Why is my performance so bad?

#1 Load up the level and type in the console:

metrics("FPS GFX SHADOW");

How many draw calls?
How many polys?

#2 | FPS | 15.0 max: 1519.5 min 0.9 mspf 200
| GFX | Polycount 7707435 DrawCalls: 14423 RT Changes: 18
| Shadow | Active: 1 Updated: 1 PolyCount: 621246 DrawCalls: 2769
RTChanges: 1 PoolTexCount: 1 PoolTextMB: 5.33333MB

#3

Quote:
I have a scene, its not overly complex,

7.7 million polys counts as complexed...

#4

Quote:7.7 million polys counts as complexed...

Almost 8 million poly's being drawn would tend to have an effect on fps. I agree with Mr. Steve. ;)

#5 7.7 million polys sounds like a benchmark :)

#6

Quote:| GFX | Polycount 7707435 DrawCalls: 14423 RT Changes: 18

You're exceeding the number of polygons and drawcalls used by current-gen games by a huge amount.

For reference, Crysis is probably the current game with the most polygons and drawcalls, with peaks at ~1.8 million and ~4000 respectively. Capcom's Lost Planet pushes something around 600K triangles and ~400 draw calls during action scenes.

Looking at your screenshots, I see detailed trees, some highly-tesselated objects (those pots) and details like individual wood posts. Create LOD levels for those so they use less polygons when viewed from afar and you might get big gains.

I can't tell exactly how your number of draw calls got that huge, but I suggest you check the number of unique materials.

#7 OK this doesn't make any sense to me, i use the optimize modifier in 3ds max, and it tells me that the shape is down by around 1,000 polys. Load up the engine with all my max models down and what do you know...

POLY COUNT IS UP TO 10,000,000!!!!111!!?????///???

now this is looking like we might need to remake a lot of our art work...

I thought maybe zones could help but all they did was make the sky disappear.

I suppose this teaches our artist a lesson though... :)

EDIT: Thanks for the pointers Manoel, will give LODs a try. Are you sure about the Poly count in crisis being 1.7? our terrain only scenes have like 2.5 lol :(

#8 How many of your objects use skin ?
Are you using collada ?

#9 @Bryce: there's a console command in Crysis that shows FPS, memory usage, polycount, drawcalls and other metrics. I never saw it reach 2mil.

Also, just for sanity, check if you don't have any duplicated and overlapped models in the editor, or if your collada exporter somehow duplicated the meshes.

#10 LODs on your shapes are important as well. Crysis has aggressive LODs, and if you want your game to run well, you should also.

#11 thanks for the replies guys this is all really helpful thanks, going to give lods a try this afternoon :) and if it is still slow i might need to get the terrain smaller (currently it is a 2048 res heightmap)

#12 as a sanity check, you might try making a very empty scene, measuring the number of polys, then adding in an object with some known expected number of polys (eg 1000) and seeing how that affects the polycount.

#13 Have you checked what you are getting with Basic Lighting and with the Sun's shadows disabled? Pushing LOD will help quite a bit because of all of the shadowing rendering that is going on, but you might check to see if something else just isn't going crazy.

#14 At 2GB RAM the 2048 res terrain stands a good chance to be the source of the problems.

Because I doubt that you have closed all the other stuff including browser etc so you might actually run out of RAM as your terrain on its own requires a few hundred MB already.

In addition your graphic card likely has shared PCIe texture memory in the RAM further reducing it.

#15 if anyone was wondering, i managed to get it down to about 800 000 - 1 000 000 :) so now the scene can still be playable :) :) :)

(Although i did cheat a little I deleted quite a lot of fencing, but it will be back, waiting on lod from artist)