v0.72.2 — Ending fixed · Smoother area changes · Less video memory held

Install the game on an SSD or NVMe drive for area changes without stutters.

🏁 Ending Fixed: No Stretched Textures, No Close Before the Intro

At the end of the game, the game gives texture memory back while it is still drawing those textures. Once another texture took that memory, the port loaded the new bytes into the texture still on screen: stretched or smeared textures, flicker in the castle fight, and the game closing between the ending and the title intro (an old bug, also in v0.72.1).

• Those textures now keep what was uploaded for 400 frames, then refresh as usual.
• Two full ending runs went through to the intro without a glitch or a crash.
• On by default (SOTC_POOL_FREEZE=0 turns it off).

🌲 Area Changes: Smoother

• The hard FPS drop that v0.72 brought back at area changes is gone: High and Maximum textures are back at mip 2 (as in v0.71). The finer mips copied up to 1.1 GB of textures in one frame at the forest entrance.
• Area-change memory releases no longer wait for all the GPU work: 68 ms → 1.6 ms in the slow frames.
• Faster memory table lookups and a per-frame cap on deferred texture uploads.
• With 24 GB of RAM or more: new textures are read by the GPU straight from the game's memory (no CPU copy on the first entry to an area). The game's memory is imported at boot (about 2.5 s) and stays pinned, so it is off below 24 GB.

🎮 Video Memory

• Large textures (2048×2048 and up) now get memory of their own and give it back as soon as they go. Before, up to 1.8 GB stayed reserved and empty after an area change, going over the budget on 8 GB cards. In the test: peak 6.35 of 6.5 GB, never over the budget.

🧹 Launcher

• Updating the port clears the shader cache once (shaders from the previous version could conflict with the new one). The first start after an update stutters a little while the cache is rebuilt. "Clear shader cache" is still in the settings.
• The window title shows the port version and the play time: SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS™ · v01.01 · Port v0.72.2 · 60 FPS · 0:12:34

⚠️ Known Issues

• The forest entrance still loses some frames, more at 60 FPS.
• With the game's debug menu on, rare crashes can happen (0xa469b7 and others). Keep it off for normal play.
• Dust from footsteps can flash white on AMD Vega/GCN integrated GPUs (still under investigation).