Advice on Optimising For Integrated Graphics (5.6)

Hey everyone,

I've been working on a game for a while, which you can see in action below, and I was wondering if anyone could advise me on squeezing out as much performance (on integrated hardware chips) as I can. (I have noticed that there is about a 4ms drop after upgrading to 5.6 from 5.1, and I am not so sure why...)

Graphically, it is a fairly simple game. Most of the time there are simple diffuse textures and only one small area (usually a room) is active at a time (though every room is loaded, just hidden until needed) Lighting is often sparse too, with a spotlight being the main source, and occasional point and spot lights in some of the areas. Currently, only the cheaper, texture-based noise post processing effect is applied too, though this is a toggle setting within the game options anyway.

The game is currently using the deferred renderer, but I am considering either switching, or offering an option for this too, as in theory, few lights are needed on screen at a time, and the upfront cost of deferred is noticeable.

With this in mind, this is how the game performs(on a laptop when not throttled):

GPU: Intel HD Graphics 530
CPU: Intel i5 6600U
RAM: 8GB

Milliseconds: 16-24 (60-40 fps)

Resolution: 1366x768
Shadow Quality: Low/Off
Anisotropic: Off​

Renderer: Deferred

If it could perform any better through some optimising I am not aware of, I'd really love to know how! We are not going for anything much more than the graphical fidelity of Silent Hill 2, which was originally released on the PlayStation 2 and PC and want our game to run as well as it can on low end hardware.

 

Well... You should use the profiler and see if there's anything in particular that is taking a lot of time.

(also, why did you go with deferred? if you're not using many lights, forward could potentially be faster?)

 

I have been using the profiler.

Almost all of the ms is being spent on rendering.



Deferred was chosen as at the time, dynamic lights had to be used due to lack of light probe proxies and proper mixed lighting. There were also a few bugs with the forward renderer.