Working with Large Landscapes in Landscape Builder
As we move more features over to the GPU, we have been testing bigger landscapes. Even with a modern CPU, applying Topography, Texturing, and Grass can be relatively slow once you get past 16 terrains in a landscape at a terrain resolution of 513 or greater. Note, our Trees and Groups (aka prefab placement system) is optimised for the CPU and is already pretty fast.
However, GPUs are designed for parallel processing, which we can take advantage of in LB. In the next release (v2.1.0) we’ll be upgrading the status of GPU acceleration from EXPERIMENTAL to PREVIEW. This means we’ve been doing a lot of testing and now have a higher level of confidence in this technology.
So, if you’re building larger landscapes, with 16, 64 or 256 terrains, you’ll want to turn on the following options in the LB Editor on the Advanced tab.
You will most likely also want to turn off AutoSave. The reason being, that saving the scene to disk after each operation is pretty slow with large landscapes. You’ll then need to save your scene often manually (like regular Unity) just in case things go wrong.
For landscapes with say 256 terrains at a relatively high resolution of 1025, you’ll need at least 16 GB of RAM, a fast CPU (e.g. Intel i7 or a high-end AMD desktop CPU), and a modern graphics card with at least 4GB of dedicated VRAM.
With 64 terrains you’ll probably get away with an Intel i5, 8GB of RAM, and a 2-3 year old video card with at least 2GB of dedicated VRAM.
To follow the latest development head over to our [Beta Forum]( [BETA PROGRAM] Landscape Builder - realworld, GPU acceleration, prefab placement page-8#post-4093027).