How does that battle work, Ali, where you get all these performance improvements and then you start adding more and more features and visual elements and start taking up the performance gains you just made? How do you balance that?
TL;DRNew rendering technology can save performance and enable further optimizations, some features may cost performance, and they plan to make the engine scalable, with Gen 12 described as the first step in an ongoing series of optimizations.
Well, ironically, a lot of the new technology we have actually saves you performance. So initially, it might even go the other way. It enables a whole bunch of features with things like mesh shading and variable rate shading, and sometimes not even hardware technology, but internal. Because we've restructured the renderer, we can now do certain things much easier than we could before. So there's lots of opportunities now for optimizations that we may not have had before. So it might actually be a double win after we can implement some improvements. There's features that I know there's questions about later, about DLSS or FSR and these types of technologies, which were problematic to implement halfway through when we're doing the conversion to Gen 12. Then they become on the table again once we've settled on a single new renderer. I don't think it's the end of the performance improvements once we've got to Gen 12. But there are also a few that would go the other direction and lose us performance. Future battle: we'll see how fast we can make it first before we worry too much about how much we'll slow it down in the future. A big focus we want to do is to make the engine scalable, so hopefully any new shiny things we add can be scaled up and down, ideally, so that you can keep the game running on the lower spec but push it hard on the high spec.
And completing Gen 12 is just the first step to a series of more optimizations we've already planned out. So expect much more to come after Gen 12 is done.
Yeah, we've got it on the milestones as if Gen 12 and Vulkan are a concrete thing that is not done and then one day is done. That's not quite true. I mean, it's useful for scheduling to make it appear that way, but it's not as precise as that. It's a continuous set of features. Even Vulkan will introduce new performance, or it might detriment performance in some areas, might improve performance in some areas. And as we learn more, we'll be able to get more performance out of Vulkan. So it won't just be we're done and we never look at this thing again. But the milestones we mention are a point of confidence when we think, yeah, that's like 99%. The biggest chunk of work is done.