Performance hints

[demostenes]

There is lots of internal mechanisms, which have impact on performance and they are different for each engine, so just knowing general tricks does not help. For example there is big difference between implemenation of grass in Unity3d and UE. Unity grass handles overdraw quite well, but polygons are deadly (unity atlases grass textures into 1 texture and merge meshes into 64k batch. It means If you put more triangles performance will go down like hell). UE is quite opposite it instances in different way, so overdraw for grass is deadly, but more polygons are OK. How is it for Unigine mesh clutter instancing? And such information has ciritical impact on asset creation/optimization. Other example, I ve accidentaly find information on the forum,  that decal radius has impact on performance. Exactly type of information important for level designers, they tend to set big radius, just because it is more comfortable....

What about making list of such hints? No article, just one big list (there can be link of more detailed article, if there is any) which will be updated each release. Something like:

• Decal radius has impact on performance
• Try to minimize overdraw for vegetation even at the cost of more polygons
• If you use lots of instances of some mesh, try to bake in mesh cluster (+link)
• You can make impostors even for meshes (+link)

etc...

 

Edited April 4, 2019 by demostenes

[morbid]

Hi @demostenes,

We try to give our users as much info on performance optimization as we can. However, some optimization cases too specific to extrapolate them on general engine usage.

Unfortunately, decal radius thing was missed in the video tutorial, but I think it' plays the same role in other engines.

Must-do things already described in our documentation: 

• https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.7.3/videotutorials/essentials/content_optimization
• https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.7.3/videotutorials/essentials/microprofile
• https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.7.3/content/
• https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.7.3/content/vr/

If you feel that something is missing or if you have some specific questions - post here and we'll help :)

Thanks!

[demostenes]

I know these articles, I ve read them all :) I was just thinking about more technical and not obvious stuff. And giving it some structure, to have short hints on one place and links to arcticles, where is some detail (etc..).

I am definitelly curious about that vegetation overdraw question, if Unigine is in this case more like Unity, or UE. Btw, I ve noticed some engines providing views for overdraw and shader complexity analysis, for example:

or other view for showing shader complexity:

Do you plan something like this?

I was reading as inspiration this article: https://80.lv/articles/creating-next-gen-grass-in-ue4/

Thanks!

Edited April 5, 2019 by demostenes

[morbid]

Thanks for the references.

Right now we're working on vegetation optimization, we also will make a similar tool in the future (no ETA, sorry). A new demo with better vegetation visuals is also in development, keep an eye on our updates :)

Best regards