Horrible performance with trees

[Maximum-Dev]

@MonsOlympus;653815

Id just like to chime in, if these are known weaknesses of UE4 as you say and Cryengine better supports the feature set you require then I think its a mature perspective to consider moving to an engine which may cause you the least resistance. Obviously these issues can be alleviated in UE4 but the skill of the person making the scene is heavily in question not only the renderer, to jump on the renderer first is really not the best approach in my opinion. Its not that youre entirely wrong, its the way people around these forums expect Epic to do their work for them, obviously Id like the renderer to be as fast an general purpose as possible but Cryengine was built with foliage in mind since it was used for Crysis so thats a specific set which may always outperform a general purpose solution.

Granted not everyone uses the correct tone in putting things across but there are a hugely varying bunch of age groups and skill levels, its extremely difficult to come to a conclusion from acouple of lines especially when discussing something as complex as a renderer, you have to admit you hugely jumped the gun with your blanket statement about optimization.

You can argue both of these calculations result in the same number:

A) 10000 + 10000 = 20000
B) 9243 + 10757 = 20000

But to say which one fits better in your mind, it’s A. And that’s where you can say A works better. And if you was to force everyone to go with B and argue that’s not any harder to memorize because it results in the same number as A, that’s a problem.

And no, no one is blaming the renderer in the first place and no one has jumped high with their guns. Do you know me? do you know anything of my background to say that about me?
I’ve been using Cryengine 2 since 2007 and 3 ever since the Free SDK came out, and the moment I started using UE4 about 2 years ago, I noticed the difference. To make sure I wasn’t doing something wrong I ran so many tests using the same meshes and same textures in both engines and tried to keep all the conditions as close as possible. The result is always 180 degree different performance wise. No I do not wish to go back to cryengine because of this, but I’m letting the OP know he will not be able to get the same result as in cryengine because that’s what he was after. Even if you optimize (degrade the quality) of your foliage so much so they run ok in UE4, the (unoptimized) meshes still run better in cryengine, so it’s not entirely an artist issue at all. Does cry work better there because their games relied so much on dense foliage? or that UE4 performs worse there because it has more uses over cry? that’s not the point of this discussion. The point is the artist is not to blame and he is only a small part of a large issue.

Edit: Now since this thread is in “Feedback for Epic”, I’d like to add a test, maybe they consider some improvements.

This is 817 tree instances, almost all of them in the viewport, ~4000 Tris each + lods, No billboards used, 7 shadow cascades. Most atmospheric features such as fog, sun rays etc. enabled by default. Running on GTX 970 without overclocking.