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@unreal dev people I did find some very cool perf "hacks" on unreal recently Only if you're using CSM shadows though (I'm optimizing for SteamDeck) So apparently there's a concept of "Far Shadow" which is a separate cascade reserved for vista objects, objects you have to mark as "Far Shadow"

17/10/26, 2:39 am0 reposts17 likes

Pandan | GearGrit

@westonmitchell.com

I forgot to add but disabling distance field shadows completely on medium or lower for my SteamDeck profile has given me an average of 9 fps back in the outdoor zones When im done with this game I gotta do a write up on SteamDeck because it's been kinda fun discovering some of these things

Pandan | GearGrit

@westonmitchell.com

Excuse me if some of y'all knew about this already but I somehow didn't (Applies to UE4 too) You can see here the interior of this dungeon on Medium doesn't get shadowed by the Directional light

Pandan | GearGrit

@westonmitchell.com

I got around this by making a shadow mesh around the entire dungeon (With holes to let the actual windows work) And marked it as "Far Shadow"

Pandan | GearGrit

@westonmitchell.com

This requires your Directional Light to be given it's own Far Shadow cascade count of at least 1. And how far you want that cascade to reach into (This distance starts AFTER your normal shadow distance) aside: I would not recommend using Distance Field shadows AT ALL on mobile hardware (SteamDeck)

Captain McSpacebiff

@skunkdev.bsky.social

Yeah big stuff like cliffs/mountains in our game are all using far shadow Optimizing lights/shadows is honestly one of the biggest things you can do for performance in UE5 We considered doing light bakes for ours but it just takes too much dev time Best of luck with your shadows!