A small performance fix that should help with crashes on low-end hardware
[p]So we've pushed a patch this afternoon. The changes are pretty simple:[/p]![]()
[/p][p]Buried deep in the UI widgets, there was the tutorial image box—a feature we added to support those new hand-drawn graphics you'll find in some of the game's tutorial boxes. It also happened to be a feature that went live in yesterday's patch![/p][p][/p][p]The image box was set up with 01.01 as its default image. This was totally irrelevant to the game's functionality, because the default image is never used for this image box at all (our code immediately replaces it with the correct image). But Unreal had no way of knowing that, so 01.01 got packaged into the game and loaded into video memory all the time, at full quality, totally needlessly.[/p][p][/p][p]Why did 01.01 end up there as the default? Because 01.01 is the first texture alphabetically in the list of all textures in our library (which includes a bunch of asset packs and other files). If you create an image box and don't pick a default image, Unreal might just pick one for you.[/p][p][/p][p]After fixing this problem, we also poked around to see if we could find other VRAM optimizations. After all, if there were players with really low-end hardware that was just barely teetering on the verge of playability, a small change in VRAM requirements might create a massive improvement in stability for them.[/p][p][/p][p]We managed to find another 100MB of savings without much effort, mostly by compressing textures that were way higher quality than they needed to be. We'd have made these changes much sooner if we knew they would actually make a difference for players! (But our goal was to stay under 3GB of VRAM so we could run on 4GB cards, and we were already way below 3GB).[/p][p][/p][p]In any case, you shouldn't notice any visual differences as a result of the changes. If you do, please let us know.[/p][p][/p][h2]One other thing... [/h2][p]We also got reports from a couple of players who had much more powerful GPUs than the Intel Iris Xe Graphics, but were still suffering from the same instability.[/p][p][/p][p]In all such cases, it turned out that they were running laptops with both integrated GPUs (the Iris Xe) and discrete Nvidia GPUs, and their systems were choosing to run Glimmith using the integrated graphics (definitely not a good idea if you want the best possible performance in the game)! This is likely because Nvidia just hasn't yet learned that Glimmith benefits from the more powerful GPU (likely because it's not particularly demanding).[/p][p][/p][p]So if anyone out there is not getting the performance out of the game that they think they should, check if this might be the problem![/p][p][/p][p]To fix this issue, you need to override your system's assignment of which GPU is used for which program. For Nvidia users, you can use the NVIDIA Control Panel app to create overrides. Just go to Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings, and add Geri.exe (typically located at C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Steam\\steamapps\\common\\Geri\\) and set it to use the NVidia GPU.[/p][p][/p][p]Thanks again to all the players who shared their crash reports and system specs with us to help us identify the problem. Please try the main build on Steam again and let us know if you have any further issues.[/p][p][/p][p]Happy puzzling![/p][p][/p][p]~ Elyot Grant[/p][p]CEO and Game Director, Lunarch Studios[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p]
- [p]Fixed a dumb bug that caused the game to use 200MB more video memory than it should[/p]
- [p]Made further optimizations to save another ~100MB of video memory[/p]