In gaming, lag and/or long loads can interrupt play and possibly dissuade players from playing again. Roblox is constantly working to improve game performance on its end, but there are ways you can improve performance as well.

Analysis Tools

Roblox offers various built-in tools for analyzing game performance, including:

Place Setup and Design

The following setup and design tips can make significant improvements in overall game performance.

Content Streaming

Game content streaming allows the Roblox engine to dynamically load and unload assets in regions of the world. For a detailed explanation, best practices, and implementation notes, see articles/content streaming|Game Content Streaming.

Teleportation

Very large worlds may benefit from /articles/Teleporting Between Places|teleportation. For instance, if a fantasy world has several towns, a castle, multiple large dungeons, and a haunted forest, you should make each a separate place and teleport players between them at specific points, like a dungeon’s entrance/exit.

Terrain

Roblox’s /articles/Intro To Terrain|terrain system offers peak efficiency per unit and automatic level-of-detail. When using terrain, consider these tips:

• Blend different materials for visual variation — they cost the same in terms of performance (except for water).
• Enable articles/content streaming|content streaming.

Lighting

One light with high brightness is cheaper than many intersecting lights with lower brightness, and it’s more optimal to use non-moving, non-shadow-casting lights. Also, the ShadowMap lighting technology causes all objects to cast shadows by default, so consider Voxel lighting if your game doesn’t require distinct shadows.

Replication

Models placed inside certain storage containers are replicated to the player’s local client — even if they don’t exist in the 3D world — meaning they occupy memory even if the player can’t see them. It may help to keep infrequently-used models in ServerStorage until they need to be placed in the game world.

Object Properties

Level-of-Detail

Level-of-detail for a /articles/Mesh Parts|mesh or /articles/3D Modeling with Parts|solid-modeled part defines how detailed it appears in proximity to the camera. If a place has a large number of detailed meshes or solid-modeled parts, you can improve performance by setting each instance’s enum/RenderFidelity|RenderFidelity property to Automatic.

Anchoring

Anchor all non-moving objects, as anchored objects are more efficient in terms of rendering/physics. Do not simply rely on a large object’s mass to keep it in place.

Collisions

If an object will be in close proximity to moving objects or players, but it never needs to collide with them — for instance a “ghost” wall — set BasePart/CanCollide|CanCollide to false. Do not, however, take time to set this property on distant objects that will never collide with anything, as it will not improve performance.

Transparency

Use partial object BasePart/Transparency|Transparency sparingly, as semi-transparent objects inhibit a lot of internal rendering optimizations. If you require transparency on several BasePart|BaseParts, attempt to merge them using solid modelling (a transparent union is more optimal than a group of 10 smaller transparent parts).

Materials / Texturing

For BasePart|BaseParts, use built-in enum/Material|Materials in favor of Texture objects, as materials are more efficient in regards to replication and rendering. For MeshPart|MeshParts, however, a texture applied via its MeshPart/TextureID|TextureID is equally efficient to setting its material. That said, textures occupy more memory than materials, so you should monitor the GraphicsTexture value in the Memory tab of the /articles/Developer Console|Developer Console.

Collision Fidelity

Both solid-modeled and MeshPart objects have a enum/CollisionFidelity|CollisionFidelity property which controls the “detail” of the object’s collision bounds. The following options are ordered from most performant to least performant.

Shadow Casting

If you’ve enabled the ShadowMap lighting technology, all objects will cast shadows by default. If a specific object doesn’t need to cast distinct shadows, disable its CastShadow property.