After some debugging with the performance monitor, I found out that my endemic random FPS problems have to do with Virtual Shadow Maps.
Changing the setting to Shadow Maps fixes it, but results in a runtime warning that thousands of objects need to have their lighting rebuilt - not a surprise, because those objects are procedurally spawned at runtime. It still manages to generate shadows regardless, but they have the text “Preview” stamped all over them.
This is a stylised indie game, so I’m not overly interested in having extragalactic shadows at the cost of randomly dropping to 2 FPS for no reason. I’m actually perfectly fine with the preview shadows, other than them having the text “Preview” on them (but I can change the material) and the warning about lighting.
Can I just literally leave it like that and ignore the warning? Is there a way to make the warning go away? What am I actually supposed to do with procgen objects that can’t have lighting baked in advance, other than using Virtual Shadow Maps?