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Jack Knobel

@jackknobel.com

193 followers 224 following 58 posts

Game Engine Tinkerer, 🇦🇺in 🇫🇮. Senior Core Engine Programmer at Remedy Games. Prev: Frostbite, The Artful Escape The Bards Tale IV, Trover Saves the Universe, Kieru.

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Jack Knobel @jackknobel.com · 24/09/2026

If you’re curious about how we got here I’ll be talking about exactly this ⬆️ at GCAP in Melbourne in less than 2 weeks! registration.crowdcomms.com/gcap2026/sch... Once I’m back from holiday (end of October) I’ll try to get this online 🙌

Getting Northlight Performance Under
CONTROL
Future Ready
Engineering & Technical
02:00 - 02:50 PM
Jack Knobel
Room 109

Getting Northlight Performance Under CONTROL

CONTROL: Resonant is Remedy's densest game to date, with entity and component counts massively exceeding anything the engine has seen before. As a result, the Northlight Core team had to re-evaluate our approach to many of the runtime systems.

In this talk, I’ll provide a high-level overview of the different parts of Northlight and break down a series of CPU-side frames in CONTROL: Resonant's "airlocks". Within these frames, I’ll detail both the attempts made and the actual solutions used to solve the ‘Stutter Struggle’ we repeatedly encountered, including discussions of world streaming, data transformation pipelines, ECS and resource management.

This talk is for intermediate to advanced engineers. By the end, you’ll have a concrete checklist of where to look first when a transition blows your frame budget on a dense, gameplay-system-heavy game, and a set of steps you can utilise when the obvious fixes aren’t enough. Join me as I walk through the variety of attempts and techniques we applied; virtual memory, data baking techniques, parallelism and more will all be explored!

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Jack Knobel @jackknobel.com · 24/09/2026

And a side by side It’s not perfect, and there’s a lot more I wish we had time for But that is the reality of shipping a multi-platform game of this size!

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Jack Knobel @jackknobel.com · 24/09/2026

Through some considerable hard work between the Resonant team and practically all departments in Northlight here’s where we are today on PS5 in this same spot

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Jack Knobel @jackknobel.com · 24/09/2026

We did a LOT here to improve the performance Here’s where we were a year ago on base PS5 at performance target ( 60hz )

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Jack Knobel @jackknobel.com · 24/09/2026

For Alan Wake 2 we could hide our level loads through fade to blacks and loading screens For Resonant this wasn’t something we could do Enter the “airlock”, a void between two levels where we can safely do a level load and unload without *hopefully* any of you noticing!

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Jack Knobel @jackknobel.com · 24/09/2026

First I just want to thank my wonderful fiancee @aliviamantel.com, she’s truly the best 😍 AND has a song in the game! You can check it out at Atlantis cafe in zone pattern (near the dancer 👀)

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Jack Knobel @jackknobel.com · 24/09/2026

I’m in the game!!! Now for a thread of things 🧵

Credits scene with an arrow pointing at my name saying “me”

A brick wall with a decal saying “buckets KNOBEL barrels”

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Jack Knobel @jackknobel.com · 11/08/2026

Been a hot minute since I spoke at GCAP but I’m BACK This time talking about CPU performance on CONTROL Resonant; a mere week and a half after we launch! Stutter struggles were real so I’ll be discussing how we tried to solve some of the worst offenders Join me on Monday 5th Oct 14:00 - 14:50

A screenshot of my talk summary.

Getting Northlight Performance Under CONTROL

CONTROL Resonant is Remedy's densest game to date, with entity and component counts massively exceeding anything the engine has seen before. As a result, the Northlight Core team had to re-evaluate our approach to many of the runtime systems.

In this talk, I’ll provide a high-level overview of the different parts of Northlight and break down a series of CPU-side frames in CONTROL Resonant's "airlocks". Within these frames, I’ll detail both the attempts made and the actual solutions used to solve the ‘Stutter Struggle’ we repeatedly encountered, including discussions of world streaming, data transformation pipelines, ECS and resource management.

1100