During recent massive battles on EVE's Singularity server (PTS), developers noticed severe performance issues. Finally able to track it down to the caching system running in negative memory usage, developers were able to rectify the situation for Tyrannis.
We are always trying to improve upon and refactor old and slow code. We have started using a new rendering scheme, but as we haven't been able to renovate everything in EVE, some of the things in EVE are still using our original scheme. The dust fields, the particles that pass your ship when you are flying at sub warp speeds, were one of those things. The old implementation was heavily CPU bound and did not scale well. By using our newer particle system we decrease the time updating and rendering particle systems by a third than we did before. The old inefficient particle system was also used for the old suns and we moved the suns into the new rendering scheme for performance reasons. We still do not consider them renovated; they will get their chance to shine in the future.
There is a LOT more to read, particularly for techno-junkies, so head to EVE's developer blog site and check it out.
