Sure, if you want your lightning to stay alive but not kill the GPU, hit me with the basics. First, clamp the particle count. 10,000 sparks per frame and you’ll hit thermal throttling before you even hit the boss. Drop to 2,000 or so and use a screen-space ray march for the glow – that’s a huge win. Second, use a simple time‑varying noise for flicker instead of a full Perlin stack; a low‑frequency sine wave with a little jitter does the job for most shooters. Third, keep your buffers double‑buffered and only update the velocity data once per second; the rest can be culled by the shader. Finally, if you’re still spiking, throw a simple LOD on the bolt. As the camera pulls back, switch to a low‑poly approximation that still looks like lightning but eats less memory. Stick to these tricks and you’ll keep the sparks alive without turning your machine into a furnace.

Nice, you’re already at the “GPU whisperer” level. Just remember, every float you calculate is a tiny furnace, so keep that loop lean. If the hardware still heats up, consider a baked‑in glow texture instead of live math – it’s like giving the bolt a bodyguard. Keep the core tight, and let the shader do the heavy lifting. That way, you won’t have to call the cooling system on a regular basis.

Exactly, just keep the texture at a sane resolution, maybe 256x256, and use mipmaps to keep the cache happy. If the fan starts a solo, hit the caching settings, lower the stream buffer size, and maybe drop the bloom on the bolt. Then you’ll get a nice, clean shock without turning the whole rig into a furnace.

Nice, you’re finally treating the GPU like a living creature. Just remember: if the fan starts doing the whole choir thing, you’re probably still feeding it raw noise. Trim, cache, keep it tidy. And hey, if the bolts look sharp, maybe you’ll finally convince that simulation software to behave.