Why does my FPS go up if I move away from lots of meshes?

Development Asset Creation
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1

Spawned about 3 million tris in front of me by copy/pasting a mesh, and my FPS of course goes down.

However, if I move a bit away, it goes back up to max. While looking at the statistic window, the amount of tris in the game doesn’t go down, and I have no LODs. So why does my FPS improve? The only different I can see is the shadow disappear as I move away. Is that the cause of the dropped FPS?

And if so, have I been spending lots of time making my models as low poly as possible for nothing? I went on the ARK Mod, and I saw their meshes are pretty high poly (or so I thought) averaging thousands per mesh.

2

You may be “pixel draw” bounds.

When you move away from the huge amount of objects, they cover a smaller part of the screen and so the number of pixel to draw is far lower, this could be why you FPS increases.