Patch - The cool your jets release

Do your fans try to escape your machine when running TaleSpire? If so, this patch might be for you!

We have a fix for a long-standing threading issue that has been causing CPU usage on some machines to be noticeably higher than would otherwise make sense.

Here are some very rough observations that we’ve made:

WARNING: We are not set up for rigorous benchmarking, nor do we have the deep knowledge required to do a good job. Take these results as a rumor!

On the Steam Deck, we saw a 7 °C drop in CPU temperature, a ~1000 RPM drop in fan speed, much more stable frame timings, AND all with slightly higher FPS.

On an x86 tablet/laptop convertible with a Ryzen 8840U SoC, running TaleSpire with frame-rate limited to 30fps, we saw an approximately 20% SoC power consumption drop compared to the same setup on our previous release.

And with a 16-Core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, you could straight up hear that the fans were not being thrashed so hard!

You can see some more hand-wavy findings at the end of the post.

Of course, this patch doesn’t fix all the perf issues. We’ve got a lot more in the pipeline that should make TaleSpire even more accessible to our friends on lower-end machines. Which means more folks who can join the fray!

Until next time, we wish you all good CPU temps, and a good week.

BUILD-ID: 22077554 - Download Size: Win / Linux 4.0 MB / Mac OS 8.1 MB

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Once again, we are not professional benchmarkers, and these are not benchmarks we would feel comfortable saying you can rely on. Making repeatable benchmarks is hard, and these are simply an account of the things we saw on our machines.

The numbers on the laptop, especially, are much more variable and, as such, less accurate.

With that out of the way, let’s get into it.

Steam Deck

New vs old.

This image shows the same scene, with the Steam Deck left untouched for one minute before each picture.

The Steam Deck fans run about 1000RPM slower (and thus much quieter). Even with the slower fan, the CPU temperature dropped from 83 °C to 76 °C, while the GPU went from 72 °C to 76 °C (4 °C warmer). The temperature increase on the GPU can probably be attributed to the much more stable frame times: with the new patch in our test scene, the Steam Deck reached stable 60FPS, and while the old version sometimes got close to that, it also regularly dropped below 30FPS

Laptop

Here we tested locking the game to 30FPS to see how the “same amount of work” compares. We also tested with unlocked FPS to let it run as fast as it could.

In the locked 30FPS test performance before and after are unchanged; 30FPS is obviously the maximum, but even on the old patch, this was easily reached and very stable. However, the total SoC power consumption drops by about 20% (~16W -> ~12.5W) with temperatures also dropping about ~2-3 °C.

In the unlocked test, we saw that, other than with the Steam Deck, if you have a more powerful CPU with enough cores, this patch won’t improve performance. If there is any impact at all, it is much smaller than our measurement inaccuracies. However, we still saw temperature drops of around 1 °C.