Performance could (and should) be better than this of course, mainly when it comes to the gpu side. I would call this well optimised myself if the gpu side was 1.5-2x faster.
The goal of this demo is mainly to show that making something somewhat nice looking is possible. It is here to show potential, what if a studio with actual budget and people would work on something? (And not just one guy in his spare time, who does not even have any gamedev or even IT education.)
Anyways, I hope you liked the demo, even with its flaws.
Looks amazing! The performance leaves a bit to be desired, but this shows that Godot is a tool, and proper art direction and quality assets (especially textures are important) really makes it look good. Hats off, your skill is clearly visible.
Some questions though; what do the gi options actually do? To me it seems like lightmaps are being used, at all settings, but do the higher settings mean? Ssao? Ssgi?
Also, how did you get the texture quality setting to work? Godot doesn't have texture streaming.
Thank you for trying out the demo. SSIL and DOF are both really expensive for what they do so they only get enabled on the ultra preset. (SSIL has a comparable effect as SSAO, but it also includes simple GI) This also explains the performance difference between high and ultra.
FSR 2.0 upscaling only works if you lower the 3d resolution. Otherwise it just acts as TAA with sharpening. (It looks better than TAA but it's almost unnoticeable at 4k)
For example FSR "balanced" in a lot of games is 3D resolution at 60%.
thank you for playing. The camera sometimes flips upside down when leaving the GUI. It occurs when the mouse goes from free to 'captured' mode. It's because of the smoothing I use in de the camera controller.
To enable the asset encryption I have to compile Godot. I do not own a mac, so I cant compile for MacOS. If I hadn't used purchased assets, I wouldn't have used encryption and then I could have made a MacOS build. Maybe in future projects, who knows.
I think it can be optimized a lot further. Some of it would be in the engine and some of it would be in the game projects. I would start calling this 'well optimised' if it can achieve about 1.5-2x the performance of what it is now. (So with 50-60fps on 1080p ultra on my gtx1060, I would be very pleased.)
As far as occlusion; The game does use Godots built in occlusion culling (But I don't think its really that effective with all these alpha clipped materials), but more important it uses frustum culling with the vegetation in chunks. (Possible thanks to ProtonScatter)
The demo utilizes billboards (impostors) for the trees in the distance. For better performance I could have used a better setup for LODs in general.
It uses most effects that are available in Godot. Ssao, sdfgi and ssgi are all used on the ultra setting. On high and lower however only ssao is used. The demo does not use the voxelgi or the lightmap nodes, everything is real-time.
