wow, this is pretty performance expensive indeed. I second the pettition of a performance tutorial/guide. The performance section on documentation is pretty empty.
1) What could be VERY helpfull is a documentation section with an isolation of properties that are performance heavy, in some kind of qualitative grouping , like low, medium and hight.
That way we could play with the parameters values in a more coordinated way to actually use this asset in a real game.
Actually I get pretty low fps, that without any foliage being rendered.
2) Another thing is the tilling of some layers are pretty bad, this is solved with macro texturing in slide (i thnik) layer. Is there some way to make the tilling less aggressive for the other layers?
I play with some other textures and I can do something by myself modifing the shadder, but I think this package should include a proper solution to that without the need to mess around with the shader or fill everything with grass meshes hiding the tiling.
I hadn’t too much time to play around, this is just some thoughts of my first impressions.
I have actually requested a refund for exactly the same reasons. On a 8km x 8km terrain my frames drop to 10 FPS … but yet with the Auto Material from the Tropic Islands pack for instance I can get full FPS with no drop.
The optomisation section on the website is pointless and actually didn’t get me any performance increase.
I was optimistic about the pack, but it is definitely not designed for large maps which is unfortunate. It would be nice if this was mentioned on the marketplace page … but anyway.
I’m getting 30 FPS with 10x10, Epic settings, tesselation on and over 240 000 grass foliage instances (custom grass, not from LAM). I think this is a acceptable result. If u have a look on ARK, I can’t even play ARK with Epic settings over 15-20 FPS.
For sure LAM is performance heavy, but not that much you wrote.
Maybe you should play a bit with your settings, like increasing the landscape lod factor, use custom grass and be sure that your graphic settings aren’t set to epic when your pc isn’t good enough to play other games on epic.
Well I respect your opinion, but that performance hit in an empty landscape let you with no room for add anything else, and you still need to create your world, and you still have to add all the gameplay elements. You can’t and you shoudn’t be wasting that performance amount only for your landspace, unless you are only rendering an image.
But this is only my opinion.
Trust me … my PC is good enough so your assumption is invalid, see my tests below. A lot of the tweaks I would have to make would mean disabling features or I would have to disable Multiplayer support, which is a no go. The minimum I would accept without extra buildings is 60 FPS and even then I would not be 100% happy. Your terrain and foliage and textures for those should not effect your performance … if your rig is that good then just using LAM on a 10km x 10km rig has cost you 90 FPS … and you are happy with that?
I agree with @ALexarg … and respectfully reject your statement. If you want, check my tests below and then try to repudiate them if you can. If you still think my rig is bad then please try the tests yourself and share your results with us, your numbers might be higher but you will still see the point I am trying to make.
My test was as follows on a middle tier rig which most players would have. Wherever possible I used the 3rd Person Template as a testing template.
1). I used the Military Base as a starting point and tested that map as is (Military Base in Environments - UE Marketplace) - with no tweaks or changes - Average 75 to 85 FPS … 11 MS … this is an 8km x 8km map.
2). I then tested the Tropic Islands pack (Tropic Islands in Environments - UE Marketplace) - with no tweaks or changes - Average 55 to 65 FPS … 11 MS … this is an 8km x 8km island map with water.
My next test was to try the Auto Material from LAM and Tropic Islands on the Landscape from the Military Base, so I exported the Heightmap.
1). LAM on this landscape with nothing extra and no tweaks or changes - Average 5 to 10 FPS … 100 MS.
2). Tropic Islands Auto Material on this landscape with nothing extra and no tweaks or changes - Average 85 to 95 FPS … 10 MS.
So now, tell me what I can do to tweak the results and get the performance I require? Disabling features is pointless because then I should not have bothered buying the pack. Doing level streaming or something else also won’t help because then I loose multiplayer support. Using a smaller sized map is also pointless as my project requires larger maps.
I tried everything on the Website with regards to tweaking performance and that bordered on disabling features, and it didn’t help.
