Optimizing Steel Aces: Major Steps

Hello!

Today, we are excited to show you the current state of our ongoing optimization efforts.
Performance, especially on a lot of different hardware configurations, is extremely important to us.

One of our main goals with Steel Aces is to make sure the game can be played by as many people as possible. This is especially important for a free-to-play game, where accessibility matters a lot.

Not everyone has access to the newest GPU or a high-end PC, and average hardware can vary heavily depending on region. Because of that, optimization is not just nice to have for us. It is a core part of making the game more accessible.

Big Performance Gains Across a Wide Range of Hardware

Compared to the latest publicly accessible offline build at the time of writing (0.6.12 or 0.6.14 as these have equal performance metrics)
Based on our current internal testing, we are seeing approximately:

• +15–20% performance improvement on low-end hardware
• +40–60% performance improvement on medium to good hardware
• A sharp decrease in Microstutters

Our current lowest hardware target is the GTX 1050 Ti 4GB, which is now roughly 10-year-old hardware. You may be able to launch the game on the 2GB variant, but we cannot guarantee as much, as it falls outside of our official target hardware.

Comparing the versions

Below, we are showing part of our performance comparison sheet.

This is a small snapshot of a huge comparison sheet spanning a lot of different hardware configurations.

Maximum in-game settings · No Ray Tracing · RTX 3080, i7 13700KF, DDR5 @ 4800. Values are FPS. Per-column heatmap: greener = faster.

This example shows a comparison of our our current baseline - a version accessible to you, with different optimization oriented builds we tested.
These changes will be rolling out to you very soon!

Our Internal Benchmarking Run

To keep our comparisons consistent, we use a dedicated internal benchmarking run. This allows us to test the same scenario repeatedly across different builds, settings, and hardware configurations.

This helps us identify performance issues more reliably and measure whether changes actually improve the experience in real gameplay conditions, rather than only in isolated test scenes. However, it is impossible to include every scenario, so you should always expect some deviance in actual play.

What Actually Improved?

The full list of changes is very long, but here is a selection of some of the areas we have worked on.

We improved shadow quality and render distance while lowering GPU and VRAM usage across all graphics presets.

We updated our lighting and volumetrics logic, resulting in better visuals while reducing usage by roughly 5–7%.

Water simulation and rendering have been heavily optimized.

We implemented smarter deployment and usage of motion vectors, improving their use for anti-aliasing and upscaling-related features.

We also made general updates to geometry and polygon counts across assets, reducing unnecessary rendering cost without harming the visual identity of the game.

Other optimized areas include:

• Decal rendering, including impacts and track marks
• Subsurface scattering logic
• Ambient occlusion calculations
• Lens flare
• Screen-space reflections

Some of these changes mainly help lower-end systems. Others improve scalability on stronger PCs or allow us to push visuals further without wasting performance.

Thank You

A lot of this work was only possible because of your feedback.

Playtest reports, hardware information, log files, every bit of detailed information helped us identify where the biggest problems were. That feedback directly influences what we prioritize.

Optimization will always be an ongoing effort. This is not a one-time pass where we declare performance “done.” As Steel Aces grows, we will continue improving performance, stability, visuals, and accessibility.

We already have many more exciting improvements in the pipeline.

For example, we are currently working on heavily optimizing VFX performance.

In some cases, VFX are now up to 15 times faster in our internal builds, but these changes still require a bit more time to be fully ready.

We are looking forward to getting these changes into your hands soon.

Thank you for supporting Steel Aces and helping us make the game better at every turn. ❤️