Riot Games has detailed why it added global invalidation to Valorant, and exactly what benefits it has brought players.
A post was written by Valorant software engineer Aaron Cheney, who talked about the how and why of global invalidation in the game.
“Global invalidation aims to significantly improve UI performance across the whole game while also reducing manual work required of developers to place Widgets in individual Invalidation Boxes,” he wrote. The Widgets Cheney refers to are the graphical elements that make up a user interface, for example the health bar, or an ammo count that appears on-screen.
After adding global invalidation the UI became around 35 per cent faster, although there were a handful of bugs Riot Games needed to fix to make sure it ran smoothly. Global invalidation essentially reduces the number of UI elements that need to refresh during any given game of Valorant, allowing the player’s PC to run better.
“Invalidation is the mechanism the Unreal Engine uses to indicate when a particular Widget has changed and needs to be updated,” writes Cheney.
“A Widget needs to be invalidated for a variety of reasons: animation, colour, opacity, size, ordering, text, images, and many other properties can change in response to something that happens in the game. When these changes happen to a Widget, it’s “Invalidated,” signalling that it needs to be updated.”
Riot says initial investigations into global invalidation begin in July of 2021, with the feature launching in February of this year. It delivers up to 15 per cent gain for CPU-bound clients, but Riot notes that not every PC will see the exact same results.
The general improvements with global invalidation arrived on February 8 via the 4.03 patch, but Riot says it kept a close eye on the release to make sure performance matched its own estimations, which it did, giving players “improved frame time”.
More can be learned about the implementation of global invalidation in this blog post.
In other news, Nintendo 64 classic F-Zero X is coming to Nintendo Switch Online later this month.
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