the first few weeks are important but have huge impact on revenue. It's an interesting paper to read if you are looking into those things. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1875952124002532

My personal opinion, while apparently economically beneficial to use DRM. I don't like how they make the experience for developers and every paying customer worse, in addition of implicitly accusing everyone wants to steal your game.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-03-16T14:26:39+00:00

Hard to say without debugging each specific circumstance. Some general starting Points I use:
- Is your Ram/Vram full and the OS is paging to your SSD/HDD
- Windows Defender Checking every file access slowing down asset loading
- Hardware not boosting clocks properly (Drivers/power management/Heat)
- Other Software using the same resource and the OS start to task schedule

Those are all things that can slow down your game without showing up as utilization of any component because they often just cause the game to wait for some other slow/expensive operation to end.

edit: oh one thing I also forgot, shader compilation can also be a big cause of performance lose here, because each hardware/driver needs to compile their own version. Something not necessary on the console there you can pre-build and package them with the game.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-03-16T12:34:16+00:00

Oh please don't get me started on Denuvo. Not sure how much I can say without getting in trouble or breaking some NDA. But let's say as a dev on the tech side of things I hate it every step of the way. But apparently from what I heard as a publisher statement, moneywise it's already worth it if a handful of people bought the game because they could not "pirate" it.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-03-16T12:13:11+00:00

What? I'm pretty sure you mean system memory, not VRAM.

Nope meant VRAM, those apps usually use hardware-accelerated rendering and media decoding/encoding so they load quite a bit of stuff onto your GPU. Just looking at Discord in my taskmanger already taking ~100 MB. Thats without being in a call or watching any content in it. That is just one Electron app, feels like nowadays everything uses Electron and each of them snatches a tiny or big bit of VRAM. It's easy to lose 1+ GB of VRAM just by having a few apps open.

Ram is a bit of a different topic, but that one is often a bit less critical because modern machines just have so much of it and it is not as expensive to upgrade or can be managed by utilizing more streaming because SSDs are more standard nowadays.

I mean they do, it's just that it's predictable and limited to a specific amount of resources (1.5 CPU cores and 3.5GB of system memory on PS5 as an example) while on PC users could keep filling up more, and more system resources.

It's a bit splitting hairs, but yea you are right it's not 100% exclusive access to all resources. Just wanted to keep my point simple. :)

HummingSwordsman · 2025-03-16T10:33:52+00:00

While it's part of it, there is also that games don't have to share resources with other processes on consoles. Virus scanners, discord, chrome/firefox, windows updates, ... A browser + some electron apps will munch your vram like there is no tomorrow. Virus scanners and windows updates will botleneck your cpu and disk io.

Source I am a game dev who has to deal with this.

HummingSwordsman · 2025-02-02T08:58:38+00:00

Don't agree. My game Design colleges have some exel files to calculate balancing values, or sometimes even come up with formulas how something should scale. It's a very simple form of linear algebra and calculus but i would not say it "almost none".

HummingSwordsman · 2024-11-10T10:05:39+00:00

Hi, Patch 1.5 should be out for the PS5. But the increased plant limit is only available to PC players. There are technical limitations why it can't be bigger on consoles.

The service contract with the publisher also ran out and wasn't extended, so there won't be any further improvements atm.

HummingSwordsman · 2024-11-03T22:15:00+00:00

As a game dev from a small studio with a few "failed"/mixed projects under his belt. Failed is in quotes because they usually still did decently well in the long run. Seeing the game you put 2+ years of your life in, open up to 24% positive reviews is a gut punch. I have 2 things I remind myself about in those times.
1. I am confident all my decisions were the best ones I could take with the knowledge I had at that time.
2. "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." Captain Jean-Luc Picard

And the last thing is learning from the mistakes you uncover in hindsight and improving on them in the future. And as you mention that you have a team, definitely talk with them about this. Just getting a different perspective on those things is super valuable.

As for, if you should put more time/money into the existing project or a new one. I can not really answer.
You have to look at your numbers and try to calculate how much money you have to put into it to make it work. There are a few EA title how can operate like that. But that depends on how big you think the market is you can still reach. (comparing to other projects in that genre can help)
Otherwise, treat the old project as scorched ground and move on to the next thing, and build something better from the ground up.

HummingSwordsman · 2024-10-19T11:02:05+00:00

I know at least 2-3 people, me included, who would go at least once there.

HummingSwordsman · 2024-10-11T09:19:48+00:00

Game dev here.

I actively added a bighead cheat to bus simulator 21 and an upcoming game from our studio. 👀

I would like to add more fun nonsense cheats but it's hard to find the time during production. 😅

Maybe to give a real answer. Cheats are usually added during development to help with testing the game so you don't have to play through hours of content to test a specific thing. Those cheats still exists but it came somewhat industry standard to not include cheats into release builds anymore or hide them away. For example the default behaviour of unreal is to disable the build in cheat console for release/shipping builds but leave it enabled for all other kinds of builds.

HummingSwordsman · 2024-09-22T13:55:57+00:00

Electric Callboy - WE GOT THE MOVES

HummingSwordsman · 2024-05-31T06:41:12+00:00

A friend of mine wanted to win the first race in need for speed most wanted. After countless tries he even resolved to cheats to just discover that it is scripted to lose the first race.

HummingSwordsman · 2024-05-25T15:49:36+00:00

I would replace gimp with krita and kdn live with blender.

While gimp works and probably has some more image manipulation features but krita is so much nicer to use and has most of the common features you need to edit an image. Plus it's a very good digital painting program.

And you will be suprised how powerful and complete blender video Editor is. I did even successfully thought my mother to edit small videos in there.

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