Rendering at 500 km/h in Gear.Club Unlimited 3

Eden Games renders a 60fps arcade racer at 500 km/h across platforms ranging from Switch 2 to high-end RTX PCs — all using a custom Scriptable Render Pipeline they've been developing since 2019. The pipeline is fully GPU-driven, with virtual texturing, async compute, and tight DLSS integration holding the framerate stable at extreme speeds.

On PC, the team uses a ReSTIR path tracer for ground truth validation — using ray tracing as a production tool for lighting validation, not just a runtime feature. The custom pipeline has shipped four games since 2019 and contributed new Unity APIs through direct collaboration with Unity's ray tracing team.

Sustaining 60fps at 500 km/h means the renderer must load, decompress, and draw new terrain and environment data every single frame. Any hitch or loading stall breaks immersion at those speeds. The game was also the first production release on Switch 2 hardware and the first shipped title using their custom SRP — meaning no prior production data to lean on.

Ray tracing acceleration structure (RTAS) memory became a bottleneck during production. The combination of dense trackside environments, high streaming speed, and new hardware constraints meant the pipeline needed to be fundamentally GPU-driven rather than CPU-submitted.

The custom SRP is a fully GPU-driven architecture — the CPU prepares draw lists and resource bindings, but the GPU itself drives culling, batching, and draw submission. Virtual texturing loads only the texture tiles actually visible on screen, keeping memory predictable regardless of environment size.

Incremental garbage collection and aggressive allocation removal eliminated frame spikes from Unity's GC. Async compute overlaps vertex processing, shadow maps, and post-processing workloads to maximize GPU occupancy across all work queues. Variable Refresh Rate acts as a safety margin when frame targets are briefly missed.

On PC, the pipeline supports DLSS 4.5, FSR 4, and XeSS 2 alongside a ReSTIR path tracer for ground truth validation. A custom Unity API was contributed to support GPU-generated acceleration structure data, solving the RTAS memory bottleneck through direct collaboration with Unity's ray tracing team.

The game maintains a stable 60fps at 500 km/h across all target platforms, including Switch 2 with full ray tracing. The custom SRP has now shipped four games since 2019, proving the "controlled degradation" approach — one scalable pipeline adapting to each platform's capabilities rather than maintaining separate rendering paths.