A General Note on Current Game Performance

We've shared this elsewhere but just to be clear -- the game is currently CPU bound due to a limit on how Unity 4 handles physics. It (Unity 4 physics) is not optimized for multi-core CPUs, which means raw CPU speed will help you more than having a lot of cores.

You'll notice that in our large exterior regions, like Pleasant Valley, where there are tens of thousands of objects, that framerates are not as high as you might expect on high-end hardware. This is due to that physics problem. We're making some optimizations for the next update, but we don't expect to see major improvement until we upgrade to Unity 5. Timing on that is still TBD as it will disrupt our development quite a bit, but we're evaluating the engine right now.

The game is currently not GPU bound, which means having a very high-end graphics card won't make a big difference to performance. Another way of looking at it -- you can get good visual performance on a solid mid-range card. Changing quality settings won't affect frame-rate much. Changing resolution may, or may not, depending on your CPU.

So, the game is not "poorly optimized" per se, except that we have pushed our scenes to be large and have a lot of objects, and have hit a limitation of Unity 4 in the process. We feel it's more important for us, and for this game, to have large scenes with lots of objects, than to have the game running at 60-120FPS. Since we're not an action game, we find the game to be highly playable at 30FPS.

All that said, we do expect to get a meaningful performance increase with Unity 5.

Jeremy