I was wondering what makes packed level actors more performant to render.
So, let’s say I have few big boulders that I turn into a regular old Blueprint and start dotting around my level. My understanding at the moment is that there’s already quite a lot of rendering optimisation happening at this level, not because this is a Blueprint but because static meshes that use the same material are instanced automatically and drawn in a single draw call (so, if my Blueprint is made up of Boulder1 and Boulder2, all the Boulder1s are being drawn in the same draw call etc .)
When I asked on another forum what extra rendering optimisation using a packed level actor would give me, someone replied that “Packed Level Actors result in a single draw call for the whole actor, whereas otherwise there would be multiple draw calls per mesh component.” Is what they mean that, essentially, in a Packed Level Actor the static mesh actors that make it up will be treated as one big static mesh? So that now instead of all of the Boulder1s being drawn in one draw call and then all the Boulder2s being drawn in another, now all of my BoulderPackedLevelActors will be drawn in one draw call?
And would that actually be more performant? I thought bigger static meshes could actually be more taxing to deal with in terms of not working as well with various occlusion culling techniques etc.?