Ok so I have a scene with only a directional light and I get 60FPS on average. Without doing anything else I add two point lights. I turn on soft shadows. Then I turn on deferred lighting. I hit play again and get 25 FPS. so then I add 8 more point lights with soft shadows and get 5FPS …
I thought deferred lighting was supposed to help me out with FPS on point lights? What am I doing wrong? How do I do this deferred lighting stuff? 
Turn the shadows off; deferred lighting won’t really help with those.
–Eric
dang … I need those shadows, I am trying to do an interior office. The main thing about what I am trying to do is the lighting. Specifically making room mockups for video conferencing where light position and shadows are important.
So what would be option #2? The lights dont move… the people in the room do but all the furniture does not. So the shadows dont have to be awsome, just acurate.
Get hardware thats capable of handling deferred rendering or switch back to U2 where you can do have point shadows in forward rendering
awsome … that really sucks. This has to run on corperate hardware. So getting hardware that can run it is out of the question. And after seeing all the amazing features of 3.x it would be like going back to the stoneage if I go back to 2.x … I have never delt with lighting before but this is really disappointing.
I guess its back to 2.x …
Define corporate hardware?
Depending on that the question is not a where to go but how to reformulate your lighting as regular corporate hardware might not run it at all on reasonable performance independent of what you use as realtime shadow and light is taxing (with deferred its impact is lower but the base costs are just higher … with forward it would run at 2-4 times the FPS depending on the hardware but it requires more work on the assets as the drawcalls otherwise will explode)
Intel onboard (also known as intel cpu to DVI adapters as they normally need an own performance category for GPUs to be categorized at all) for example defines it as “out of question” basically unless your environment is simple enough
Use the Beast ?
Bake everything if the lighting isn’t dynamic.
I’m in the same situation about the corporate hardware except its gov. so it’s worst. Occlusion culling helped but it’s a b*tch to make it work properly with cramped spaces.
agreed, lightmaps would definitely be the first thing to approach, dynamic lighting + machines that potentially even lose to my netbook don’t play well together 