I’ve been having the (already reported, yet disappointingly not-fixed) issue of shadows being calculated for lights of radius 0, resulting in a huge ShadowDepths render time - however, in trying to find ways to provide a temporary fix whilst testing the performance of the game, I have created a simple blueprint that goes through all the pointlights every couple of hundred milliseconds and disables those beyond a certain distance.
Whilst this works in disabling the shadows being rendered in the viewport, the ShadowDepths remains huge even when I set the custom shadow-disabler distance to 0m
I don’t know why you marked this as an answer Tim, because as I said - the problem is that ‘Set Cast Shadows: false’ does not stop the shadows from being computed.
The blueprint itself is fairly complex as it is a random generation system - however the light component system is simple:
It creates a bunch of point lights, then at runtime it disables them all on begin Play.
The shadows disappear, although the shadow calculation still appears and consumes alot of frame time in the GPU Profiler.
I’ve actually re-checked that before answering, Oscar.
Setting influence radius or intensity to zero results in shadows still being calculated. However as for setting Cast Shadows variable,
I have correct, expected and measurable ShadowDepth render time reduction when doing so. I’ve tested it on directional,point and spot lights, both dynamic and stationary. 4.13.1 version.
Perhaps You could provide in-depth info about the scene in question to get more specific assistance.
Also, for your information, You can remove that answered status on the question yourself.
Just to chime in here. The ticket above is referencing the issue you’ve described. This is something we’ll look at resolving for 4.15 and is some fallout from refactoring the rendering code previously.
If you suspect this to be a separate issue that doesn’t is just disabling shadows and having them calculated can you please list detailed steps to reproduce the issue or a simple project that can reproduce the issue. From what I’ve seen shadows are currently only being calculated if the intensity has been set to 0, but not when shadow casting has been turned off.