GPU prices are not kind to consumers, but thankfully there are people who care about players' PCs not rocketing into space from effort. Game developer Tom Looman prepared an hour-long tutorial on how to optimize Unreal Engine games for GPUs lower than the 50 Series, taking the new indie game Far Far West as an example.

In the video, he profiles the game using Unreal Insights and discusses important GPU stats. He also pays special attention to Nanite foliage, deferred decals, single-layer water, and distance field shadows.

Looman used an RTX 3060 to get real-world profiling data to make the game "run on as many GPUs as possible."

The starting point is around 50 FPS, or 20 ms per frame, with 7 ms taken by Nanite VisBuffer, which handles visibility and culling. Looman tracks it back to masked foliage materials with pixel depth offset enabled – a very heavy load on the PC. Disabling it can save you 2 ms a frame, so it's a great point to start your optimization process at.

If you want to know what you can do to make your game more pleasant to play, watch the full video on Looman's channel and check out his comments on the topic.

Then, you might want to take a look at Far Far West – an indie gem that managed to attract 47,256 concurrent players soon after it came out. There must be something that people appreciate about it. Maybe it's the robot cowboys you and your friends play as. Or the skeletons. Or the cool VFX.

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