Former id Software artist argues performance and optimization are 'as much of an art problem' as a tech one: 'Killzone 2 looks incredible today. FEAR looks incredible today'

I recently sat down with Defect game director and former id Software artist, Emanuel Palalic, as well as composer Mick Gordon to discuss the upcoming cyberpunk FPS. One topic I wanted to get their thoughts on was optimization: Defect looks like a heavy game, but has surprisingly lenient specs⁠—RTX 2060 minimum⁠—and no mandatory ray tracing like we're starting to see in some games.

The graphics arms race is proving ever more costly for devs and players, with diminishing returns: The cutting edge Metal Gear Solid Delta left me feeling cold, especially compared to the similarly photorealistic, yet more vibrant, striking, and ten years older Phantom Pain. Meanwhile, people's champions like Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6 are scoring points with players by not just running on lower-end hardware, but looking and performing well.

This isn't just a question of tech and optimization, according to Palalic."Good performance in a game isn't always a technical problem, it's as much of an art problem as well," he told me. "A really strong art team can work within any shading and rendering limitations that are presented and lean into those. When you look at older games, Killzone 2 looks incredible today. FEAR looks incredible today.

"A lot of that's because, as an artist, you're working within whatever limitations are presented in front of you, and being able to lean into those strengths. That's how we're looking at optimizing for Defect. While it looks fancy, there's definitely a lot of stuff that we're doing, there's some old school techniques mixed in there."

That really struck me, not just as a fan of throwback indie graphics, but also as someone who suffered through a lot of bad Nintendo Switch ports. It wasn't just the bad frame rate and low resolution (they certainly didn't help), but games like The Outer Worlds had to strip away so much detail that the developers simply assumed players would see.

In my experience, condensing and warping high fidelity art in this way always results in a worse-looking game than something retro, but intentional, while ludicrous GPU prices and longer lifespans for core components seem to be heightening the issue.

Palalic says the team at emptyvessel is "making an active effort" to ensure its art assets still look good and perform well at lower settings. One example he gave was how Defect will scale gun smoke and bullet impacts at different graphical settings, checking in on changes when the team playtests Defect's latest build three times a week. A particularly exciting feature that they're grappling with is environmental destruction a la Battlefield or Rainbow Six Siege.

"We're working on persistent destruction of persistent debris. There's a lot more work to be done on that," said Palalic. "But being able to turn those switches off, and some optimizations we've made to get some of this stuff running at 60 [fps] has allowed us to take interesting cuts on the lower to mid spec things as well. And I think another thing that helps is Defect's gritty, moody lighting, there's some more dimly lit spaces.

"We're doing a lot of fun stuff there to reduce the load of destruction, to make it a little more optimal, whether it's offloading things from the CPU and putting them onto the GPU or vice versa, scaling them down to much simpler versions of those effects on the lower settings, and even scaling down things like persistent bodies in the world."

While Mick Gordon's expertise is music, he's also a 20+ year veteran of the games industry, and chimed in with a final endorsement of Palalic and the team's expertise on the graphics front.

"Emmanuel can be quite modest, so I'll jump in and say it: The folks behind this team are also the same folks that have been behind some of the most optimized games from the last 10+ years as well," said Gordon. "It's a strong consideration from everybody, right from the beginning, and these folks are some of the best around at that specifically."

For more on Defect, you can read about how Mick Gordon is "really exploring the extremes of distortion" in Defect's soundtrack, which you can hear in its recent extended gameplay trailer. Defect does not yet have a release date, but you can wishlist it on Steam.