So… real scene. Again, started with the third person template, this time I turned on Raytracing for Lumen + Hit Lighting for Reflections and HQ Translucent Reflections. I also enabled Virtual Texturing since this level used an RVT for the landscape material. Otherwise all settings are default.
Some things I did to make it better reflect a real modern UE project:
- Everything that can use Nanite is set to use it (shadow method is set to VSM)
- Set trees, boulders, and other larger foliage meshes to affect distance field lighting.
- Grass and small vegetation are set to use contact shadows.
- All meshes have a WPO disable distance (75 meters for trees, 50 meters for smaller foliage)
- Unplugged PDO in the foliage materials (as this tanks Nanite perf)
- Minor aesthetic changes (deleted their post process volume and made my own with increased saturation and local exposure, used Unreal’s built-in SkyAtmosphere instead of their included sky system)
As I recall this level is over 1 km^2, and it’s primarily foliage.
Final note: Nanite landscapes were apparently bugged in 5.1 with materials sampling RVT, which caused it to render with a glitched material. Didn’t bother trying to narrow down the issue, as I doubt it impacted performance, I only mention it in case you’re wondering why it looks messed up compared to later versions.
All measurements done in standalone process.
Results:
Conclusions…
- Every version offered some performance gain until 5.5p, Nanite/VSM performance in particular seems to have steadily improved.
- Can’t find any performance regressions between versions…
Performance could be better, but that is mostly because this scene was never optimized for Nanite, all the foliage is using low poly masked cards. I only did the bare minimum to get it working correctly.
Anyway… hopefully someone found this useful.
System specs for reference:
3900x
32gb ram
RTX 3070
Windows 10
Edit: I noticed an error in my original screenshot here; 5.3 (apparently) doesn’t warn you when the Nanite landscape needs to be rebuilt, and I didn’t notice. I’ve updated the screenshot so it is now a correct comparison with the rest of the versions, the timings didn’t change much (0.45ms improvement mainly from Shadow Depths with Nanite landscape enabled) so my conclusion is still the same.