Performance Tips

[Gary]

We know that for a game like SENTRY, performance is especially important. While we’ll continually optimise the game, we felt it may be helpful to have a pinned post on the Steam forums that people could refer to if this is something they’re looking for information on.

CPU and GPU

The most important component in your PC that determines the performance of SENTRY is your CPU. Because of our art style, we don’t really impact the GPU, but we do run a lot of AI and have large amounts of physics objects, which are traditionally CPU-based costs.

If you have a powerful CPU you likely wouldn’t notice a big framerate difference between running the game on an integrated graphics card versus a discrete one. In our tests, having a decent graphics card made more of a difference if you had an older or lower performing CPU.

Tips for when the game runs well but suffers from occasional dips

Because one of the largest performance cost is the AI, when there’s particularly large amounts of them the game will naturally run slower than with less AI.

Some people have reported that they can enjoy extremely high framerates for most of the time, but at moments where there’s lots of enemies it can drop. For some people’s machines, they’ve reported drops to what would still be considered high framerates (i.e. 60fps) – but it is the difference during this drop you feel the most.

The best thing to do in this situation is to cap your framerate. This will be down to personal preference of course; in the example above that player may prefer to play for most of the time at extremely high framerates and suffer the drops to high framerates. Others may prefer to cap the framerate at the lower value so that it remains stable at all times.

If that latter example sounds like you, then we’d recommend heading to the Graphics Settings and adjusting the “Maximum Framerate” to something that approximates what your framerate is during peak combat moments. Please note that v-sync overrides the Maximum Framerate setting so you may need to switch this off.

If you’re unsure what v-sync does, it caps the framerate to your monitor refresh rate. Having v-sync on helps avoid what is known as "screen tearing".

Tips for improving the base framerate

If you’re generally looking to improve framerate, you can try these steps:

• As mentioned in the above section, try capping the framerate but this time at a more aggressive value
  
• Lower the resolution – this will only help for those on very low performing GPUs
  
• Disable realtime shadows
  
• Avoid having other programs running in the background
  
• If you're on Windows 11, disable "Optimizations for windowed games". This can be found in the Settings menu under System -> Display -> Graphics and select "Change default graphics settings"

As with any game, it’ll be your personal preference on the sweet spot between visuals and performance.

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Hopefully the above steps will help smooth out any performance issues you may be suffering from. We’ll be continuously optimising the game and if there’s anything particularly odd with your framerate please tell us about it so we can look into it (and be sure to include your PC specs when reporting).