Optimal total triangles near player for good performance?

[KibblesBits]

Hey everyone. So I’m trying to understand how many triangles can be loaded at once while still giving 60+ FPS on an average PC. I can’t figure out how to test it myself in unreal since when I play my world, it caps the game to like 10% of my CPU, so I don’t know what the game would be able to handle under normal circumstances once I’ve finished it and shipped it to the consumer.

Right now I’m trying to get a better handle on how many triangles can be near the player in total so that I can optimize my trees, rocks, and foliage around that before I spend 40 hours painting my world with trees and foliage.

Right now the megascan trees LOD 0 are 600,000 triangles, which is looking like a no go for performance. I’m trying to understand how low I should bring them before I start painting them in for a video game that I intend someone to play, not just a cinematic. Is 100,000 max triangles with LOD’s good enough? Or should I aim for 20,000 max triangles per tree, or what do you think?

And do keep in mind, two of my biomes are going to be forests, with one being a very thick forest that’s hard to navigate because of the tree density. Any input on this would help immensely. Thanks!

[ClockworkOcean]

If you’re just looking at tris, then you need to consider the total number in the scene, from any possible viewpoint.

Typically, a modern(ish) game could have 2mil, no problem. But for low end hardware, you might want to limit that to 500k. So you should never be drawing more than that, from any standpoint.

But, it’s not just that.

If you write a horrendous material, or hang some nasty on tick, it will kill everything even if you get the tri count right.

So it’s many things.

[KibblesBits]

Thank you, that was literally exactly the answer I needed, exactly what I was asking for. Now I know what to aim for when it comes to tree triangle counts to keep the viewport between 500k and 2 million at all times.