---
title: "Apex Renderer Performance Guide"
description: "Date: 2026-06-04"
engineVersion: v1.0.234
date: 2026-09-28
license: "(c) Gessa, proprietary. Cite with attribution to https://gessa.ai/docs/. Terms: https://gessa.ai/terms/."
canonical: https://gessa.ai/docs/creator/graphics/apex-renderer-performance/
---
# Apex Renderer Performance Guide

Date: 2026-06-04

Use this guide with the Workbench Profiler. The profiler is the source of truth for backend, effective tier, p95 frame time, draw calls, light counts, culling, streaming, memory pressure, warmup, and budget warnings.

## Quality Tiers And Hardware

- Low: fallback or low-end devices. Minimal post, tight light and texture budgets.
- Medium: broad desktop/mobile baseline.
- High: capable desktop authoring target.
- Ultra: high-refresh desktop path.
- Cinematic: high-end desktop path, not a guarantee for every browser/device.

The effective tier may be lower than the authored tier when the device, browser, backend, memory, or adaptive mode requires it. The profiler reports the clamp reason.

## Budget Warnings

Server-side project budgets protect collaborators. At warning thresholds the project can still accept changes, but the team should reduce live entities, enabled lights, prefab instances, material variants, or oversized assets. At cap thresholds the server rejects the mutation before it propagates to collaborators.

The warning exists to keep other creators' browsers responsive. A scene with 50k authored lights can be valid only when most lights are inactive, baked, culled, or clustered to low visible overlap.

## Streaming Radius

Keep high-detail assets inside the inner streaming ring. Put distant geometry into lower LODs or imposters. The renderer streams high mips near the camera and drops distant mips under memory pressure.

## LOD And Imposters

Use mesh LODs for near and mid distance. Use octahedral imposters for distant static props, crowds, and vegetation. Imposters preserve scale and motion cues at a fraction of the cost, but they are not full-fidelity skinned actors.

## Performance Overlay

Check these fields first:

- `sceneExecutionProfile`: `trivial`, `standard`, or `heavy`.
- p95 frame time.
- backend and effective tier.
- visible/culled entity counts.
- active lights and clustered lights.
- draw calls and pipeline switches.
- material variant count and cache hit rate.
- memory pressure level and eviction counts.
- loading/warmup status.

If an empty or small scene reports `heavy` without a clear reason, file a renderer regression.