Hey Sam,
Thanks for the response! As far as I can tell the hitches have a chance to happen whenever the particle effects spawn but the required mips are not resident, this could be the first time or could happen again if it has been a while since the effect was seen.
We have a lot of different potential particle effects that can happen depending on the situation, so having these never stream is going to require a lot of GPU memory that we don’t really have the budget for. On lower texture quality settings we do have texture LOD groups with a LOD bias set for these textures, and that does help with the hitching (though still doesn’t completely fix it with a bias of 1) but on higher quality settings we would ideally like to use the full resolution mips.
Do you have any advice on either the CVars I mentioned, or on any other configuration that might help us avoid the allocation bottlenecks / prevent this process from blocking the frame? The answer may be that we end up having to be more aggressive with quality settings or have to change up the effects as you suggest but I’d like to explore any other options too!
Thanks,
Andy