Future vs Shadowmap performance

[Sindious (Michael_ScofieId)]

I’m making a fairly large map that involves driving around however I’m not sure if I should disable future lighting in order to get better performance. It makes the game look AMAZING compared to shadow map but the extra shadows seem to take up more computer resources making it unplayable for mobile devices with under 2gb of RAM.

I read this post about optimising builds made by a former Roblox employee and this caught my attention.

@MrChickenRocket

This only affects “ShadowMap” and “Future” lighting modes, which have shadows, and only on the higher quality settings. Currently, lower quality settings turn shadows off automatically.

Triangles and drawcalls for shadows don’t seem to impact performance nearly as much as scene geometry does, but you’ll still want to keep this number as low as possible:

@MrChickenRocket

Consider using just ShadowMap if your game is mostly a big, sunny, outdoor map

Real world building and scripting optimization for Roblox

This is a guest article from a community expert. We hope you enjoy it! Introduction [image] Hi, I’m Peter “@MrChickenRocket” McNeill. I’ve been a game developer for over 25 years now, and I have spent a lot of time building games, engines and renderers. I worked on Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, Candy Crush and a bunch of other mobile phone games and their engines, so mobile performance and optimisation is something I’ve gotten pretty good at. With Roblox, I’ve released a handful of my own…

So if anyone knows a thing or too about performance and lighting let me know what I should do!

[astrovue]

I’m not sure if I should disable future lighting in order to get better performance.

ShadowMap technology will unequivocally tower over Future lighting technology when it comes to performance.

Since you stated that your map involves driving, I would follow the staff members’ post and set your Lighting technology to ShadowMap, but your choices are somewhat limited if you’re trying to balance visuals and performance. You might have to outweigh one another!

but the extra shadows seem to take up more computer resources making it unplayable for mobile devices with under 2gb of RAM.

It may benefit you if you disable the CastShadow property for any BasePart the Player will not see.