That could be automated by Nanite, I don’t see why you need to create LODs specifically for that. Besides, material complexity is nothing compared to Lumen and VSM.
I’m helping develop a plugin that swaps all the meshes in the scene with a custom one (to see the Mipmap level used) and the difference is just a few frames (117 to 120).
You can’t really say how a scene will perform. At the end of the day, it’s up to whoever is optimizing the level to figure out the best tricks to maximize performance. Given new options in Nanite, different teams can figure out ways to maximize performance for their games.
I am hard pressed on maximizing performance of my nanite scenes in native resolution before using upscalers so that they can provide more than just getting above that 60FPS threshold. Before, with TSR at 75%, i wasn’t hitting 60 in my scene. Now, I’m pushing closer to 90 FPS which is miles ahead of the original.
I just want things to work on a wider range of hardware and to give developers more options to optimize performance.
You may be fine with how performance is. But this can drastically change depending on the type of game you’re building. Mine is bit more complex and has a wide variety of different worlds which makes it harder to optimize using Nanite in its current state.