Pool Room — CVL Performance Profile

The Pool Room is a custom Workshop map that represents a moderate hardware demand. While the geometry of the halls is simple, the extensive use of transparent water shaders, screen-space reflections (SSR) on ceramic tiles, and dynamic light refractions can impact performance on handhelds and low-end graphics cards.

CVL Platform Ratings & Benchmarks

Performance Analysis & Optimization

Steam Deck

The Steam Deck handles the Pool Room exceptionally well due to the map’s low asset counts. However, the water surfaces can cause frame drops to 32 FPS if graphics options are maxed out.

• Optimization: Set Reflection Quality to Medium and limit the frame rate to 40 FPS/Hz via the Steam Deck Quick Access Menu. Enabling TSR anti-aliasing on Medium ensures the tile grout lines look crisp without heavy performance draw. Refer to the Steam Deck Hider Tips for advanced gyro aims.

Mac OS (Wine/CrossOver)

Mac users running translation layers will experience slight stutters when first entering the large pool chambers due to shader-caching loops.

• Optimization: Enable D3DMetal (Apple GPTK) instead of DXVK to utilize native Apple Metal shader translations. Ensure MSync is checked in Whisky to resolve multi-threading bottlenecks. See the Mac Player Survival Guide for details.

Low-End PCs

For older desktop GPUs (e.g. GTX 1050 Ti or RX 570), the main bottleneck is the rendering of shadows on reflective tile surfaces.

• Optimization: Lower Shadow Quality to Low and set Resolution Scaling to 90%. This stabilizes the frame rate at a locked 60 FPS without ruining color representation.

Steam Deck Crash Analysis & Mitigation (OOM & VRAM Overflows)

While the Pool Room is generally rated as Stable on Steam Deck, players hosting large lobbies (6+ players) or running standard graphics configurations can experience sudden hard crashes, system lockups, or direct boots to the SteamOS game mode screen. Below is a detailed breakdown of these crash scenarios and their specific mitigations.

1. The VRAM Allocation Spike (VKD3D Driver Reset)

• The Cause: The Steam Deck utilizes shared memory (APU architecture) where system RAM and Video RAM (VRAM) share a single 16GB pool. By default, SteamOS only pre-allocates 1GB of this pool as dedicated VRAM, dynamically expanding it as the game demands. When you walk into the Deep Diving Pool, the sudden rendering of transparent water shaders combined with high-poly reflections forces VKD3D (the DX12-to-Vulkan translation layer) to request VRAM faster than SteamOS can allocate it. This causes a driver timeout, resulting in a black screen with game audio still playing, or a hard freeze.
• Mitigation:
  1. Turn off your Steam Deck.
  2. Hold down the Volume Up (+) button and press the Power button. Release Volume Up once you hear the boot chime to enter the BIOS utility.
  3. Navigate to Setup Utility > Advanced.
  4. Locate UMA Frame Buffer Size and change it from 1G to 4G.
  5. Save settings and exit. This forces SteamOS to reserve a flat 4GB of memory exclusively for graphics processing, preventing dynamic allocation timeouts when water shaders load.

2. Out of Memory (OOM) Crashes (CryoUtilities Fix)

• The Cause: Hosting a match on the Pool Room requires the Steam Deck to load player models, paint assets, and connection buffers into system RAM. Once memory usage approaches 14GB, the SteamOS Linux kernel triggers the Out-of-Memory (OOM) killer to protect the operating system, instantly closing the game client.
• Mitigation:
  1. Switch your Steam Deck to Desktop Mode.
  2. Open a browser and download the community utility CryoUtilities.
  3. Open CryoUtilities and click Recommended Settings. This adjusts the Linux virtual memory manager, changing the Swap File size from the default 1GB to 16GB and setting swappiness to 1.
  4. Switch back to Gaming Mode. The expanded swap file allows SteamOS to cache idle background assets to your storage drive, freeing up system RAM for active game processes.

3. Proton Compatibility Layer Crashes

• The Cause: Newer Proton versions (like Proton 9) can have multithreading synchronization desyncs (Esync/Fsync) when processing the UE5 physics asset engine of player characters running in water.
• Mitigation:
  1. Select Meccha Chameleon in your Steam library, go to Properties > Compatibility.
  2. Check Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool.
  3. Select Proton 8.0-5 or Proton Experimental from the dropdown menu.
  4. In the General tab under Launch Options, add the following override:

     PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 %command% -dx11

     Disabling Esync forces Proton to fall back to Fsync/MSync, resolving thread race conditions.

Safe Subscribe Workflow

To avoid download queue locks and server desyncs:

1. Subscribe directly to the map via Steam client Workshop.
2. Allow the Steam client download queue to complete before starting the game.
3. Pre-run the map locally on your client once to ensure train physics configurations have cached successfully. For download issues, see Workshop Download Stuck.