Double Fine’s games are always very interesting and tackle unusual problems. In this case, we are dealing with a walking lighthouse that can warp reality and create portals to other locations all while in a very painterly visual style.

I looked into a significant performance hit from EssenceGenerated meshes from the XBOX Series S captures provided to us. They were about heavy on BasePass, Non-Nanite VSM, RenderVelocities, and Vector ALU. A high Vector ALU cost usually meant that there’s a lot of math operations done in shaders, and these meshes are morphed via a custom shader, and so I identified the shader as a candidate for optimization.