Because sniper mode was a major part of the game, with the ability to zoom up to 100x, the team decided not to employ any of the usual techniques to limit pop-up, such as clipping and fogging. A major technical issue was that of frame rate. Shiny felt most PC games maintained frame rate by using big pixels in low resolution, which works as long as the game is not running SVGA mode. Based on their experiences developing for consoles, they wanted to take a different approach; using small pixels in high resolution. They set a target of maintaining a constant frame rate of at least 30fps at all times on all machines, and so they simply play-tested the game multiple times. Any moment when the frame rate dropped below 30, they either removed something from that particular part of the game, rewrote the graphics code, or altered the artwork until they could get the frame rate back up to where they wanted without having to reduce the resolution or increase the pixel size. According to Bruty, "We had no idea how fast we could get the engine when we started. The game would run too slow if we textured everything, so some parts were just flat-shaded for speed. We did our best to make that look like a design choice, or shadows, but it was a tricky balance."