Just wondering about the shadows performance in HDRP. Following is a series of comparison screenshots for different Shadow Map resolutions and switching shadows on/off on a directional light in a fully realtime lighting scene.
Shadow Map Resolution: 1024 - FPS: 38
Shadows Disabled - FPS: 89
Shadow Map Resolution: 2048 - FPS: 33
Shadow Map Resolution: 32 - FPS: 33
Shadow Disabled in Full Screen - FPS: 69
PC Specs: nVidia 1060 on a Core i5-6400 - Unity 2018.3 b10 & HDRP 4.2.0
Clearly disabling the shadows will significantly improve the performance even though the scene is so complex but what is more in attention is that the FPS is about the same for 2048, 1024 & 32 (however it affects more if it is above 4k) and what matters mostly here is when you enable or disable the shadows. Also the shadow distance doesn’t affect much at least above 150.
So is it what it supposed to be? I guess it goes through a lot of loops in the render pipeline in order to enable the shadows at first place!
And the last screenshot shows the 69 FPS when we are full screen which is nice as we are targeting 60 FPS but it is with shadows disabled. If we turn on the shadows the FPS goes down to around 25.
What are the most important factors to gain higher performances in dynamic lighting scene with realtime shadows?