This past week, devotees of Web3 experienced an extraordinary immersive event facilitated by the oncyber Metaverse. This cutting-edge platform has redefined the parameters of the open immersive web, successfully hosting 3,600 participants from over 100 different countries in a flawless, uninterrupted environment. All of this was executed flawlessly across a myriad of devices, owing to oncyber’s superior performance graphics.

The oncyber team reports that such a remarkable achievement would have been impossible just weeks prior. The primary challenge the platform grappled with was the harmonious integration of multiplayer interaction, diverse digital universes, and high-resolution visuals, while maintaining rapid frame rendering for fluid interaction.

How Oncyber Enhanced its Graphics Performance

The solution to the aforementioned issues came through strategic graphics optimization across several areas, including animations, instancing, and atlasing. Samsy, oncyber’s leading graphics designer, identified that “animation systems predominantly use CPU, which becomes a constriction when handling hundreds of avatars.” The team, therefore, pivoted to GPU-based animations. This allowed for the creation of a floating-point texture incorporating all animation characters, thus enabling the display of 1,000 VRM characters at 120 fps on advanced computer systems.

The second significant performance hurdle was the reduction of draw calls, or individual drawing operations. This was addressed by implementing avatar instancing, a process involving the rendering of multiple copies of the same mesh or default avatars in a single draw call. This technique brought about an impressive 85% decrease in the number of draw calls. Further optimization was achieved in rendering profile pictures, by consolidating multiple images into a larger texture, reducing draw calls required for most avatar setups from 400 to a mere 13.

The same methodology was employed to optimize the display of usernames above avatars, reducing draw calls to a single one. “With these combined optimizations, we can now display 1,000 animated VRM characters at 120 fps on advanced computers, and 600 animated VRM characters on medium-grade computers,” the team reported.

Future Aspirations

Oncyber, established in 2021, is a Metaverse development platform enabling users to design their own three-dimensional, immersive experiences accessible via any browser. In the future, the platform aims to introduce a world build editor that will feature “an array of user-friendly tools for real-time lighting, shadowing, terrain editing, scripting, and more, with GPT-powered commands on top.” This will empower users, regardless of their prior experience, to create high-quality, high-performance 3D environments.