Forests and Precipitation performance issues - RESOLVED
by Alex Huck · in Torque 3D Professional · 11/24/2009 (3:05 am) · 5 replies
Hi, when you create even a relatively small forest and reasonable amount of numDrops on the precipitation performance will go down the drain when the camera is in range of making the 3D version of the forest (billboard LOD on the forest does not get this), disabling collision on the precipitation drops brings performance back.
*edit* Forgot system specs:
Core2Duo e6600
4 gigs ram
nVidia GTX 285
*edit* Forgot system specs:
Core2Duo e6600
4 gigs ram
nVidia GTX 285
About the author
#2
IMO we need to rewrite precipitation to not use ray casting like it does now, but there are a ton of high priority tasks at the moment.
11/24/2009 (7:14 pm)
I suspect this is because of how precipitation works at the moment. Since it uses ray casts its probably horrible on performance to a ton of them into the forest.IMO we need to rewrite precipitation to not use ray casting like it does now, but there are a ton of high priority tasks at the moment.
#3
11/27/2009 (1:07 am)
This problem will be fixed for 1.1b when Forest::castRay is fully implemented instead of always redirecting to ( the very slow ) castRayRendered. 
#4
06/13/2010 (7:22 pm)
Logged as TQA-364.
#5
08/02/2010 (4:48 pm)
Fixed in 1.1 Beta 2 
Associate Steve Acaster
[YorkshireRifles.com]
Also - forests appear to be using polysoup as standard rather than a collision mesh. Maybe something to bear in mind if you have big poly tree models, more collision = more processing.