One thing that makes PC development tricky when compared with consoles is the lack of hardware standardization. A lot of people play games on their PCs, but most don’t have water cooled rigs with SLI GTX 1080 cards. Many don’t even have dedicated graphics processors at all! While some games can get away with high minimum system requirements, we believe it’s important that Disc Jam scale as low as possible for two major reasons:
1. Concurrency
Multiplayer games like Disc Jam live and die by their concurrency. If no one is playing, no one can find a match. For this reason, it’s important that we support as many hardware configurations as possible.
2. Performance
Disc Jam is designed to be played at 60 frames per second. If someone is playing on a system that’s unable to sustain that framerate, they’re not experiencing the game as we’ve intended. This may also impact their teammate’s and opponent’s experiences because Disc Jam is an online game first and foremost.
Introducing Disc Jam’s Low-End Renderer
We spent the last couple of weeks getting a second rendering pipeline up and running that is capable of rendering much faster on integrated and low-end GPUs. Although it supports only a subset of our primary renderer’s features, we think it still looks pretty darn good.
We’re also able to achieve 60fps at 720p on Intel HD 4000 integrated GPUs and above. For comparison, our primary renderer at the same settings on that hardware runs at only 15fps. That’s a 4x speed increase!
To give it a go, simply launch the game from Steam and select the option labeled “Play Disc Jam (use renderer for low-end PCs)”. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on this new experimental option on our forums.
UPDATE 10/11/2016:
For more technical details, check out our article on Intel.com!