Taken straight from Documentation here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/…TechnicalGuide
Components can optionally be divided into either 1 or 4 (2x2) subsections. These sections are the base unit of Landscape LOD calculation.
Using the 4 (2x2) subsections option gives you the same size heightmap as using four times as many components with only one subsection each, but using fewer components generally gives better performance.
The size of each section (in number of vertices) must be a power of two (with a maximum of 256x256). This is so that the different LOD levels can be stored in mipmaps of the texture. This will lead to the number of quads in a component either being a power of two minus 1 (if 1 section per component) or a power of two minus 2 (if 4 sections per component).
The choice of component size vs the total number of components is a performance trade-off. Smaller component sizes allow quicker LOD transitions and also allows for the occlusion of more terrain, but the smaller size necessitates more components.
Each component has a render-thread CPU processing cost and each section is a draw call, so try to keep these numbers to a minimum. For the largest Landscapes, Epic recommends a maximum of 1024 components.
mjbn77:
Lets say, I want to start with a landscape that is 500m x 500m in my game world. It is supposed to be beautiful and detailed, but should run good on current gaming hardware. What settings should I use for such a landscape?
This is a multi-faceted question. You can never attribute just one object to overall performance impact. Especially landscapes. You could make a 500mx500m landscape and have it run fine. But if you recklessly fill it without paying attention you could end up with a 500m squared lag fest.
Yes. I had to recently do this for my 4x4 tiled landscape. I changed component size from 1x1 to 2x2 which reduced my overall landscape components by an exponential factor.