I have been trying to use culling over the last few days and it doesn’t do what the unreal docs imply it does which is improve performance and I’m now wondering is that what it is for. What I believed culling did was effectively at a certain distance from the player the meshes disappeared and effectively would give the same performance as if they were not there at all but this is 100% not the case. I put a house with 100’s of objects into my map which brought down my fps to the low 20’s I had already checked to make sure there were no other performance issues like lights causing the frame drop so it was only the number of meshes that caused the issue.
I set up a cull volume so even if you were right outside the house all the items in the house would be culled. There was no performance boost.
I have a large map painted with a lot of foliage so I used the cull distance to show only a few feet of foliage around me. I was getting around 30 fps.
so I thought that maybe the foliage around me that I couldn’t cull was causing the issue so with the foliage deleted from the map I added some around me far denser than had been when I was using culling and the fps were still up around 90 fps.
So ya this is insanely annoying I’m trying to improve performance in my game and this is clearly as you can see in the screenshots not working. So if culling is not the same as deleting the foliage from the map then what is it for.
Something not right, lookat the skysphere, its got colored patterns in it, those shouldn’t be there, it looks like the screenshots
were made of sackcloth instead of being from a video game.
That’s not a public part of my page so I never got around to fully finishing it all up. While the information should be mostly correct, I think I made a couple of assumptions here and there, but nothing major. Overall, this should at least give you an idea of visibility/occlusion culling and some steps you can take to improve performance for your games. Keep in mind that this will not always automatically make your game magically perform better. You may have to make other optimizations not related to visibility culling in order to improve performance. I’d highly recommend taking a look at the Performance and Profiling pages for documnentation to start narrowing down where you’re hitting performance hits so you can direct your efforts accordingly.
