Do custom LOD systems help or hurt performance?

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#1

The title pretty much says all.

What LOD is for those who don't know it

LOD (Level Of Detail) is basically a distance based system that changes the quality of a model the farther you go. For example, if I were to go super far away from a building then I wouldn’t see many details as I would up close in the first place so I could just make it so that a low detailed model is put there to help performance.

I’ve recently wanted to do an LOD system for a game that uses relatively large maps with a few spots that have some structures.

I’ve also seen many conflicting opinions either saying custom LOD systems help a lot or custom LOD systems don’t make much of a difference/actually hurt performance. I’m pretty sure it would have to do with how detailed the original close up model is in the first place of course, however it’s always nice to have thoughts on different scenarios.

What do you think? If you have explanation behind your answer, please reply to the thread so I can know! It would also be beneficial if you could tell me times where custom LOD is good and custom LOD is bad.

  • It greatly helps performance.
  • It slightly helps performance.
  • It hurts performance.

0 voters

#2

For the few people who have voted, can you please put explanation behind your vote if you can?

#3

It’s something to think about, but I don’t think it’ll improve that much performance. Roblox already has LOD with meshes by default, and render distance would solve this problem anyways.

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#4

The only time I can see this being useful is if you have really large maps with a high density of high poly MeshParts.

Roblox’s own LOD system should fix most of this for you, but you could potentially improve performance a tiny bit by straight up hiding things in a certain distance.

For the most part you’re probably better off spending the time you’d use to make a custom LOD system, and instead work on optimizing your games models.

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#5

Thanks for voting everyone! I’ll leave this open just incase anyone else has any input

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