Hello Responders!
Some of the largest concerns we’ve heard from players throughout Early Access have been around optimization and performance, and with consoles joining the fray it’s more important than ever. We’ve been hard at work making improvements across the game from VFX to audio and loading latency, aiming to provide as much more room as possible. Performance headroom, that is, Hell still will have no room at all.
There’s too many adjustments across the game to detail before patch notes, but we wanted to share some highlights.
DLSS 4.5 Support
We’ve upgraded our DLSS integration to now take advantage of 4.5’s features, including Frame Generation for RTX4000 and 5000 series cards. This alongside our other optimizations makes DLSS a much more smooth experience while playing No More Room in Hell 2 for those who value getting the most performance possible while preserving visual fidelity.
Gore & VFX
One of the areas players discovered the most instability was during the most frantic moments in combat, fueled by gunfire, dust and impact particles, and our gore effects. The team has taken a look into all of these, refactoring how our game handles gore and weapon impacts to use data channels which drastically minimizes the performance cost.
Audio & SFX
Working on the console versions offered up a great opportunity to revisit our techniques and implementation for audio optimization, such as which sounds we set to streaming versus loading into memory and compressing sounds to better fit into various hardware bounds. We also made notable updates to the mixing, prioritizing the most important sounds based on relevance to the player and audio type, ensuring when several sounds play at once clarity is preserved.
We also identified an issue related to how many objects are loaded in over time that could increase the number of sounds attempting to play at once, reducing performance over time and causing some sounds to be deprioritized. This would be most prevalent on maps where players retraced their steps often, like Lewiston and Hospital, but is now resolved for Armageddon!
Console Optimization
Beyond the optimizations listed above, various other adjustments were made to shadows, lighting, model detail, and distance rendering to provide the best possible experience across a wide suite of hardware. Series S being our console baseline brought meaningful improvements that benefit lower-end PCs, as well as allowing higher-end systems more room to adjust settings to increased quality with similar performance as prior.
Community feedback helped us make all of these improvements possible, notifying us of areas we could make the most impact. Continue to help us optimize No More Room in Hell 2 by reporting performance issues in-game, on Discord, or through Support!
As always, stay safe out there!
The NMRIH2 Dev Team