Framerate
Roughly Double, Everywhere: In the built-in benchmark, sustained framerate at full load went from around 46 to around 92 on desktop, and the Steam Deck went from about 1,180 rendered frames in a 30-second run to about 2,300 — near enough double in both cases.
Smoother Under Pressure: The worst frames improved along with the average, so heavy waves feel steadier rather than just reporting a better number.
Where It Came From
Every Glow Is Pre-Rendered Now: Glow effects were being redrawn from scratch every single frame, for every projectile, particle and enemy that had one. Measuring it turned up something nobody expected: that one thing accounted for more than half of all the work the game was doing per frame. Every glow is now drawn once and reused.
Particles Draw From Cached Art: Explosions and sparks were the single largest source of drawing work in the game. They now use cached art, so big chain detonations cost a fraction of what they did.
Status Effects on Big Crowds: Slowing, chilling or weakening a hundred enemies at once used to cost far more than it should have, because each affected enemy's status ring was rebuilt every frame. Those are cached now too.
Weapon Fixes
Chrono Aura: The Temporal Entropy upgrade could cripple the framerate when its field covered a large crowd. That cost is gone. The same fix helps every weapon that applies status effects to lots of enemies at once.
Singularity: Black holes were costing framerate even with no enemies on screen at all. Their lens glow, event horizon and swirling accretion arms are all pre-rendered now — and the arms spin the other way round.
Landmines: Level 20 mine carpets no longer tank the framerate, however many mines are on the ground.
Meteors, Rockets and MIRVs: Their flame trails were among the most expensive effects in the game — each one drawing up to sixteen separate glowing sparks every frame. All cached.
Elsewhere: Turret fire, battery cells, solar flares, radiation bolts, acid fire pools, the Kamehameha charge orb, coins, chests, hearts, vibe orbs, health orbs, glitch minions and suicide drones all draw from cached art now.
Fixes
Memory Leak on Stacked Status Effects: An enemy carrying two or more status effects at once slowly leaked memory for as long as those effects lasted. Fixed, with a safety cap so it cannot recur.
Assorted: Various small rendering fixes made along the way, none of them visible in normal play.
Benchmark & Settings
Rebuilt Benchmark Results: Settings > Display > Run Benchmark now reports where each frame actually goes — simulation, drawing, and the rendering work underneath — alongside memory use, garbage collection, draw calls and a per-effect breakdown of what is costing the most. Laid out in two columns with a Copy Results button.
Steady-State Figures: The results now separate the benchmark's warm-up from its sustained portion, which is a far more honest read of how the game actually runs than the whole-run average.
Disable Shadow Blur (Test): A new diagnostic toggle that strips every glow effect from the game. It is a measuring tool rather than a graphics option — the game looks flat with it on — but it is there for anyone who wants to see what those effects cost on their own hardware.