I can speak to the graphic changes, sure.

We’ve been looking at ways that we can improve our graphics engine to improve client performance. Last release we did some changes to missiles, mostly aimed at stopping the engine from loading/ trying to draw things that wouldn’t actually appear on screen. While digging around in that concept, we realized that we could probably apply some of the level of detail adjustments to turret effects as well.

Example: Quad Light Beam Laser II modules fire four simultaneous beams from a single turret. Zooming out, by the time the camera gets to moderate zoom levels (around when the ship model drops to medium level of detail), you see a line of light from that turret to the target. The engine, however, is still drawing all four beams, just on top of each other.

This pass at turret optimization cuts down on that overdraw. We’ve also simplified some of the functions called during firing and accordingly reduced the amount of frametime needed to draw weapons fire. In a controlled scene (lots of simultaneous turret firing effects) we saw really positive gains in performance and increases in total framerate.

As far as server performance goes, the Audio and Graphics group doesn’t usually have a hand in those changes, but I’m running this week’s test, so I have added some specific steps at the request of another team.

Generally, the release mass tests observe essential game elements to benchmark performance costs. Elements you see in almost every mass test include fleet warps into/off of grid, fleet jumps between systems on a node, and jumps between nodes, and mass fleet combat with active chat. We take telemetry from those actions and investigate ways to improve things. The teams that work on those areas would be better equipped to talk about the work they do there.