Have you looked at the Vorticity settings on your Flow Material?
If you reduce the Vorticity strength from it’s default value of nine to say three or four you can get a smoother flow of particles being spawned from the emitter and get the emitter to project particles further for any given velocity.
Otherwise I’d suggest looking at the following settings to improve the framerate associated with your flow emitter:
- As suggested earlier create a movable Flow Grid that follows your character vs tiling your entire level with Flow Grids.
- Go with as small a Virtual Grid Dimension as possible, I typically go with a Virtual Grid Dimension of EFGD 256.
- Increase the Grid Cell Size from 3.125 to say 4.0.
- Turn off rendering shadow ( can be very expensive even though it looks ).
- Turn down the simulation rate, in many cases you can get away with 30 FPS without any super noticeable artifacts.
- Look at the collision settings in your level and turn off Flow collision on objects where you won’t notice the particles passing through the objects.
Finally I’ve observed that framerates don’t appear to decrease linearly with the size/complexity of the Flow Emitter.
I can have a level running at 90 FPS in VR and make a small change to the size of the emitter and the FPS will drop to 44 FPS, so gradually increase the size/complexity of your emitter and observe where that performance cliff is for your level/emitter combination.
I hope helps,