This can be used to fade lights and their shadows in the distance,
similar to Decal nodes. This can bring significant performance
improvements, especially for lights with shadows enabled and when
using higher-than-default shadow quality settings.
While lights can be smoothly faded out over distance, shadows are
currently "all or nothing" since per-light shadow color is no longer
customizable in the Vulkan renderer. This may result in noticeable
pop-in when leaving the shadow cutoff distance, but depending on the
scene, it may not always be that noticeable.
- Enable Read Sky Light to get proper outdoors lighting out of the box.
- Set bounce feedback to 0.5 by default to get a better quality result.
- Higher values may cause infinite feedback with bright surfaces.
- Increase the number of frames to converge to improve quality
at the cost of latency. Most scenes are fairly static after all.
- Use 75% Y scale by default as most scenes are not highly vertical.
- Reorder the Y scale enum to go from the lowest Y scale to the highest.
Also rename the "Disabled" setting to "100%" for clarity.
This provides more flexibility between performance and quality
adjustments, especially when using SDFGI for small-scale levels
(which can be useful for procedurally generated scenes).
On the only platform where PVRTC is supported (iOS),
ETC2 generally supersedes PVRTC in every possible way. The increased
memory usage is not really a problem thanks to modern iOS' devices
processing power being higher than its Android counterparts.
Applying overlay materials into multi-surface meshes currently
requires adding a next pass material to all the surfaces, which
might be cumbersome when the material is to be applied to a range
of different geometries. This also makes it not trivial to use
AnimationPlayer to control the material in case of visual effects.
The material_override property is not an option as it works
replacing the active material for the surfaces, not adding a new pass.
This commit adds the material_overlay property to GeometryInstance3D
(and therefore MeshInstance3D), having the same reach as
material_override (that is, all surfaces) but adding a new material
pass on top of the active materials, instead of replacing them.
This can be used to distinguish between integrated, dedicated, virtual
and software-emulated GPUs. This in turn can be used to automatically
adjust graphics settings, or warn users about features that may run
slowly on their hardware.
In scenes that have little to no overdraw, disabling the depth prepass
can give a small performance boost. Nonetheless, in most other scenarios,
the depth prepass should be left enabled as it improves performance
significantly.
On a GeForce GTX 1080 in 2002×1447 resolution, decreasing VoxelGI quality
from High to Low quality saves 1.2 ms of GPU time in a medium-sized
test scene. This only results in a minor drop in quality.
- Rename OpenGL to GLES3 in the source code per community feedback.
- The renderer is still exposed as "OpenGL 3" to the user.
- Hide renderer selection dropdown until OpenGL support is more mature.
- The renderer can still be changed in the Project Settings or using
the `--rendering-driver opengl` command line argument.
- Remove commented out exporter code.
- Remove some OpenGL/DisplayServer-related debugging prints.
The built-in ALPHA in spatial shaders comes pre-set with a per-instance
transparency value. Multiply by it if you want to keep it.
The transparency value of any given GeometryInstance3D is affected by:
- Its new "transparency" property.
- Its own visiblity range when the new "visibility_range_fade_mode"
property is set to "Self".
- Its parent visibility range when the parent's fade mode is
set to "Dependencies".
The "Self" mode will fade-out the instance when reaching the visibility
range limits, while the "Dependencies" mode will fade-in its
dependencies.
Per-instance transparency is only implemented in the forward clustered
renderer, support for mobile should be added in the future.
Co-authored-by: reduz <reduzio@gmail.com>
Soft shadows are relatively expensive to filter. However, with the
default blur factors, it's not needed to use too many samples
(unless PCSS-like shadows are used with a large size). Textures
and screen-space antialiasing can also be used to mask the noise
pattern effectively.
On a GeForce GTX 1080, going from Medium to Low for both shadow types
saves 0.2-0.4 ms of GPU time per frame in 2560×1440 resolution.
This can translate to significantly higher savings on lower-end GPUs.
Given how the shader works, this improves rendering performance
even if lights with shadows are never used.
This can be used to improve 3D shadow rendering quality at little
performance cost. Unlike the existing Hard setting which is limited
to variable shadow blur only, it works with both fixed blur and
variable blur.
