Performance update

Lean and sharp

dWars v0.5.2 · 1 August 2026

A focused GPU pass that cuts frame cost in heavy combat, plus three rendering fixes you may have felt without being able to name.

Changed

Shadow quality now scales with your performance tier. Low, Medium, and High each use an appropriate step count — Low roughly halves the previous shadow cost, High is unchanged.
Shell detonations run their own GPU pass now, so the splash from a tank round no longer serialises the entire simulation. Large detonation fans in tight battles are noticeably smoother.
The game skips simulation work on empty unit slots. With 800 live units in a 10,000-slot buffer, that cuts sim dispatch cost by roughly 90%.

Battalion outlines no longer ghost along shell and projectile flight paths. Ordnance was being pulled into the battalion silhouette union, dragging the outline across the map with every round in the air.
The renderer now sizes its dispatch to the actual canvas, not a fixed 1080p asset. Smaller windows were paying four times the necessary render cost; canvases larger than 1080p left a strip of pixels unwritten.
Effects glitches during intense combat — explosions or laser hits flickering or vanishing — are fixed. A thread-group race in the effects buffer was dropping appended events when multiple groups wrote simultaneously.

The map doesn't care how fast you click. — Elle