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GPU Usage

A topic by Bobo The Cat created Feb 09, 2023 Views: 202 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 4
Developer (2 edits)

One thing I still find difficult is making technical decisions. Developing for console would be much easier, since I would have fixed hardware specs there. That's why I experimented a bit with shaders for this game to find out how far I can go. I didn't use blurshaders or anything because even my pc would be overwhelmed with them, but still.

The most demanding room for the gpu is the first room which uses 33% of my gpu . I could imagine that many would have a problem with that though, since it's twice as much as Bobo The Cat. Now I'm torn on whether to make future games as I want them to be  or as gpu sparse as possible but even then it would most likely use about 50% more gpu than Bobo 1 because of the soon to be higher resolution. As you hopefully already read in the description there are graphics options again this time, but I can imagine that not everyone wants to use them. If there are enough requests I can also make a version of this game with less shaders. But for a big game like the upcoming Bobo 2  it would be too complicated to make 2 versions . So what are your thoughts on the matter.

(+1)

i use laptop integrated graphics, and for me the gpu usage (in windowed mode) was 75% in the first room and 55% in the tiny room above. i did notice a different when playing, so i think at least for me there is no problem here. i was able to get all the lives so it didn't seem to affect the gameplay in any way

Developer

Thank you this is very helpful. It is reassuring that most people are well equipped. I'm currently testing the final Full HD resolution for Bobo 2 and have already designed tiles, sprites, lighting, weather effects, day and night cicle and backgrounds for it. It looks like the final graphics will consume 20-27% of my GPU so it would be less than 75% for you. I decided to use at most 2 shaders per room.  One for water/fire and one for background effects. Everything else is not worth neglecting potential players. 

And I am happy that you collected all lives :)

(+1)

My laptop has both an integrated graphics card and a dedicated graphics card. By default, it launched using the integrated card, and the framerate was stuttering. It ran fine at 30 fps but not 60 fps. However, when I went into the Windows "Graphics Settings" and forced the game to run with the dedicated graphics card, it ran perfectly at 60 fps. You may want to include a hint saying that if the game is stuttering, and your computer has separate integrated/dedicated graphics (which I think is common for laptops), then make sure it is running with the dedicated card.

Developer

You're right, i wouldn't have thought of that, as i thought people know best what graphics settings they need to use, but i think i'll add that they should first test if the pc is running in performance mode and if the dedicated graphics card is being used.

(+1)

I’m on pretty modest hardware (i7-2600 and Radeon R5 430) and didn’t have any performance issues. The high resolution and effects are very nice looking!

Steam publishes the results of their hardware survey if that is of any use: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Developer(+1)

Thank you, I did not know about this statistic. It's very helpful.