franktech wrote about landscape not receiving updates since UDK, and he has good deal of truth here, because technically, it is the same system, since UDK transitioned from terrain to landscapes. Surprisingly, I used to favor that legacy one, but that is personal. In fact, there is actually not much innovations to add until today.
But what is observed, that terrains are taking longer to render and consume more memory in UE4 than in CE. To be fair this difference is quite insignificant, that alone, it can be safely omitted. However, coupled with a few other limitations of UE4, this performance hit amplifies. I am speaking about overly complicated pipeline for authoring shaders outside of material editor mostly. The first feature it hits is a landscape.
I’m already over this stage, but lack of more accessible way to do your own shaders in UE4 is probably the most contributing feature to the amount of low-performance whine.
Landscape relies on splatting textures in pixel shader, thus you will be always constrained by the number of layers you can use. This is the main limitation of landscape functionality in UE. Cry engine uses conventional multi-pass approach here with a few tricks, and wins ten folds in performance, while loosing at quality and flexibility of blends. Again, this is a long term strategic choice, and left alone, it is not bad at all, however how come users do not have easy access to use of flow control in material? Landscape rendering is crippled without it. So, speaking frankly, it is not even a flaw of landscape system at all, but rather material editor.
Then again, some pretty basic, yet essential convenience features are missing from landscape editor, like slope-based layer painting, pen pressure sensitivity etc.
By proper use of POM I meant its implementation far beyond that material editor node. You can’t be serious using POM node in material and comparing its visuals with tessellation on landscape.
I did not have any issues with tessellation in UE4, not even before 4.13 change, even taking into account that it performed measurably worse for me, than my implementation of terrain tessellation for another widespread engine.
What I and a good deal of other users did have and still having problem with, is dynamic lighting performance, and particularly, CSM performance with landscape tessellation. To my regret, briefly looking through landscape shaders and renderer, I haven’t figured the root of the issue myself. That effort was beyond the scope of the project anyway.
So no, mariomoguy, I am not confusing one conversation for another.
What about users, that bought your game, while having GTX 780 installed? How will you go with explaining them, why they are getting slideshow? A recommendation to buy GTX 1060? A statement, that they were getting normal framerates in other games, because those games were not UE4 - powered?