I have added Niagara systems fire to my project. The problem is that when I add about 5 of these the FPS drops. Even when I am not in the scene the FPS is dropped. How can I optimize this?
It sounds like there are 1 million particles…
Hello there!
Niagara’s performance can be affected by a pletora of factors, and it depends greatly on your project’s needs, what are you trying to accomplish. Meaning, we would need more context on what your scene looks like, how many elements are present, and how are you using the fire effect.
As for best practices and general advise, you can check the community’s documentation on the matter, as well as the related threads below:
Niagara is advertised as a next-generation feature that can efficiently draw thousands of particles, but in reality it is just a regular particle system that can easily become heavy if not tuned.
The lightest way to render fire is to use a single particle facing the camera with sub-UV animation (like a fire in Minecraft). If you have the performance to spare, you can also add sparks and smoke.
I’m pretty curious what a ‘regular’ particle system is in this case. When Niagara needs to be everything from a 3d fluid simulation to swarm intelligence to garden variety smoke, something’s bound to give. I agree that there are serious perf problems, but I think it’s because Niagara delivered so effectively on being flexible and extentable that perf was what they had to give up.
Two things:
Niagara specifically designed a class of emitters optimized for large draws of simpler behavior, and I think that could be a huge help because basic fire isn’t that heavy.
I am aware that Nanite doesn’t support translucency, but I’m still offering this just to make sure it’s enabled for any opaque effects so you can cut down on rendering whereever you can. I hope your work goes well 