I wonder if anyone can help with this…
I have a scene which renders fine ( 120 fps ). I then add an avenue of 60 trees, which I did as foliage, obviously. ( dynamic lighting ).
My fps drops to 50 fps ( when I’m looking through the trees ).
I tried replacing them with 60 static meshes and my frame rate went up! ( I got about 65 fps ).
From this I figured ( maybe incorrectly ) that I was GPU bound, as now the CPU was doing more to get the scene ready for the GPU.
Meanwhile, back with the instanced meshes, in the GPU profiler, the main two chunks of usage were ‘base pass’ and ‘shadow depths’. So I re-made the foliage with no shadows ( which looks **** BTW ).
The frame rate stayed the same and the GPU profiler just showed more time spent on ‘base pass’.
WTF!?
Surely drawing 60 trees as foliage should take almost no hit at all, as it’s just one draw call…
Any ideas?..
Thank you for any help :-/
------------------------------ EDIT -----------------------------------------------
Just got the same result with an empty level and the scots pine from the kite demo… The frame rate is 20 fps better with 60 separate static meshes…