Very poor performance with Future lighting technology

Bug Reports Engine Bugs
#43

This is most definitely still an issue and has actually only gotten worse with recent updates. Especially in regard to Particles.

4 Likes
#44

Bumping because Particles with future lighting shining on them, drop the frames tremendously.

1 Like
#45

The main points that cause lag with future lighting are Shadows
Culling distant lights and disabling their shadows is great in improving performance.
Unloading lights is also a great solution if they are out of view. This is what I have been using in my game and the performance is “okay” on iOS. Android I cant say because most still don’t support future lighting yet due to them using OpenGL ES 2/3 and not Vulkan.

Here are some videos of performance with future if its culled correctly. (Desktop & Mobile)

Im working more to unrender lights completely that are behind the player by using Vector3:Dot() and a Magnitude check from the camera to the light source to disable distant shadows. Currently the system above only unloads rooms and lighting alongside StreamingEnabled helping with memory management.

2 Likes
#46

I made a similar system for one of my cities because of how bad the performance was with lights. I turn off the shadows at a distance and the lights completely off at another distance. Do you actually remove the light Instances from the workspace or just turn them off?

#47

I parent them to nil. Same with meshparts. Although I do not recommend to do it with meshparts with streaming, i believe it causes memory leaks due to desyncing, StreamingEnabled is literally unusuable.

#48

I parent meshparts to replicated storage with streaming. I hope it doesn’t cause memory leaks. I parent them back in at a certain distance so that they get streamed.

Does parenting the Light Instances to nil have a better effect than just turning them off?

#49

Im not sure. I havent checked how much of a difference it makes.

1 Like
#50

Hello!
Future Lighting is costly in performance and we’ve done several optimizations since this original report, but it remains an expensive technology.

@r_r are you still experiencing unusually low performance with Future on your setup?

1 Like
#51

Hello!

I will close this ticket for now, since we would need more details to be able to conclude it’s an unusual performance issue. If there are additional information like a repro placefile and details on what seems unusually slow with Future anyone would like to share, feel free to add to this thread! We’ll be happy to re-open the ticket and look further into it.