Flipbook (Paper2d) performance questions

Hello everyone,

As my game is getting bigger and bigger i am starting to notice various performance fluctuations and i believe it is time to ask experts some performance questions regarding Paper2d and how engine handles sprites and flipbooks and if these have any extra processing cost than regular textured polygons.

If i have 500 instances of same flipbook (for example clouds that expand throughout my level. (No collisions no nothing.Just eye candy) will this have a performance impact?Is engine optimized as not to calculate and render flipbooks/sprites that are outside players viewport?

What happens when i have 5000/10000 square sprite tiles as my floor for any particular level?I know that a 3D engine does not even blink with such a low poly count but is it same with sprites?Is paper2d optimized or it is just a part of engine and everything that applies to normal 3d development applies here as well ?

Since i believe there is no other question about Paper2d’s performance on a larger scale with thousands of sprites and many dozens of textures i would like to know if there are any optimization tips,things to avoid or best practices to use.

Thank you

Hey ,

I asked Noland, and he informed me that any components that have bounding spheres completely off-screen will not be rendered, as rendering thread performs frustrum culling and ignores them. There is a small cost for culling, but it’s minuscule compared to actually rendering them. So multiple instances of same flipbook should not impact performance if you don’t have them all on screen at once.

You can determine if you have some bottlenecks by running console command, “stat scenerendering”, which you can read about here:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/PerformanceProfiling/CPU/index.html

and there’s some good general use performance and profiling information here:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/PerformanceProfiling/index.html

Hope that helps you optimize your project!