To much foliage?

Hi i’m learning ue4 at this moment and i’m using free content from marketplace to do so.

Anyway i decided to create forest scene and used fairly high density of plants included in
Starter content. Now when i try to play that level i get 25-50 fps depending on area i’m inside
I use i5 6600k @4.2ghz and gtx 1070 msi aero oc at stock settings (1080p res) is there way to
Reduce lag or i just went to agressive on plants lol.

Yeah, you might need to reduce plant density. Forests tend to be just terrible for perfomance because of overdraw (Transparent planes on top of each other having to be rendered even if the texture alpha on it says there’s “nothing” there. You can check how bad your overdraw is by changing your view mode from Lit to either Shader complexity or Quad overdraw - under obtimisation view mode). As long as your scene is not mostly red/white it should normally be fine, but if you were as heavy handed with the leaves as I suspect you were you should see exactly why there’s some performance issues there XD

Things you can do to reduce lag are:

-Remove some plants

-Switch from plants with translucent materials to masked (not perfect as it will still cause quad overdraw but it won’t be as bad)

-Use plants made mostly from polygons with as little loss area (from texture alpha) as possible (for example grass made from a few triangles instead of textured planes, or branches with a better cut around the edges. It will add polygons, but often overdraw from texture is a lot worse than having some extra polys)

-Make not all plants cast shadow (you should be able to get away with having at least a good portion of smaller plants in dense area not cast shadows without it looking weird. This will significantly reduce the cost of your lighting pass in those area especially if there’s LOTS of small things casting lights at the same time. Also make sure you don’t have a tons of lights all making shadows. Lighting is generally responsible for much of performance issues)