The Witcher 3 is shaping up to be one of this years hottest games, an RPG of epic scale and a fitting end to a fantastic trilogy. However, not all of the development process has been smooth for CDProjektRED and like any projekt, they’ve had their fair share of issues with creating such a vast open world game.
Performance in this area was very poor, it was only after analysis that they realised this monsters nest was made from 52 million polygons, whoops!
Neat little camp fire you’ve got there, but why is it slowing performance? Because there’s a huge bonfire inferno being rendered, but only the tip is being displayed.
Same again with this structure, it’s even bigger behind the scenes than it is on the screen!
How many polygons do you need to render a couple of buckets and a stool? No that many!
To help curb this problem, CDProjektRED created a cool application that can scan the game area and show a heat map of assets, showing areas with excessive vertex density/too many polygons/too much foliage.
That means they can quickly zoom in and optimise areas, a pretty cool tool to have!
What’s this the tool has found? Why it’s a single light with the apparent power of the sun, casting a shadow with a range of 4,000 meters despite its tiny size! That’s a fine way to put strain on your GPU.
Just a random bow found under the game world. You can’t see it, but it still has to be rendered by the GPU/CPU.
OK, who left test assets in the game world? Those things can really kill your immersion.
It makes me wonder what other things are hiding behind our game worlds, who knows what assets are lurking just out of sight!
Thank you DualShockers for providing us with this information.
