Performance

Rendering on a Budget: Practical Performance Wins for Indies

You don’t need a render farm or a new GPU to ship a great-looking game. You need budgets, a profiling ritual, and content decisions that favor clarity over complexity.

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Set a frame budget before art begins

Decide your target platforms and frame rate. On a GTX 1060 / Steam Deck target, a good starting budget is 11 ms GPU and 5 ms CPU for gameplay, leaving overhead for spikes. Write budgets for draw calls, lights, shadow casters, and texture memory. Put the numbers in a visible doc. If you can’t measure it, you can’t ship it.

Profiling flow you can actually keep

Grab a snapshot at the same spot every week (a stress view with particles and enemies).
Log the top three offenders and fix only those.
Rebuild, re-measure, and write down the deltas.

Make a “perf wall” graph. Watching your ms trend line drop is as motivating as a new shader.

Content decisions with outsized impact

Meshes and LODs: Merge static meshes that share materials, use LODs with generous screen-size thresholds, and cull tiny props early.
Materials: Prefer a single master material with parameters over dozens of unique materials. Avoid per-pixel expensive math in layers—prebake when possible.
Textures: Use consistent texel density; compress aggressively; generate mipmaps; watch normal map sizes. A single 4K normal where 1K would do is silent death.
Lighting: Bake what you can. Use dynamic lights sparingly and with limited shadow cascades. Shadow quality eats time like nothing else.

Unity specifics (2025)

URP over HDRP for most indies unless you require HDRP features. URP is lighter and easier to get stable.
GPU instancing and static batching for repeated props. Keep an eye on material variants.
Addressables for memory; load heavy sets on demand; unload aggressively between levels.
Frame Debugger + Profiler weekly. If overdraw looks like a white sheet, your transparents need love.

Unreal specifics (2025)

Lumen looks great but must be budgeted; tune hardware ray tracing vs software settings based on your min spec.
Nanite cuts draw calls but doesn’t make materials free. Keep shaders simple and watch masked materials.
Virtual Shadow Maps can be heavy. Reduce light count and shadow distance; consider baked shadows for static scenes.
Insights profiler and stat gpu on real hardware weekly. Don’t profile only on editor.

Effects that read without melting GPUs

Stylize to your advantage. Use sharply timed bloom, rim lights, and color grading to boost readability instead of stacking heavy particles. For bullets and slashes, a bright, short-lived mesh with a clean shader reads better than overdraw-hungry particles.

UI and post-processing

UI can be a stealth perf killer. Batch UI, reduce masks, and minimize expensive effects like blur. For post-processing, start with a conservative chain: tone mapping, color grade, vignette. Add depth of field only where it aids clarity—not everywhere.

Players forgive fewer polygons. They don’t forgive unreadable combat, muddy lighting, or inconsistent frame pacing.

Shipping check

Perf snapshot trend line for the last 4 weeks shows stability or improvement.
All scenes adhere to draw call/light/shadow budgets.
Texture memory fits in target with 20% headroom.
QA can complete a 30-minute session without a stutter spike above 25 ms on min spec.

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