Vessel Optimization (Part 1)

Lumen?!

Ok, this was a challenge without any baked lighting - but I was up to the task!

Table of Contents

Overview

Let's Keep Lumen!

Trying out Simple Collision & Merging

Applying Nanite

Changing Anti-Aliasing Settings

Conclusion

Resources

Overview

Here's a log sheet I created for the project that allows users to track what may be effecting performance over time. For this project, I tackled anything that might be bottlenecking the CPU first and then moved onto render-related items.

Let's Keep Lumen!

When opening the project for the first time, I was around 72fps at high quality settings within unreal engine. At first glance I wanted to test a few that affected framerate by toggling various groups of objects on and off. The most taxing framerate components were the meshes but I also wanted to explore anything related to the CPU since it was slightly higher at 13.54.

Trying out Simple Collision & Merging

I had a few tricks up my sleeve to get this project at least somewhat optimized. There were already a few tell tale signs that it would be difficult to pull off after only a few minutes of searching through the project. I started by seeing if collision was taxing the CPU and affecting the framerate. It did not have a large impact.

I then tried to merge actors, creating one mesh section for each material, thinking that might relieve the engine from having to render more. That did not change the framerate either.

Applying Nanite

I was curious to see if any of the meshes were utilizing the nanite feature unreal offers and they were not. So I opted to use the property matrix feature to quickly edit all of the meshes. With a simple click I had all of them enabled and increase the frame rate up to 75fps without affecting any visual quality. It wasn't much but anything seemed good at this point.

Changing Anti-Aliasing Settings

I tried another instancing method with no luck on improving framerate there either, so I wanted to look a bit deeper at the GPU profiling and see what exactly is taking the most time to render. After conducting some research and finding that that version of Anti-Aliasing is the high-resolution, I decided to change the option to Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing. The result increase the frame rate by nearly 20fps.

Conclusion

This project was certainly a challenge and there wasn't much "wiggle room" left to made for optimization as far as I could find. Because of this, I am allotting more time to be able to try and get up to 120fps in the next exercise. Stay tuned!

Resources

Ciaran Ballesty Environment: http://artstation.com/artwork/2ByxZA

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