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Futuristichub
Up and Coming
February 19, 2015

Does adding lights affect PC performance?

Hey guys im making the Back To The Future Experience and as much as i'd love to release the demo im having more issues with FPS the more lights I add. I'm thinking this might be a problem so should I just have ONE directional light and not have many neon lights and lights going in the evening scene to speed performance? Im running a 12 core PC (10K) system and even this is starting to lag a bit in FPS. Should I make it an Afternoon experience?

EDIT: Im thinking about baking the lights that need to be baked
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    4 replies

    cybereality
    Inspiring
    February 19, 2015
    Yes, you should try to bake as much lighting as possible.

    Otherwise, I believe deferred rendering is more capable to have lots of dynamic lights.
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    RSoto
    New Participant
    February 19, 2015
    Looking forward to checking out your Back to the Future demo.

    With that, I wanted to second the previous comment of baking in lights. Baking lights is just one small part to help increase performance. Keep in mind, even one directional light can greatly affect performance.

    If you're still having performance issues, look at your materials and reduce the texture sizes.

    Lastly, far draw distances affect performance. Think about limiting the height the Delorean can fly to ensure the camera won't render anything behind a building using occluders.
    Gerald
    Up and Coming
    February 20, 2015
    you can have a ton of lights, but not a ton of shadow sources. one directional light for shadows is okay, but you really should keep an eye on your drawcalls.
    to give a better answer please share some info (like what the stats screen tells you :) )
    check out my Mobile VR Jam 2015 title Guns N' Dragons
    FuturistichubAuthor
    Up and Coming
    February 21, 2015
    Thanks everyone! I'm actually working on that now. I baked most objects and the Directional light seems like it wants to not have shadows on it. I'm currently at about 3000+ draw call right now. Trying to lower this as much as possible. So far its been tested with two trusted friends of mine and they say its very smooth, one of them has a regular gaming PC nothing too fancy and his was great on FPS so we're looking good sill!

    I ran into another problem that im scratching my head on it that i'll post on another forum. Thanks everyone! After baking ALL the lights everything ran a LOT smoother so this greatly helped! Its looking great so far! We're starting in 1955 when I release the demo to Hill Valley and i'll be working on adding a lot more things to it (time travel etc) through different times is planned throughout the year.

    Thanks again!
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