Measuring POI Performance

[zztong]

(1) Occasionally I'll get reports of poor performance. Typically, FPS drops while POIs load, usually in the downtown. This has had me looking for ways to diagnose/profile the performance on my POIs. I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone knew of resources that would be of assistance. For instance, other than load and rending times, what other measurable performance might there be? Are there any profiling/debugging features that I might use for more information.

 

I'm currently aware of the Prefab Editor telling me about "Verts" and Tris" (vertices and triangles) ... so potentially a measure of the effort to render a POI.

 

I could look at POI file sizes as potentially a measure of how much effort it takes to load a POI from disk.

 

(2) I'm aware of certain "tips" for performance, such as "don't turn on shadows on POI lights" and "don't overlap POI light radii." There was talk of performance issues related to windows in A20. What else should I know?

 

(3) A seemingly related matter is the notion that POIs located in either the game's files or LocalPrefabs perform better than POIs found in modlets. I have no idea how or why they might perform better, only that a number of folks believe it to be so. I'm a fan of putting things in modlets as I suspect that's the future, should we get into mods being distributed via the Steam Workshop. Can anyone shed any light on if there's any truth to POIs in some locations performing better in some way?