Hello there,
glad you like the game. A few things about optimization:
The reason a better card is currently recommended is solely because of the hair. Turning off high-quality-hair in the options will likely give you +40% or more on your fps depending on your system.
It's pretty much the latest in graphics technology unity has to offer (so much so, that I had to fix it for unity).
I plan to add a geometry hair option, which will turn the hair into what most games are using: textures cards, instead of individual strands. With that the minimum graphics requirement will come down a ton.
However, I need an artist to commission the hair with textures which isn't cheap, so I held off for now.
There is also still some stuff I can do on the strand hair, but it's a lot more complex.
The second bigger thing is VRAM. The textures of the girl use mostly 4k textures. This is where most of the VRAM usage comes from. Putting the quality settings on lower will cut those sizes a lot, but there is no balance (she still looks decent on lowest, but the room deteriorates).
So the plan is here to carefully group the textures so saving can be done more efficiently allowing the game to be played on lower-end cards.
The room itself has little on performance by the way. It even uses LOD already which is massive overkill but I implemented it as a system, so when I add bigger locations, I will already have it.
If you get slideshow fps, it's often because of VRAM running out. To explains what happens: once it runs out, the system automatically stores textures and other data on system RAM as it pulls in other buffers that are required to draw the frame. So you would have a bunch of data pushed between your graphics card and your system RAM each frame, which costs A LOT of time.
Currently, setting the graphics quality to low is the only way to reduce VRAM requirement.
And of course, I will further be optimizing everything I come across, including doing extensive analytic tests to see where the bottlenecks are.
Despite my other game being a sandbox/VN game rendered in DAZ, I've been a graphics programmer for over 15 years, making my own engine back in the day. Graphics programming is my main bread and butter, so I will do my best with my experience to make this game as good as possible.
