Base map distance performance

Graphics Shaders & Materials
1

I created a topdown game and launched it on my Android device. I had a fps of 30 when my full view was covered by a large 2048 base map texture. But when I set the basemap to a higher value (so I could see the hd textures) my fps dropped down to 20. How is such a 10fps drop possible?

I tried to remove all my terrain textures. So my whole terrain was white. The same happened: by disabling the basemap my fps dropped to 20 even when there was no texture visible. With enabling the basemap to a 0 zero distance my fps was 30 again.

How to make my topdown terrain work smooth with normal quality textures?

2

It’s switching between two different shaders. When it’s showing the basemap, it’s just a simple diffuse shader. When it’s showing the splat textures, even if you didn’t define any, it still has to do all the shader processing. The texture lookups end up just being white because they don’t exist, but it’s still going to do all the calculations for everything.

3

Thank you very much! So what is the best way, performance-wise, to render good textures from distance for my top-downgame without a huge fps drop on mobile? By using a different shader that can render groundtextures better, or…?

4

You are only top down? How far away are you from terrain? What size is the terrain?

5

Yes, it is only top down. With base map distance = 70 it is ok. Terrainsize is 300 x 300

6

I would think that with only 300x300 terrain, that a 2048 basemap would look pretty nice… Maybe show a picture of what you are seeing.

7

Thanks for your reply. Hope you can help me. Unfortunately the quality of the basemap is very bad. The quality needs to be much better for my game:

Good quality, no base map: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Quality with base map: Imgur: The magic of the Internet

8

Why don’t you just increase the basemap distance? Just because you noticed a performance drop?

What device are you testing on? It shouldn’t be that bad… Are you using legacy diffuse shader for terrain?

9

Yes, indeed. Because of the HUGE performance drop (10fps). I tried it on Asus Transformer Pad TF301T, so I think that is an ok device. I am using the ‘Built In Legacy Diffuse Shader’.

Hope you can help me.

10

Can you (or someone else) please help me with this problem?

11

What is your splat textures resolution ? Why don’t you display splat textures instead of the base map ? Doing so you could decrease the size of your base map texture. In each case all of those textures goes into the device’s ram, which has a performance cost. 2048x2048 looks huge for a base map on mobile devices to me.

And also what is your splatmap resolution ?

12

Consider this : “what on-screen size will my texture occupy ? Does it occupy more than “x” screen pixels ? I need my textures pixels to be slightly smaller than my screen pixel” this describe a good optimisation vs quality logic. If you never need to zoom-in more than what your screenshots shows, I’ll use 256² or 512² splat textures and would never display the base map, so I would decrease it’s size to the minimum.

13

The problem is that he is saying when he increases the base map distance so that splat textures are showing farther away, it causes an FPS drop. So having the basemap show earlier is better, however it’s not high enough quality.

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14

Yes, that is indeed my problem. The basemap is not high enough quality, but disabling the basemap causes an 10 FPS drop…

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