Thanks for the responses Andrew.
The assets I provided with this example are not the ones we are using in our game. I quickly threw them together because they were easy to use to represent the problem. In the lava texture from the original images, this is built from a fairly sophisticated material built from a set of dynamic components. We will obviously need to look into options to work around this limitation.
With respect to the performance issue, I would like some elaboration on this, as my understanding of this doesn’t match what you’ve stated, so maybe there is more going on that I’m unaware of.
If my screen resolution remains constant, and a pixel shader needs to sample the textures at a specific pixel location, whether that primitive is 10 units away or 10,000 units away should be of no consequence. The vector from a light illuminating that surface multiplied into that equation is similarly equal. It doesn’t matter if the light is 10 units or 10,000 units away. None of this math changes the number of samples that need to be taken for a given number of pixels on the screen.
I do understand that the quality will change with distance, as the amount of information packed into each unit of distance is diluted the further the distances are spaced, but that’s a visual issue, not a performance one.
Thanks, Josh