Quarterly Engine Performance Patch — VRAM Improvements

This quarter's engine pass focuses on memory pressure. Valve has reworked the streaming pipeline so that map textures and weapon view-models share a unified VRAM pool with smarter eviction. Internal benchmarks show peak VRAM down ~18% on 8GB cards (RTX 3060 Ti, RX 6600 XT) at 1080p high settings.

Frame pacing is the bigger win for many. The pre-patch micro-stutters on Inferno's apartments-to-banana transition and Mirage's mid-jungle entry are gone after the streaming change. Players on 16GB+ GPUs see no regression and modest 2-4% average framerate gains thanks to better cache locality.

The patch deploys today; restart Steam to pick up the update.