How does distance affect rendering performance?

Unity Engine
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1

I am working to optimize performance on a VR game, and it seems to me that performance gets worse when the controlled character gets closer to the camera. I have been reading about graphics performance but have not found anything that indicates that proximity of the main object to the camera should make a difference. I may be missing something. Should proximity to the camera make a difference for rendering performance?

Thanks for any insights!

2

You process the same amount of vertices but all the triangles get bigger as you get closer to the object.
This gives more pixels to shade for the pixel shader. If the main character also consist of multiple meshes with some overlap these also have more pixels and you get more overdraw for the overlapping areas.

3

Thank you, that makes sense and is very helpful.