I’m making a game that requires a high FPS, so I’m trying to find a more performant solution to large reflective planes (coastlines, specifically), I don’t really care how blurry or low-res the reflection is, I just want something close-enough. I’ve been experimenting with lumen reflections, screenspace reflections, planar reflections and scene capture reflections (both box and sphere) and I can’t seem to get a good looking solution that is also accurate. I feel my best bet is a planar reflection but I’m not sure if that’d be any more performant than using Lumen or Screen Space, but those also have a tendency to create weird artifacts and other less-than-stellar behavior.
Most tutorials I see on reflections cover only small, interior spaces, and often consider quality over performance.
I feel like getting sphere reflections to look right would be ideal, since they’re the most performant, but since they take a picture only from one angle having very open levels with lots of height variations inevitably results in reflections looking bad from certain angles.
And using multiple overlapping spheres causes very strange artifacts, not to mention I keep getting RHI crashes that require reverting my maps to pre-capture states.
Planar reflections might work here since I’ve only got the one plane for these, and low-ish poly levels, but even after fiddling with the settings, they seem to cause performance problems on my higher-end machine. I think this is likely due to the size of the planes in question. Such as this particularly large level set on open ocean.
Which looks really good with a planar reflection:
But now this crashes on startup, complaining that
”Uniform buffer bound to slot 4 is not what the shader expected”
And I’m not even sure if this would be all that performant regardless.
Is there a better way?