Faster on CPUs with fewer cores: lighting moved to the graphics card
On the PS3, inFamous 2 computed its lighting and ambient occlusion (the soft contact shadows) on the Cell's SPUs. This port ran that SPU code on your CPU, about 30 ms of CPU work every frame, and on 4- and 6-core CPUs it was the main thing holding the frame rate down (#19).
Both jobs now run as compute shaders on your graphics card instead. The picture is the same: the GPU versions were checked against the original SPU code pixel by pixel (98% of pixels identical, the rest within one or two brightness steps).
Measured in the first big fight (the gate), same PC, limiting the game to fewer CPU threads:
| CPU threads | Before | Now |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | 30 fps | 41 fps (+37%) |
| 12 (like a Ryzen 5 2600) | 42 fps | 51 fps (+21%) |
| 16 | 55 fps | 65 fps (+17%) |
It is on by default. To compare or if something looks wrong: PC Settings > Frame > CPU > Lighting on the graphics card (Off = the old SPU code), then restart.
This changes the toolkit, so the next build recompiles everything once (the same long build as the first install). Press Update now in the launcher, then Build/Play. Or download inFamous2Recomp-v0.1.27-windows.zip / inFamous2Launcher.exe below.
If you see anything different in the lighting or shadows, please send a Save report from the launcher with a note of where it was.