You have also mentioned that you want Star Citizen to replace Crysis as the next benchmark for new GPUs. There's a concern that the final PC requirements for the game will be quite high. Given the scope and depth of the game what is the development team doing to ensure that optimization is their top priority?asked by Ravi Sinha
TL;DRRoberts says optimization efforts include merging simple meshes that share a material, supporting Mantle to bypass DirectX bottlenecks, and standard techniques like level of detail, funded by R&D money.
Couple of things we're doing – one, we're merging a whole bunch of simpler meshes that use the same material since they'll render at the same time on GPU level which looks like it will give us a decent frame rate. On top of that, we're doing things like obviously supporting Mantle which is from AMD and basically that makes the arithmetic go straight to the GPU hardware and bypasses DirectX, which is a big bottleneck.
Direct X was built during a whole different time and they didn't really conceive of the machines of today with parallel, multi-core CPUs. There's two of the major areas we're investing our R&D into. So then of course we'll be doing a lot of standard stuff like level of detail. One of the nice things about being so strongly funded at the moment is that I can actually take some of the money and invest it in R&D in a way I probably wouldn't have been able to for various areas to make the game better.