UE 5.3 Foliage Nanite Performance

Development Rendering
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1

Hello everyone,

I have a question about the performance of nanite foliage, to be more precise about the overdraw. I’m creating a scene using PCG with the same type of trees that was used in the ElectricDream demo from Epic and I’m having a lot of overdraw. I have check with the demo level from the collection in both engine (5.2 and 5.3) and there is a big different of overdraw between them, so I’m wondering if there is a bug or is something changing between versions? Or I’m making something wrong with the new version?

I leave here a picture to see the diference with only 5 tree layers

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image0011920×600 138 KB

The left is UE 5.2.1 and the right 5.3.1.

2

If you have Nanite foliage, you can’t have overdraw :slight_smile:

You can only have overdraw with masked material foliage ( or more precisely, transparent meshes )

3

Hi, I think they changed to overdraw visualization for masked materials from 5.2 to 5.3, from their roadmap for 5.3:

Overdraw Visualization for Masked Materials

Nanite’s overdraw visualization mode now properly accounts for masked materials. A masked material might appear to show more overdraw than in 5.2 due to the more accurate visualization.