Hello, we have been experimenting with instanced skinned mesh components with PCG spawned via InstancedSkinnedMeshSpawner nodes.
The issue we have is that despite the animation being entirely driven on the GPU the InstancedSkinnedMeshComponents still tick on the CPU. As they have no bone data to update on the CPU the ticks are individually very cheap and a majority of their cost is from updating their bounds. However, with hundreds of these components the total tick cost can become more than 1ms on the game thread on consoles.
Our current use case is for animating foliage that does not require constant bounds updates on the CPU so we would like to disable the ticks that seem unnecessary in this case. For blueprint actors using these components this is not a problem, but from the InstancedSkinnedMeshSpawner nodes in PCG it is not clear to us if there is an intended way to control tick behaviour on these spawned components or if it is necessarily safe to disable these ticks. For now we have added some engine changes to disable the ticks on components spawned this way which has been working fine for us.
Is this CPU cost something you have observed in your own use of InstancedSkinnedMeshComponents and do you have any recommendations on how to go about reducing this cost? Is it safe to disable the tick on these components and will these kind of controls be exposed to PCG spawners in the future?
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