Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

Well, it's a different answer for every single person, obviously; different machines. Some people might already be getting north of 60 FPS all the time. Some people will never hit 60 FPS. So for me, it's three things. It's Gen12 first. Once we finish Gen12, which is our CPU optimizations, we shift our focus to GPU optimizations and the graphics settings, to give people control over how their GPU is being used. And then after that, the one part that I have no control over is just the rest of the engine and the game code, which we talked about earlier when we talked about XenoThreat. The particularly challenging areas of the game where we get a ton of players, or a city and whatever else on screen, or things like expo halls, sometimes can be challenging. This is where the rest of the company will have to take, or they are taking, their part of the problem on. But yeah, for our side, it's definitely just Gen12. And then immediately after that, we'll look at the GPU side of it to give you some more flexibility there. I really want to see 60 FPS after this. There will be situations, like I said, that will be more troubling, more difficult. But I'm hoping for a lot of the game, for most people, that's the target.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

In addition to graphics stuff, there's networking stuff, there's server meshing, there's streaming, there's optimizations in the actual assets themselves, there's further LOD development, it's everything. If there's one answer you take away from this question, folks, there is not one thing that will get us where we're going. And that's the truth for any game on any platform, and especially true for one as big and as ambitious as ours. It takes the work of almost every team in every aspect of Star Citizen to get us where we're going, and that includes our performance goals. I just want to disabuse anybody of the notion that there will be a magic day where we throw out a patch and everything will be better. Just like with Vulkan, which we talked about at the beginning of the show, it will be implementation after implementation after implementation that gets us where we're going. And then, like getting used to cold or hot water, it will just suddenly be there, and it'll be where we need it to be.

Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

One thing on that I'm going to add is something I spoke about at CitizenCon and I've talked about on Spectrum: I would like to improve some of our debug stats for the backers so they can understand their performance a little bit better, because at some points you're CPU bound, and a better CPU or more cores or faster cores would be what you need, and at some points it's GPU. And I want to more clearly display that to the users, or the ones that are interested in that, so they can better understand why their frame rate is what it is and whether there's anything they can do. And especially, obviously, if they're GPU bound, it does become fully under my control. Well, art as well, obviously; they're producing the content and we put it on the screen. But ultimately, the graphics and rendering is under our control. So when you're GPU bound, the graphics options we provide you and how our technology works will be all we need to get to 60. But if you're CPU bound, then it's a more complicated picture. But we're hoping to inform people, because there is a lot of misinformation and confusion sometimes about the performance of the game, because it has changed so much and it has been difficult in stages. I just want to clarify it for backers. No nonsense: this is where your frame rate's at. Hopefully that will help people understand and help them improve their frame rate as well, and see the improvements as they come, so they can see their GPU time reducing or the cost of the rendering side of the CPU decreasing as we release Gen12, even if they happen to be in XenoThreat at that moment and still not getting quite the frame rate they want.