Optimizing scene

[anonymous_user_5d2d3469]

@The_dragon01

Good morning,
I created an environment with static meshes, some foliage and many particle systems. I already worked for optimizing it, but I achieve 32-33 FPS in game. Foliage is already set with culling and LODs. I was thinking of optimizing the lights:

1. Should I set point Lights on Static or Movable for best performance?
   2)Any tip to gain more fps?
   3)I’m pretty sure I need to manage shadows because when I remove them I gain many fps. How could I manage this problem without removing shadows?
   Thank you for your assistance.

1: Use movable ONLY when you need to actually move said light otherwise use stationary for its quality (Similar but slightly less quality to dynamic, MUCH cheaper and a lot less buggy with things like reflection captures.) or static (Lowest cost, drops quality harshly due to ue4 or nothing really anti-aliasing its lightmaps so reserve this far/ambient lights, like skylight, otherwise use stationary for its flexibility.)

2: Strip off anything that takes a lot of power and doesnt contribute much. Use the command: profilegpu to help you find what is taking so much time to compute. Also, if you use planar reflections, force only 1 to be visible at a time, based on when it actually matters, otherwise use reflection capture/ssr.

3: Static only, you will get identical fps and keep your shadows, they wont look as good as stationary but they are free.

A tip: If you dont use a day night cycle, dont even touch dynamic directional lights, instead use a stationary directional light with cascaded shadow maps with lower settings and distance than the dynamic one. You will gain a lot of graphical quality and a bit of framerate.

Yet another tip: For that scene and other ones, you might want to keep an eye on global illumination if you want most of the area to be pitch black, as GI will, as its name implies, illuminate a lot more than just what is directly in the light, as it does in real life.

More tips: Reduce texture size when you cant tell the difference between the higher and lower res version. You will save a good amount of vram, stop it from going over the texture pool, and probably improve texture quality elsewhere due to the freed up space. Even if you dont need to free up space, its good practice and can actually free up some space in the final product.

Even more tips: If your aiming for DX11/DX12 only (Or DX13 if your from the future) Try BC7 compression on transparent textures, you will gain some texture quality at literally no cost whatsoever, just compatibility will be an issue for really old systems and it takes 2X space on non-transparent textures, but it looks great.