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Technical Art & Optimization

Hit your framerate target. Ship on schedule.

Production-ready engineering and technical art services for complex Unreal Engine projects. We diagnose engine-level bottlenecks, optimize rendering pipelines, and implement data-driven solutions to ensure your game delivers steady performance without sacrificing visual fidelity.

~20%

Frame Time Improvement

4.6×

Draw Call Reduction

2.5ms

Frame Time Saved

0/409

VSM Dynamic Invalidations

The Bottleneck

UE5 ships hot. Unity scales fast. Projects regress quietly.

Performance debt is cumulative. What begins as a single unoptimized material or an extra draw call soon cascades into late-stage shipping delays. We find the technical ceiling before your players do.

01 / GPU

Overdraw and shader cost

Complex translucent materials and high-vertex density assets create significant GPU pressure, leading to frame drops during intense gameplay sequences.

02 / DRAW CALLS

Scene complexity creep

Excessive draw calls caused by un-instanced geometry and redundant world-outliner depth choke the CPU-render thread on lower-spec hardware.

03 / MEMORY

Asset bloat at runtime

Inefficient texture streaming pools and unoptimized VRAM usage lead to frequent hitches during world traversal and potential platform-mandated crashes.

What We Ship

Profiling, optimization, and technical art across the full pipeline.

Comprehensive technical expertise for Unreal Engine and Unity projects. Our services cover the entire optimization lifecycle, from initial hardware-level profiling to runtime memory engineering and target-specific QA tuning.

[01]

Performance profiling

Deep-dive analysis using RenderDoc, Unreal Insights, and Pix to identify CPU and GPU bottlenecks across frame timelines.

[04]

Materials & shaders

Custom HLSL shader development that balances visual fidelity with runtime instruction cost for target spec profiles.

[02]

GPU optimization

Draw call reduction, LOD strategy implementation, and specialized geometry processing to hit high framerate targets.

[05]

Scene & asset pipeline

Automated asset validation and level streaming setup to eliminate hitching and optimize world partition management.

[03]

Memory engineering

VRAM pool management and memory leak diagnosis to prevent crashes and ensure stability on platform-constrained hardware.

[06]

Platform & QA

Target-specific performance tuning for PC, Console, and SOC-limited mobile devices including platform certification support.

Case Study 01

From bottleneck to 20% performance gain.

UE5 · Open World

A deep-dive technical engagement focused on profile-driven optimization for a high-fidelity open-world environment. We identified engine-level rendering stalls and implemented systematic asset-level fixes, resulting in significant runtime efficiency and stabilized frame pacing across target hardware profiles.

Frame Time

12.43ms

↓ 2.5ms saved

Draw Calls

280

↓ from 1,313 (4.6×)

Triangles

3.6×

↓ reduction

Perf Gain

~20%

↑ across the board

Key areas improved

Geometry

Nanite & Overdraw

Implemented targeted static mesh optimization and custom Nanite settings to reduce overdraw in dense foliage areas and manage geometry complexity in hero assets.

Lighting

Virtual Shadow Maps

Optimized VSM caching and resolution to eliminate shadow casting stalls, reducing frame time spikes during time-of-day transitions and localized point light interactions.

Rendering

Shader Complexity

Refactored master materials to lower HLSL instruction counts and minimized translucent sort costs, achieving consistent GPU performance across varied environmental conditions.

Core Engine

Scene Management

Tuned world partition streaming distances and optimized component-level culling to stabilize CPU render thread performance and minimize runtime hitching.

Case Study 02

Memory budget audit: from RHI breakdown to recovered headroom.

UE5 · Memreport

From audit to recovered budget.

RHI Non-Transient

Before / After

Total Before

~4.9 GB

Non-VT textures resident

Nanite

Lumen

Virtual Physical Texture pool

StaticMesh resources

UI textures

SkeletalMesh resources

1.2 GB → 0.85 GB

0.45 GB → 0.32 GB

0.38 GB → 0.22 GB

1.0 GB → 0.75 GB

0.62 GB → 0.45 GB

0.25 GB → 0.15 GB

0.8 GB → 0.55 GB

−33%

Total After

~3.3 GB

-29%

-28%

-42%

-25%

-27%

-40%

-31%

Initial profiling revealed a critical imbalance in VRAM distribution. High-fidelity hero assets in the tutorial sequence were persisting in memory during transitions to expansive open-world regions, causing immediate pool overflows on 8GB hardware.

Our audit focused on RHI resource lifecycle management. By implementing aggressive streaming overrides and refactoring texture group assignments, we reduced the idle memory footprint of non-visible assets, creating the necessary headroom for complex VSM caching.

Open world map

18.4 GB

Tutorial map

2.85 GB

A 6.5× peak memory delta implies that asset volatility must be managed through specialized world-partition streaming logic rather than global budget caps.

Engines & Techniques

Deep coverage of UE5 and Unity rendering stacks.

We work where most of the frame budget is spent: the engine core. Our team deep-dives into the rendering pipelines of Unreal and Unity to optimize draw calls, memory allocation, and shader complexity, ensuring your project hits its performance targets on all platforms.

Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine 5

  • Nanite: High-density geometry optimization through programmable rasterization and cluster culling.
  • Lumen: Real-time global illumination and reflection tuning for high-fidelity light transport.
  • Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM): Management of shadow cache invalidations and resolution footprints.
  • MegaLights: Scene scaling with thousands of dynamic shadow-casting lights via stochastic sampling.
  • Materials: HLSL refactoring, shading model optimization, and runtime instruction cost reduction.
  • World Partition: Streaming distance tuning and data layers setup for seamless open worlds.
  • Insights: Low-level CPU/GPU trace analysis to identify micro-stalls and thread contention.

Unity  6 / URP / HDRP

Unity

  • SRP Batcher: Refactoring draw calls to maximize GPU constant buffer throughput.
  • GPU Instancing: Implementation of specialized shaders for high-population environment rendering.
  • URP / HDRP: Custom scriptable render pass development for target-specific post-processing.
  • Addressables: Asset lifecycle management to minimize runtime memory pressure and load times.
  • Job System & Burst: Offloading complex gameplay logic to multi-threaded SIMD-optimized code.
  • Memory Profiler: VRAM and Heap audit to eliminate fragmentation and platform-specific leaks.
  • Frame Debugger: Deep-dive profiling of draw orders and render target invalidations.

How We Work

Four phases. Profile data drives every decision.

PHASE 01

Capture

We deploy hardware-level profiling tools to gather high-frequency performance data across target device profiles.

Tooling: Unreal Insights / PIX / RenderDoc

PHASE 02

Diagnose

Deep analysis of the collected data to isolate engine-level rendering stalls and memory pool overflows.

Tooling: Trace Audit / VRAM Mapping

PHASE 03

Execute

Engine and technical art engineers implement systematic fixes, from HLSL refactors to world-partition tuning.

Tooling: Custom HLSL / Pipeline Hooks

PHASE 04

Lock In

Validation through automated regression testing to ensure localized gains are maintained across the final build.

Tooling: CI/CD Build Validation

Engagement Models

Three ways to bring us in.

Optimization is not a one-size-fits-all process. We meet you where you are in production—whether you need a surgical diagnostic audit, a focused sprint toward a milestone, or long-term engineering depth.

Diagnostic

Performance Audit

2-week engagement

Ideal for studios mid-production needing a validated technical roadmap and bottleneck identification before major milestones.

  • Full GPU/CPU frame-time analysis
  • VRAM & memory profile deep-dive
  • Material instruction cost audit
  • Render thread stall diagnostic

Most Popular

Execution

Optimization Sprint

6 to 10 weeks

Our primary ship-readiness model. We embed a small team to execute fixes identified in the audit and hit targeted framerate goals.

  • HLSL shader refactoring
  • LOD strategy implementation
  • Draw call batching & instancing
  • PSO caching systems
  • Hardware certification support

Partnership

Embedded Engineer

Quarterly retainer

Continuous technical art and engine support for AAA and high-scale indie projects through their entire dev cycle.

  • Custom pipeline tool development
  • On-call performance triage
  • Tech art standard validation
  • Ongoing memory optimization

Ship at framerate. Start with an audit.

Get In Touch

Send project details and target platform. We promise a scoped proposal within 48 hours.

Engines

Unreal Engine 5 · Unity

Platforms

PC · Console · Handheld · Mobile

Studio

Fracture Labs · Est. 2018

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