Topic
Every article about Performance on the COLONIZED blog, newest first.
18 articlesRSS feed
RenderA much larger L3 cache, stacked on the processor, avoids trips to RAM and speeds up data-heavy games. How it works, who benefits, how a 9800X3D differs from a 9950X3D and how to make sure the game uses the right cores.
4 min read
RenderEvery game is limited by either the CPU or the GPU at any moment. A five-minute test with resolution and per-thread usage tells you which one is yours, and a table shows which settings to touch and which part to upgrade.
5 min read
RenderFrames per second count how many frames come out; frame time says how long each one takes. With a conversion table, the formula, what 1 % and 0.1 % lows are and why a high average can hide stutter.
5 min read
RenderA powerful graphics card running at 60 % is not coasting: it is waiting. The seven usual causes, from the CPU to the frame limiter, how to tell them apart with three tests and when the right fix is to do nothing.
6 min read
RenderA nine-step recipe for tuning the graphics of a big-world game: start from a preset, find the worst scene, identify the limit and touch only the settings that move that limit. With a table of what loads the CPU, the GPU or VRAM.
5 min read
RenderMeasuring well is what separates knowing from guessing. Which free tools to use, which numbers to watch (frame time, 1 % lows, per-thread usage, temperature), a repeatable test protocol for online games and how to read the graphs.
5 min read
RenderPing is not frame rate: it is how long a message takes to reach the server and come back. What ping, jitter and packet loss measure, how prediction and lag compensation work in an MMO, what a good ping is and how to measure and improve your connection.
5 min read
RenderA big world does not fit in memory all at once: it loads on the fly. How much RAM makes sense (and why in two modules), which SSD is enough, how much VRAM each resolution needs and how to recognize memory stutter, which looks a lot like a CPU problem.
5 min read
RenderAn upscaler relieves the GPU; frame generation multiplies what you see, not how you respond. A decision guide: what to use depending on your limit (CPU or GPU), with what base frame rate, and why in an MMO it pays to think before turning it on.
5 min read
RenderThe display refreshes at one pace and the graphics card produces at another: that is where tearing and stutter come from. How vertical sync and variable sync (G-Sync, FreeSync) solve it, why a frame limit helps and which setup to start from.
5 min read
RenderA bottleneck is the part that sets the pace for the whole PC. This guide explains how one forms, why there is always one, which symptoms point to the CPU, GPU, memory, disk or network, and when fixing it is not worth the money.
6 min read
RenderMore players, more fauna and more structures mean more work for the CPU, and a better graphics card does not fix it. The five loads that saturate it in an MMO or a survival game, why one thread rules and what hardware eases it.
4 min read
RenderOne day of work on COLONIZED, read from the commit history: how dune fields will come from each world's wind, why the ground now weathers by real data, what the terrain costs and how we will make it cheaper, and why our public roadmap looked frozen until that night.
8 min read
RenderMegaLights became production-ready in Unreal Engine 5.8. What it actually does, why its cost barely grows with the number of lights, what hardware it expects, what it cannot light yet, how it differs from Lumen, and why the COLONIZED development build does not use it.
5 min read
RenderMost procedural planets start from a random seed. COLONIZED starts from a canon: radius, density, air, rock, places and rules written as data. How that data becomes fifteen worlds, why the terrain comes from real elevation and physics, and what is still under review.
4 min read
RenderNVIDIA's RTX technologies without the marketing: what each part of DLSS does, which GeForce cards support it in 2026, why generated frames do not respond to your input and how Reflex fits in. Plus how COLONIZED's development build uses them.
4 min read
RenderNanite and Lumen without the marketing: how virtualised geometry and dynamic global illumination work, what Virtual Shadow Maps, MegaLights and TSR add, the budgets and limits Epic documents, and two lessons from using them on a whole planet.
6 min read
RenderA practical guide to performance in UE5 games on PC: the settings with the biggest impact, what eats video memory, how to read minimum and recommended requirements, and the measured story of how we cut a planet's VRAM by 58 % and its cloud cost from 15.5 to 3.5 ms.
6 min read
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