Advice for reducing particle overdraw costs

Hey there,

I’m trying to create a spooky scene and one of the things I’m using is a dusty particle effect, however I realized very quickly there’s a huge overdraw cost involved in creating a volumetric dust clouds from overlapping particle planes.

Does anyone know how to improve performance while keeping the same atmosphere?

Any help or recommendations would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
-Metric

Thanks to the kind folks over at the Unreal Slackers Discord I was able to come up with a solution that saves a bit of performance I think. But I would still love to hear other solutions to reduce overdraw from anyone else who might stumble upon this.

What I’m doing is, to reduce overdraw I’m shrinking the particles based on the proximity to the camera.

This is effectively letting me have one particle system cover the whole map while also having a sort of custom scaling culling system.

If you wanted to shrink a mesh the same way, you would replace Particle Position with ObjectPivotPoint.

Happy hunting,
-Metric