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PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds devs will now focus on performance, server-side optimization, and cheating

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Bluehole has announced that it will be now focusing on improving overall performance, server-side optimizations, and addressing the cheating issues in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The developers have also admitted that they have failed to address complaints about performance, and that they haven’t done the best job of communicating about the changes they are making to the game.

As the developers stated, over the past few patches, they’ve seen a big increase in complaints about performance problems, including unpredictable FPS drops, visual stuttering, and overall sluggish performance. The good news is that they have identified what is causing these performance drops.

Going into more details, the developers discovered that when vehicles move over many different types of ground materials quickly, too many effects are produced, causing players’ GPUS to overload Furthermore, another cause of GPU overloading (and FPS drops) has to do with the way lighting effects are processed.

The developers have also dentified quite a number of ways they can optimize different aspects of the game to improve performance holistically, and have listed them below.

Upcoming Client-Side Optimization Work

Character optimization

  • We’ll optimize the way the game handles the movement of opponents who you can’t see.
  • The vaulting process and animations will also be improved—we believe this will address certain screen stuttering issues affecting low-powered PCs.
  • We’ll improve the character model rendering process to prevent some small frame drop issues.
  • We’ll optimize character movement and animation while skydiving to improve framerate when multiple characters are skydiving at the same time.
  • We’ll optimize parachute animations to cut down on frame drops near the start of the match

We expect the final three changes above will make the early stages of each match feel much smoother. War Mode will also benefit immensely from these changes.

Vehicle optimization

  • We’ll optimize the way the game handles unseen (far away) vehicle movement and the movement of player models inside faraway vehicles.
  • Currently stopped vehicles demand an unnecessary amount from your CPU. We’ll fix it.

Loading optimization/stabilization

  • We’ll optimize the core structures of Miramar and Sanhok to improve map loading speed.
  • We’ll optimize physical texture loading while level streaming, which should address screen stuttering issues.
  • There’s a crashing issue caused by some level-streaming processes that we’ll address.

Other optimization work

  • We’ll address the frame drop issue caused by high-magnification scopes
  • Certain other far-away objects will be rendered in a less taxing way
  • We’ll optimize the replay system to improve framerate for players who have the replay/death cam activated

 

Upcoming Server-Side Optimization Work
  • We’ll optimize network code and reduce network latency. As a result, basic player inputs will be revealed to other players much more quickly.
  • We’re going to increase the speed at which the server transfers data about objects (items, doors, fences), to address the fact that sometimes item spawn in late after players parachute in.
  • We’re going to eliminate some inefficient network code. Currently, some objects send updates to the server unnecessarily
  • Currently the server rapidly updates certain frames (on vehicles and character models) in an inefficient way. When we address this, we believe it will also resolve some abnormal physics affecting vehicles.

Although Bluehole has not announced when these first performance improvements will be added to the game, it did reveal that it is now planning to push updates to live servers whenever fixes are ready, instead of simply waiting for major patches.

Last but not least, here is what the developers had to say about the cheating in PUBG.

Cheating – Cheating is the area where we’ve made the most progress in recent months. We’ve introduced a variety of encryption based solutions to make it harder for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities. We’ve also banned hundreds of thousands of cheaters’ accounts and refined the process by which we identify cheaters—most cheaters are now banned within hours of using an exploit.