How to handle thousands of point lights

Development Programming & Scripting
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1

Hi,

I’m trying to simulate a city during the night and I’m actually facing of a performance problem.
When I fly over the city I’ve about 30,000 point lights to render and I’ve not enough fps.

Is there a solution to improve fps with point lights or a way to fake it ?

I’ve already disable all shadows.

Thanks.

2

Rendering thousands of point lights can indeed be a performance challenge, especially in a cityscape simulation. One approach to improve FPS is to implement light culling techniques where you selectively render only the lights that are visible to the camera or affect nearby objects. This reduces the number of lights processed by the GPU at any given time, leading to better performance.

You can also consider using light baking or precomputed lighting techniques to fake the effect of point lights. This involves precalculating lighting information for static objects in your scene which can significantly reduce the computational load during runtime. Experimenting with different optimization techniques and finding the right balance between visual fidelity and performance is key to achieving smooth performance in your city simulation.

3

Yes, it is. Same as GTA - change visbility of light after some distance and replace it by emmisive plane.

4

Thanks for your reply.
By emmisive plane did you mean UMaterialBillboard ?
If it’s not, how can you achieve the rotation of each plane to face the camera properly ?