A 3D world that runs in a browser tab competes for resources with everything else the visitor has open. There is no installer, no driver check, and no minimum-spec page anyone reads. The world either holds its frame rate on ordinary hardware or it feels broken.
A few habits do most of the work. Cap the device pixel ratio — rendering at 3x on a phone burns battery for detail nobody perceives at arm's length. Clamp the frame delta so a background tab returning to focus does not teleport the player. Use fog honestly: it is not just mood, it is a draw-distance budget that lets geometry pop in without a visible seam.
Geometry discipline matters more than shader cleverness at this scale. The Holovate frontier renders 96 parcel tiles, their towers, terrain, roads, and a starfield as simple primitives with shared materials. Nothing in the scene needs a normal map to communicate what it is; emissive color and silhouette do the reading work.
The last habit is graceful failure. If WebGL is unavailable or the module fails to load, the world falls back to a stylized grid rather than a blank viewport. A fallback that preserves the page's usefulness is part of performance work, not an apology for it.
You can inspect all of these choices live — the world at holovate.space is unminified enough to read, and the documentation covers how the pieces connect.