Lighting delayed if moving a lot in low graphics

Bug Reports Engine Bugs
#1

Actual behavior:
When I am in a game with a lot of lighting, like Doors for example, when I am in low graphics mode, it takes a while to render the lighting.
What I mean by lighting, are light sources, like PointLights, SurfaceLights, etc.

Expectated Behavior:
Lights should render instantly.

Where it happens: Happens in both Roblox Studio and the regular Roblox Client.

Reproduction Steps

  1. Make a moving light source, like a flashlight.
  2. Set graphics quality below 6
  3. Move around non-stop. The delay it takes to render the light is visible.
    (delay occurs in the end of the footage below)

robloxapp-20240214-1336049.wmv (3.9 MB)

2 Likes
#2

We’ve filed a ticket into our internal database for this issue and will start investigating, we will update you when we have further information.

Thanks for flagging!

#3

Is this an intentional feature or a bug?

#4

Light updates are intentionally limited on lower graphics qualities, as they can tend to be a little “expensive”, but ideally they shouldn’t be throttled too hard to give players a disadvantage.

Also, I think Doors likes to turn off the lights in the next room and only turn them on when the player gets there, so there is even less time for the throttled voxel grid to update the lighting on the lower graphics levels. Maybe a suggestion for the Doors devs?

#5

Can concur, this is intentional. As we decrease and scale down quality level, light update frequency per frame is something we decrease to allow lower end devices to still run.

It’s the old throughput versus interactivity conundrum and is just how the engine works. We are working on increasing this over time through gains in engine performance though.