Best Solutions for Ocean-Scale 60fps Water

Unity Engine
1

Hey guys–

I’m developing a Unity prototype with the Oculus Rift and it is essential to maintain 60fps. Anything that dips below 30fps begins to break the VR illusion and actually induce motion sickness.

I just did a test with an island filled with many models and baked a lightmap. This improved fps dramatically, but anytime I’d have the ocean in view (default Unity Daytime Water Pro), the FPS took a dive, sometimes to 4 fps even if staring at lightmapped terrain (with ocean under and obscured by it! The water was totally not even visible! In fact nothing else but grass texture could be seen!)!!!

When I removed the single water object entirely, framerate for viewing the entire scene shot back up to a healthy 40-60fps, mostly 60fps!

So the water is practically unusable at a large scale with the Rift. Any advice for the best framerate efficient solutions for large-scale water in Unity?

Cheers

2

This worked fairly well, but there are some drawbacks:

After using this, my framerate was generally maintained between 40-60fps with everything in the 1K - 2K map in view. I’m open to any other suggestions if anyone has them!