Hey everyone still lurking round here! I'm still slaving away on Chapter 2 but decided to release a small optimization patch in the meantime for lower-tier GPUs!

I realized during my performance profiling that a lot of the game is GPU bound due to Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Lumen GI. Also, the low preset and medium preset in the previous build are nearly identical in terms of performance which is unacceptable from an optimization perspective. The updated Low Quality Preset disables Lumen GI and switches the Global Illumination to Screen Space instead. Both the Medium and Low Quality Presets disable Nanite + Virtual Shadow Maps and switches to the traditional system of LODs. High, Ultra, etc. still utilize Nanite. I regenerated and configured LODs for 90% of the static meshes in the game and also reduced triangle count on a lot of oversaturated meshes to get a nice balance between quality vs performance. Medium settings in this build vs the previous one shows a performance increase of 20.7% (111fps -> 134 fps) without sacrificing visual fidelity. The only difference is that some environmental meshes are slightly lower poly at a distance due to LODs. Low settings show a performance increase of 49.5% vs the previous build (111fps -> 166 fps).

I attached screenshots of the performance changes. I know there are still some things I need to optimize but I figured the increase in performance was enough for an update. Oh yeah, I also updated the game to UE 5.7 for better stability and I included some other quality of life fixes. Also, I apologize in advance for the big update size, when I updated engine versions it rewrote all the chunks of the game so essentially you have to redownload the game like it is your first time!

Thanks!