PUBG Devs Promise Massive Performance Updates As Fortnite Dominates In Popularity
It's widely accepted that admitting you have a problem is the first step in overcoming it. That applies to drug and alcohol addiction, though it can hold true in other areas as well. In that regard, developer Bluehole readily admits that its widely popular battle royale game, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, suffers from numerous performance and is vowing to fix them in future updates.
"Ever since we launched the 1.0 version of PUBG earlier this year, we’ve been focused on building our team so we can invest in the game’s ongoing development[...]Although we’ve made some meaningful improvements to PUBG, we’ve fallen short in other ways. Players have rightfully called us out for failing to address complaints about performance, and recently we haven’t done the best job of communicating about the changes we’re making to the game," Bluehole said.
Going forward, among Bluehole's top priorities is to optimize its servers for better performance. The developer admits that in the wake of the past few patches, there has been a "big increase in complaints about performance problems," among then unpredictable drops in framerates, stuttering, and just overall sluggish performance. Bluehole has traced some of the root problems to client-side issues, and others to server-side bugs.
Two specific issues that Bluehole identifies include:
- We’ve discovered that when vehicles move over many different types of ground materials quickly, too many effects are produced, causing players’ GPUS to overload.
- Another cause of GPU overloading (and FPS drops) has to do with the way lighting effects are processed.
Fixes for those issues are currently in development, though it's not clear when they will arrive. On the client-side, Bluehole also says it plans several character, vehicle, and loading optimizations with a range of fixes and improvements on tap, including the core structures of Miramar and Sanhook to improve map loading speed.
PUBG's popularity has waned over the past several months, going from more than 3 million concurrent users in December of last year to nudging past a peak of 1.5 million concurrent users today. It's still an incredibly popular title. Meanwhile, the most recent update from Epic Games pegs rival Fortnite as having 3.4 million concurrent players this past February.
