Update Global Distance Field Volume taking longer than usual

AgentMilkshake1
Tue, 09 Aug 2016 16:32:26 +0000
Rendering

Hi everyone,

I’m currently part of a team making an open world game and parts of our world have time sinks in the GPU causing the overall framerate to go up.

The biggest culprit in these areas (or so it seems) is “UpdateGlobalDistanceFieldVolume”. It is spending about 20ms in here which is an incredibly long time.

Can anyone explain to me why our frame time is spending so long in here, and why we have so many clip maps. As I understand it, only newly visible areas or those affected by a scene modification need to be updated.

For a bit of context we have foliage, landscape, and a rain particle emitter (focused on the player).

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: After some further investigation, I have found that a non-shadow casting Skylight was causing this issue. However, it is my understanding that the distance field stuff is not used when cast shadows is turned off.

8 posts - 5 participants