Much smoother, especially in dense fights. Measured in a hard fight with around 45 enemies and 700 to 1,400 effects on the throttled test rig (laptop with Retina resolution, phone-speed CPU):
| Scene | Frame time before | after |
|---|---|---|
| Orbit, laptop | 32.6 ms | 20.3 ms |
| Sector, laptop | 18.4 ms | 11.3 ms |
| Orbit, phone | 58.2 ms | 37.2 ms |
On top of that comes what the test rig can’t show, since it only throttles the processor: the graphics card now has to process about a third less screen area (glow and comet blur), which helps phones and laptops without a dedicated GPU most.
Fixed: “Glow: Off” didn’t switch the glow off. The setting saved nothing, and the glow even stayed visible. Now it is really gone at “Off” and costs nothing; at “Subtle” and “Full” everything looks as before.
What got faster:
- Effects: sparks, embers, smoke and fire are no longer managed as individual images but drawn in one go. In a dense fight that alone saved about 6 ms per frame in Orbit (24.4 to 18.1 ms), 3 ms in Sector and 9 ms on the phone.
- Circle lines: hit rings, orb rings and nova waves only get as many segments as their radius needs (before, always 100). About 1 ms per frame in combat.
- Backdrops and rocks: wreck backdrops no longer trigger five console warnings per frame. Rocks off screen get no 3D work anymore, visible ones compute their corners once per point (197 instead of 1,236).
- Sounds: kill, big kill, hit, graze, orb, ion, salvo and rocket are pre-rendered once at start and then just played. Each sound costs 0.04 to 0.06 ms instead of 0.07 to 0.66 ms. The noise start and the orb pitch come from a few variants.
- Small stuff: the display is written only once per frame, the timeline and contract panel ten times per second (events like zone changes at once), effect lists are walked without intermediate lists, and layers draw without needless alpha changes.
- Comets: with no comet on screen, its layer including the blur is skipped entirely (about 30 % of frames).
Minimally visible, noted on purpose:
- Smoke and cold debris now always sit below sparks, embers and flashes, instead of partly above depending on when they spawned. That saves draw calls and matches the intent (smoke is darkened so the fire above doesn’t wash out).
- Glow and comet tail are blurred at half resolution and look minimally softer (on average 0.1 of 255 brightness levels, at most 6). Hit rings differ at their edges by fractions of a pixel.
- Explosions, fire, sparks and rocks otherwise look as before (pixel comparison of a frozen frame: equal up to rounding).