Game Performance seems to have been cut in half#137

Something in the recent updates of this month appears to have cause the game’s performance demands to at least double. I use a steam deck, and I’ve been getting a consistent 60 fps with 1920x1080 resolution for a long time, including early this month, the last time I played the game. Now, even with all graphics settings set to low, or off if allowed, I barely reach a consistent 30 fps at the same resolution. This is one of the worst impacts on performance by an update I’ve seen in this game.

Here’s the graphics settings I’ve been using that I used to get a solid 60 fps on with my steam deck:

1920X1080 resolution
Textures: high
Material: high
Mesh: high
Shadows: low
Reflection: low
Effects: high
Foliage: low
View distance: low
Anti-aliasing: FXAA
Cloth simulation: off
Fog: off
Post processing: off
Resolution quality: 100%

Been playing with extremely low graphics on a high end system for the game’s lifespan. As of late (and to be clear performance degradation seems to happen with every hotfix after a big patch but it’s way worse this time), matches consistently take like 4-5 seconds to load for every time a new character it hasn’t loaded yet appears. This has never happened before and I can only assume it’s due to changes with a hotfix.

My pet theory is that there’s some kind of checkbox for compilation optimizations that doesn’t get hit sometimes during hotfix builds.

I will say that Julesvale has less lazy loading pop in now than it used to, so it’s possible the game is now doing pre-loads rather than launch and then load, but that doesn’t explain the character thing. What I haven’t encountered for a few weeks now is the bug where a character will be randomly invisible at the start of a match for a few seconds, which I would chalk up to lazy loading.

Regardless, performance is spottier than usual.