Reducing lag - optimising game

[Polyheximal]

My game is pretty laggy, and it’s heavily detailed.
It has a lot of:

• Textures/Decals
• Unions

I’ve heard Unions are pretty bad, but I’m not sure if that’s the full story. If I were to make all the unions into plain parts, would that be just as bad, worse or better?

One of the major things I noticed that was in my memory, GraphicsTexture was using ~120 MB / 490 MB (total)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but 120 MB on one “group” is a lot. So, what does GraphicsTexture consist of, and how can I lower that?

And finally, is 490 MB on a game a lot, or is it a reasonable amount?

[Kotojo]

@Polyheximal

I’ve heard Unions are pretty bad, but I’m not sure if that’s the full story. If I were to make all the unions into plain parts, would that be just as bad, worse or better?

While I’m not very experienced in building, I’m much more of a scripter, a brief investigation caused me to come across this:

Unions causing lag?

Never union parts just for the sake of unioning them, they use much more memory and processing than the individual constituent parts. Edit: CSGV2 Has made this less true, in many cases unions are now more efficient. Once part instancing is out it likely won’t matter much between the two.

Yes, you should make them into just plain parts.

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Hope this helped!

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EDIT:

Unions causing lag?

If you watch that talk, the takeaway should be that it’s often advantageous to make unions. It’s certainly not true that a bunch of parts are more efficient or use less memory. Unions are usually the winner here. Part instancing is nearly upon us, but unions are already instanced, and have been for a while, so they are really good when you want to copy-paste a bunch of them to build something larger (as long as you don’t change a property that thwarts instancing Part Instancing - pre-release an…

Actually, another good link here. You may want to read this also. If you’re using the same union multiple times, it may be better to stick to that, but if you’re using multiple different unions, then parts may be better.

[Polyheximal]

But then, would part count be yet another cause for lag?

[Kotojo]

Edited my last answer,

@Kotojo

If you’re using the same union multiple times, it may be better to stick to that, but if you’re using multiple different unions, then parts may be better.

But in general you may want to investigate to see if there’s a memory leak in any scripts also. I would say that may be more likely the issue than the graphics being poorly optimized. As far as Unions go, they definitely seem to have their issues.

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EDIT:
Found some helpful resources for you:

Roblox Developer Conference 2018 - Designing for Performance

Building Optimisation | Tips and tricks!

UPDATE - 2021 This post is slightly old now so some information on the topics discussed may be out of date or incorrect. Another post may come out at some point updating this information but this is something to keep in mind when reading this post as of now. ________________ 2008. The year where games on the small but relatively ambitious platform “ROBLOX” were the simplest they could get. With limited development resources, many developers were confined to the basic brick and pre-made meshe…

[Polyheximal]

I agree, I’ll definitely optimise my scripts. The only thing that concerned me though was that GraphicsTexture was using a lot of memory, and I’m fairly sure that isn’t related to the scripts. I could be wrong.

[r0bl0xic808]

If you want to reduce lag head over to Roblox Studio and follow these steps below.

1.Click “File” in the top right
2.Find “Rendering” and click on it-it comes with a little warning but its ok just click ok
3.Once you’ve clicked rendering find “Quality Level” and if you want to optimise your game set it to Level01

Extra tip if you want to use it.
1.In Rendering(i think) find “Game options” and set to no graphics.-this doesn’t take away the graphics but it improves lag