I think LAM is an awesome tool for anything other than a game and this should be pointed out on the Marketplace page. I live in South Africa, $100+ is a pretty big chunk of money for us and not just an amount I can say “oh well” too. I requested a refund about 2 hours after I purchased the pack when I realised it was not able to perform the task for me adequately and after running the above tests.
Why has the seller not commented on these posts or trying to help us with the performance issues?
Then there are other things like collisions on the rocks … so basically this pack, as I stated earlier, is useless as it stands for being used in a game … which was not mentioned anywhere.
@Alexarg - What landscape is that? I would like to run another test on that Landscape without LAM, with LAM, and then two other landscape auto materials I have access to. Can you send me that landscape or the heightmap with the settings you used (as long as it is legal … if it is from another pack just let me know and I will see if I have it). I want to try as many options as possible, maybe the developer will eventually respond and offer some advice … although I doubt it … but I am the eternal optimist.
Nah, it is a landscape I made in word machine in a couple of minutes just for testing purposes. Is a 4033*4033 resolution and the pictures was taken in a corner of the landscape. I can send you the file when i get back home.
Yeah … I just wish the marketplace was more transparent in this regard as I have now been denied a refund and I am sitting with a $100+ asset that is useless to me. 8-{
Perfect … if you can DropBox it or something for me … keen to try a few tests with some other materials. Although I am probably just wasting my time as my refund has been rejected and the seller is silently absent from these discussions. I wonder how many other people they caught out with the sale.
Sure no prob, just for your info, I am using other similar asset from marketspace and the performance hit in the same landscape is not even comparable.
It is not useless. You can use it for composing or LEARNING. We learnt a lot from it. Take out of it, what you need and make your own landscape material.
I use Unreal Engine to make games … not ArchViz, not composing. Hence in my instance it is useless. My point is and has always been that this should be identified on the marketplace as not designed for large maps and not optomised for games … if that had been stated then I would never have bought it.
The only thing you can learn from this is how NOT to make a landscape material for a game … so your point is moot because in my case it is a useless asset and will never be used.
Hello guys,
Optimization it is the actual topic for us and currently we’re researching different ways to increase performance significantly.
Currently you can use some tricks from Optimization section on our web site: http://www.veagames.com/how-to-use
The time spent to Unity release was more than planned but now we’ve back to actual performance research for UE4 LAM. We tried different variants of LAM optimization, and I think we can public some powerful results in the next v1.04 update.
The problem of a big fps drop on a huge landscape with LAM - Tesellation.
You need turn it off in Material properties to get a fine fps results - the checkbox for tessellation in LAM material instance unfortunately don’t turn’s off the tessellation system.
There is no tests with Tropical Islands autograss (it’s permanently in state “building grass maps (240…)” in the scene with same setup)
So there is no problems with material at all, but tessellation setup is need to be improved.
We plan next features in LAM v1.04:
Make tessellation disabled by default
Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) as alternative for tessellation (tessellation still be available)
Add Quality Configuration - switching between customized grasstypes (grass shadows, density, lods of grass will be custom for diferrent setup)
Thank you very much for your feedback!
We want to improve quality of our products and your feedback is highly appreciated.
If you have any questions, ideas, suggestions, please feel free to contact our customer support ().
@SDVenom - Thanks for the info. Your images aren’t showing unfortunately, but there is enough for me to try your tests as well and compare some results with the changes you mentioned.
I am glad to see you are going to look at the performance and make some changes, it is much appreciated. Thanks again for getting back to everyone and providing some options.
I hope the performance changes work out. I got this, and, have been looking for other solutions.
duel 1080GTX cards and i sit at 40FPS with LAM
I disabled tess and all foliage and i dont gain anything (you dont even want to know my foliage count hahaha)
I had to downgrade my map from 8k to 2k just to get some FPS overhead so that i could add all my foliage.
Just removing LAM from the setup (the material from the landscape) i can easily push 100-120FPS without skipping a beat
It would be amazing to be able to just use this asset “as is” and not lose 50-75% of my total frames. Using this on a multiplayer game just isnt even in the cards as users would need massive HW to keep up (and imagine the server side of the calcs … ugh)
