Why would a 14k tri model lag so much? Do I need to use some kind of preload/precache setting?

Hey, guys, I get a significant frame drop when this model, and a very similar one to it enter the screen, along with various other small meshes that are less complex.
The FPS quickly recovers but the frame drop is there like 99% of the time, caused by the GPU thread and not any of the other threads.
I’m actually a little doubtful it’s a cache thing given that the game continues to lag for about one more second after the asset is already loaded and visible, but that could just be the framerate smoothing of UE3.

Imgur
Imgur

Images are broken.(except the tunel one)

Need wireframe of your collision.
Did you turned off per poly collision?
What is the shader size in mb used for the mesh and the mesh it self in mb size?
What is your gpu and ram size?
Are there particles involved the same moment the meshes come in to view?

There was no collision model and no wireframe as I don’t need it, but unchecking all the collision flags did increase performance a little, thanks for the idea.
Mesh fbx is around 500kb, as for shader size I’m not sure how to determine that.
Hardware is quite good, it should definitely handle this stuff.

If you just replaced the mesh’s material with the UDK default material, does that affect how quickly the model loads?

I don’t really see a noticeable change, the material is just a texture sample too.

I think the issue might be something like the game being poor at culling the landscape or something, performance got a lot worse once I added 2 landscapes and did the lighting on everything.

Did you managed to fix it? If not we can do it like last time and send me the upk and sample scene for me to test and see if i can find the problem :wink:

It’s hardly fixed, in fact, being more careful I notice the whole level is infested with frame drops related to GPU load, even with settings reduced to minimum.
So either my computer/drivers are broken or there is something wrong with the whole setup, not individual assets.