CPU-side rendering producing lag even when geometry not in view

Unity Engine
1

After much testing, I confirmed that the constant, enormous lag I’m getting is caused by CPU-side “rendering” even when hardly any geometry is in view. The profiler shows this category is causing almost all the delay even when the player character is facing an area with very little in view, but when I deactivate a large amount of geometry BEHIND the player the lag suddenly disappears and the CPU-side rendering usage drops dramatically.

This seems counter intuitive, since I thought the CPU “rendering” category refers to activities such as dealing with unevenly scaled geometry before sending it on to the GPU? I do have a lot of unevenly scaled geometry, granted, but why should it cause so much lag even when it isn’t in view and therefore doesn’t need to be sent to the GPU?

2

Someone must know the answer to this?

3

Note that in the Unity Editor, if you have the Scene View visible then frustum culling (culling out objects not in the camera’s view) is disabled since the Scene View needs to be able to render the entire scene).

4

It happens even when the scene view isn’t visible, though.

5

Anyone know what would cause this? It’s been driving me nuts.

6

[Edit: I finally solved most of the problem: one of the reflection probes had accidentally been set to “every frame” rather than “awake”.]