PUBG developer admits it has 'fallen short' on performance improvements

It's no secret that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has performance problems—it's something that has rightly irked players since its release. In a Steam post yesterday, PUBG Corp admitted it has "fallen short" in this regard, and that it has failed to properly address player complaints about the game's performance issues. It also outlined a road map for how that will change in the future.

Its three priorities going forward will be "performance, server-side optimization, and cheating", it said. To improve performance, it will first address the way lighting effects are processed as well as the way vehicles move across different ground surfaces, both of which are causing players' GPUs to overload.

Next, it will focus on player movement, animations and character models, with the aim being to boost framerate across the board. It will also address the way the game handles vehicles that are far away from the player as well as parked vehicles, which are currently too demanding on players' systems. Finally, it will focus on server-side optimisation, reducing network latency, eliminating inefficient network code and tweaking item spawns.

There are too many changes to list in full here, but if you're interested, check out the blog post. In future, performance updates will arrive as and when they're ready, rather than being bundled into major updates as they have been in the past, PUBG Corp said. "Obviously these are a lot of changes. Even once we implement every single one of the optimization opportunities listed above, we will keep looking for more chances to improve the game."

The team also talked about the level of detail they're adding to Sanhok, PUBG's upcoming 4x4km map. "The team is focused on making literally every inch of Sanhok perfect for players, whether it’s the texture on a rock wall or little unique trimmings around each of the islands houses," it said. The map is currently in testing.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.