Shader Complexity shows extremely bad result after moving to Forward Rendering in 4.14

Hi!

I’ve noticed that the Shader Complexity view mode is showing some extreme results after moving to 4.14’s Forward Rendered pass.

Any hints as to what could be going wrong?

The following picture showed everything as green before Forward Rendering was enabled. It shows the same poor results even when using the most simple Actors with a Cuboid Mesh and a single node Material.

The shader complexity viewmode works by visualizing all shader instructions in the base pass. In the deferred renderer, a lot of features which contribute hundreds of instructions are in separate passes - deferred lighting, deferred reflections, area lights, tube lights, etc. In the forward renderer, all of those features are present in the base pass, although skiped with dynamic branching if they are not currently enabled, so shader complexity gets messed up.

We need to change the behavior of shader complexity such that it subtracts out built-in code feature overhead, which would get back to a useful state. I’m not sure when we’ll be able to work on this though.

Duly noted! I suspected something along these lines, but thought I should confirm…