I’m noticing that I still get noticeable performance drop from foliage when looking out across my landscape, even for foliage that is far outside of it’s cull range.
Increasing the foliage instance count per cluster helps, but this seems to be a problem that will cause scaling issues as i continue to expand my map.
Does anyone have insight into this or have any ideas on how to mitigate the issue?
I don’t know for sure, but the gameplay profiler might help us discover what exactly about the foliage is causing the performance drop. Is it being “drawn” even though it’s not showing up on the screen? Or is it something else?
Yes. You need to hide the far clusters, because the maxdrawdistande seems to be insuficient, take a look of this:
Wow, @CobaltUDK Thanks for sharing that. I’m going to test it now, and will report back on performance benefits using your approach.
It seems for me, disabling all my foliage, gives around 3fps increase (from a high vantage point looking over the whole map). I think the reason I’m not seeing larger performance benefits is because I’m already using quite large instance sizes per cluster. I believe for me the static meshes for rocks and speedtrees are causing me a fair bit of performance, so I will look to optimize this.
Still, @CobaltUDK 's approach is very cool, and something I will certainly look into as my map continues to grow in size.
Thanks for your reply.
As you can see in the last image from my link, from 36 fps to 76 with a panoramic view of the map.
The method is for disable the out of range clusters, but if the radius is very big, then the improvement is low. I’m using 300 instances per cluster, with a radius of 3000, for the palms. The performance is good. My bottleneck are the big threes, with 7000 triangles each. When there are a lot of them near of the player, they ruin the draw stat and then the framerate. I want to use other model instead.
But I use the foliage tool only for thress. Grass is spawned dynamically around the player. For the threes, I have about 10000 clusters in total in the map.
I remember you said that you are using the foliage tool for the grass too, and that perhaps is excesive for the foliage tool.