Can Paritcle Effects Cause Lag?

Questions & Answers
1

So I have spent the last couple of hours searching for an answer related to this, and I couldn’t find anything straight forward. If there is a topic similar with a solution, please feel fee to point me in its direction.

I just finished making a waterfall on my mountain scene and I have to say, I am impressed with myself! Now, the thing is, I noticed that I had to use many of the same particle effects over and over and have them overlap in certain spots to make it look more natural. Over time with doing this, I would jump in and test it with the 1st person controller to see how it would look, and everything was fine.

Once I finished the scene itself, I hopped in one last time to do a play test and I noticed that there was some lag when I would look in the direction of the waterfall, but I wouldn’t experience this lag when I looked anywhere else. Can having a lot of particle effects in one area cause this? If so, I can go back and see what I can do to reduce the amount of them I had to use to achieve the look I desired.

One source suggested I adjust the clipping planes on the main camera, but that did nothing, and seemed a bit irrelevant considering the camera I see through is on the first person controller.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. It is a bit annoying have to deal with the lag after finally achieving this nice little waterfall look :slight_smile:

2

Yea, many particles can cause performance issues. Probably the best solution is to reduce the number of particles, your effect won’t look as pretty, but that’s the reality of hardware limitations. You can try compressing the textures to a smaller resolution and a different shader, but the difference might be so little that it’s unnoticeable. There might other things you can try, such as culling backfaces or using LOD. Making sure the particles are batching might help too.

3

Thanks for the tips. I Guess I will just have to mess with what I have now, and see if I can get it to run smoother. Really a shame, cause I had it looking good :stuck_out_tongue: