If the local player’s character model is visible on screen in an experience with the Realistic lighting style, and clouds, there will be a massive amount of shadow draw calls per frame.
(Character model visible on screen.)
(Character model not visible on screen, in this case going into first person, scene and depth calls are higher due to different camera angle.)
In this scene I have a semi-complex level, the player character in this scene is not being affected by any local light sources. Disabling CastShadow on the character has no effect, so it is specifically the presence of the character on screen causing shadow draws to spike tremendously.
When I tried this with Soft + Prioritized, there was only 36 draws per frame when the character was on screen, and 0 when not, so long as the camera wasn’t moving. With Realistic LightingStyle, I consistently would see 750-1000 shadow draws (depending on level geometry complexity) per frame when in third person, these draws would go back down to 0 when in first person. Disabling clouds would put the shadow draws down to 36 per frame in third person.
On my computer with this scene, this costs roughly 1.5ms on the CPU and 2ms on the GPU per frame while the character is visible.
System Information:
OS: Windows 10 Home
CPU: I7-7700K
GPU: GTX 1080Ti (11GB)
RAM: 16GB DDR4
Main Display: 2560x1440
Expected behavior
I would expect that the shadow draw counts don’t massively increase while in third person in a scene with clouds and Realistic lighting style.