Making Avatar Rendering More Performant

[chimig1984]

Key Takeaways

We’re optimizing avatar rendering with FastCluster and Layered Clothing improvements to boost performance. These updates reduce memory overhead and increase frame rates by streamlining how models are processed.

Check out the technical details to optimize your experience today.

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Hi Creators,

We are excited to announce that we have made substantial performance-focused improvements to FastCluster and Layered Clothing rendering systems. This should resolve some long-standing issues with player avatars causing framerate drops in your experiences.

While the FastCluster improvements outlined below are active immediately, additional optimizations for Layered Clothing will go live in early 2026.

Note: in the context of this post, an avatar is a Model with a Humanoid or at least one skinned MeshPart. By having a Humanoid or skinned MeshPart, the entire Model and its parts are rendered through FastCluster.

FastCluster Improvements

• Reduced Skeleton build time by filtering out unnecessary parts
  • This reduces the time taken by buildSkeleton (which shows up in Microprofiler) when there are a lot of parts in the Workspace, or in a Model, alongside a skinned mesh.

• Seating (or in general Weld/Constraint) changes will not cause FastCluster rebuilds
  • To take advantage of this improvement, ensure that any seating (or in general Weld/Constraint) changes are not adding or removing parts with geometry under the same avatar Model.
• Tools equipping or unequipping will not cause FastCluster rebuilds.
  • To take advantage of this improvement, ensure that any Tools or accessories that you equip or add to an avatar do not have skinned meshes (i.e. Tools should have rigid parts only).

• Highlight changes will not cause FastCluster rebuilds.
  • Most highlight changes will now be instant. This improvement applies to both Studio (for selection highlights) as well as in experience (e.g. an avatar highlight effect).

• Part.Color, Part.Transparency, and SurfaceAppearance.Color changes will no longer cause FastCluster rebuilds.
  • In early 2026, we will release an update to eliminate the need for FastCluster to be rebuilt due to changes to Part.Color, Part.Transparency, and SurfaceAppearance.Color.

For Performance Optimization tips, please see our docs on Performance Optimization. For information on how to cage clothing, please see our docs on Caging Best Practices.

Next Steps:

Improvements to FastCluster presented here will apply to Layered Clothing, as described in specific scenarios outlined above. However, other scenarios, such as equipping and unequipping Layered Clothing, death/respawn of an avatar, and changes to avatar scale will still cause framerate drops. To address these, we plan to release an update in early 2026 to make Layered Clothing fully asynchronous.

We continue to make improvements to FastCluster and Layered Clothing to ensure they integrate seamlessly within your experiences.

[TTC3B (jsodd)]

what in the army is Roblox making

[LoveingLiamGuy (Liam)]

This is amazing. As someone developing games that heavily rely on a lot of NPCs, I’ll no longer have to do weird workarounds for performance like putting all of the NPC tools in some random Workspace folder and then manually creating welds. Keep up the Humanoid performance improvements.

[aymannkaadan (CAT)]

Great update. The FastCluster improvements already address several common avatar-related performance pain points, especially around seating, tools, and highlights. Looking forward to the fully asynchronous Layered Clothing changes in early 2026.

[megasuperalfonato (RonaldoR9)]

Well, i don’t know if this affects me, but performance and optimization updates are always welcomed

[MetatableIndex]

These changes have been a very long time coming. As someone whose games rely heavily on morphs and tools, avatar performance issues related to fastCluster and buildSkeleton have been one of the biggest optimization issues that have been heavily affecting performance.

Ever since some of these changes (such as the tool equip / unequip improvement) went into effect, we have seen about a 15% improvement in framerate (P90) across all devices. That is huge news!

A very sincere thank you to the team that worked on this. Looking forwards to seeing further improvements!

[R0bl0xianDeveloper (RobloxianDev)]

Awesome update! Honestly, I’m glad to see that you guys are finally making improvements.

[ThatBushyZaza (LordAnanas)]

Im so glad over the fix to the equipping issue, i remember making a gun system and trying to figure out why the game would spike when equipping the gun, and after finding put having to make my own tool implementation instead.

And from the looks of it, it would also fix the weird issue where using a Motor6D instead of a weld for tools causes the layered clothing to temporarily break every time you added the tool to the motor

[Linux_55 (Dughoo)]

Very beautiful. Very powerful.

[TimeFrenzied (xand)]

@chimig1984

equipping/unequipping tools no longer cause framerate drops.

guys rogue lineage might be half playable now

[devSparkle]

This is absolutely awesome! Can you share if this is live across all platforms, and when it was enabled?

[ChasingSpace (Chasing)]

@chimig1984

Reduced Skeleton build time by filtering out unnecessary parts

• This reduces the time taken by buildSkeleton (which shows up in Microprofiler) when there are a lot of parts in the Workspace, or in a Model, alongside a skinned mesh.

Does this mean that you can parent welded parts to the Avatar now? Or do you still need to parent them outside?

[HealthyKarl]

These flags will be fixed, right?

Layered Clothing - Due to AutoSkin, changing properties from the Character or their Tool causes Major Performance Issues

I tested FFlagFixLayeredClothingSpike and I’d have been thinking that it would resolve the issue. Same as it would maybe resolve this one as well Layered clothing causes lag spikes when updating unrelated part properties   But that Flag alone doesn’t seem to be it because when it is turned on it breaks the Avatar from the Re-production Steps [image]   After checking more, the following flags need to be enabled from what I think: FFlagFixLayeredClothingSpike ? FFlagWrapDeformerContextOutp…

[Starveldt (paracosm daemon)]

This is one of the best announcements I’ve seen all week, thank you

[DanielxdSBlol]

The Metaverse army maybe and it’s variations.

[Contrastual]

OH MY GOD TRANSPARENCY FORCING A CLUSTER REBUILD IS BEING FIXED LETS GOOOO

I really hope geometry changes to parts that are fully transparent doesn’t force a rebuild but this is a really good update! W

(also will humanoids with EvaluateStateMachine off be excluded from the humanoid step? it gets annoying with like 30 of them)

[Fe_ct]

Please please please keep bringing more performance updates like these, especially for avatars.
I plan on releasing a 100-player server game soon, and so far my greatest performance issue has been avatar draws & triangle counts.

This will definitely improve the draw performance & load times for avatars, although triangle counts are still a major issue with detailed character rigs & layered clothing.
Would love to see more aggressive avatar culling & LODs come next!

[ThatBushyZaza (LordAnanas)]

wait is this what causes insane lag when setting the transparency of a character every frame? i was wondering why my TPS system would drop to 10fps when modifying the transparency.

[Contrastual]

Yeah, to this day I still don’t understand why it’s like that. It’s plagued avatars for years atp especially when switching between 1st and 3rd person view. It’s also dependent on how complicated the rig is. I work with R6 and typically rebuilds are 2ms on my hardware with my most demanding outfits