v0.6.6

Performance

• Less stutter while the camera turns, and shorter freezes when you arrive somewhere.
  • The first time a shader is drawn in a session, the renderer reads it from the shader cache on disk. That read happened on the thread that draws the frame, and on PCs with less than 20 GB of RAM it happened for every scene shader. It now runs on background threads, several at once, while the frame goes on.
  • More of the driver's cleanup work left the render thread: texture views, images moved by the video-memory reshuffle, freed buffers. 0.6.5 had moved the images themselves.
• Measured on a Ryzen 5 5500 / RTX 3060 Ti (16 GB of RAM), 60 fps cap, 75 % render resolution, no DLSS, no frame generation. The same build with these changes off and on, the Market twice per run, three runs per side taken in turn:

	off	on
frames over 25 ms while the camera turns (20 s)	59.5 on average	47.0 (−21 %)
99th percentile frame while turning	38.1 ms	32.6 ms (lower in all 6 pairs)
time lost in long frames, first arrival in the Market	1,915 ms	1,590 ms (−17 %)
longest frame at that arrival	496-549 ms	425-459 ms

• "Off" here is the same build with RX_VK_REAP=0 and RX_VK_ASYNC_LOAD=0, so it also turns off what 0.6.5 already had. Against 0.6.5 itself, the background shader reads alone measured about −10 % of the time lost at arrivals. The arrival freezes that remain are mostly the game loading the area itself.

Updating

The first start after this update prepares the shaders again, once (about 16 minutes on our PC, with the progress screen). The change to how shaders are read is part of what the shader cache is checked against, so the old cache is not used.

The launcher offers the update. The game is translated and compiled again, which takes about as long as a first install; saves and settings are kept.

If something does not work, please open an issue and attach relink_log.txt from the game folder.