Is disabling Lighting.GlobalShadows the same as setting every single part's CastShadow to false performance wise?

Are these the exact same performance wise? Not gonna lie no matter what game I’m in (including mine), it seems that their shadow toggling (which is clearly GlobalShadows) has no impact on my performance. Which one will have the more positive impact on performance? Or am I just being delusional and they’re the same?

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Shadows in general contribute to performance. There’s a difference between the two and I assume their functionality/ how they render differs by a bit. In the Improving Game Performance article, it states:

If you’ve enabled the ShadowMap lighting technology, all objects will cast shadows by default. If a specific object doesn’t need to cast distinct shadows, disable its CastShadow property.

However, there doesn’t seem to be any information or even performance relationships with Global Shadows mentioned anywhere. Imo, without much information provided about performance wise for the latter, I would stick with disabling CastShadows when it’s not needed. I don’t even touch that property often anyways so I guess I can’t say much. I do urge you to do some experimenting and see If you can find anything.

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While optimizing my game I found out that turning CastShadow off on parts that dont need it can reaally add up and improve performance. It might be because that means the server can’t see the shadows though (because you do this from Studio). Does removing shadows on the server and having them purely client do anything at all? I’m not sure if shadows actually do anything to the server (does the server have to render shadows or something?) so I think I’m going to experiment.

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