When my camera looks off into the distance, the fps drop from 66 to 40-45.

I was debugging using the statistics panel, and noticed that when this happens, In the Geometry section "ent: time for entity rendering" raises from 5.0 - 20.0

Why is this? How can I fix it? Is this the problem that causes my games Fps to drop when There is a distance / two layers of map..?

What is the meaning of "looks off into the distance"?
Statistics panel always stay away from the camera.

The statisics panel actually shows exactly where the cameras xyz is including pan tilt and roll.

Off into the distance is to say that If I look directly at a wall (block) there is no distance to render.

The engine is rendering something off in the distance.. Is it perhaps trying to render everything it sees - I am using LOD so its not rendering much.

EDIT: Or it shouldnt be

EDIT* Yes it is trying to render everything it sees that isn't blocked, clipped or back-facing.

(From my little knowledge) When looking at a wall you are not rendering much. I know anytime you look dead into a wall up close you frame rate will be highest if the rendered scene is basically empty . The more the camera see the lower the frame rate. Using LOD and shared texture will help reduce this. And setting a short clip_far range and fog help. As for shaders I know nothing really but the post I have read from the real experts here point to good shaders moving processes to the GPU and increasing the frame rate. Make sure your LOD's are good steps. For far away objects stop their animation and kill everything you can attached to them. You can restart it when it comes close again. Dropping only 10% of the polys each step of the LOD may not give much advantage. Flat texturing your level will increase Fps but Y would you? Anytime you move from seeing little to see much there should be a drop but it should be reasonable. Light setting and shadow setting effect a lot too. The more info you give the forum the more they can help.

<- I Tried but a real expert will most likely reply to you soon.

I met something similar. when a model is very close to the camera (i.e. its apparent scale is large), e.g. a tree, the fps drops significantly.

from the manual (at Frame Rate Optimization):

The bigger a model or sprite is scaled, and the closer it is to the camera, the slower it is rendered. The rendering time depends on the number of pixels that the object covers on the monitor.

NOT Hijacking - Thanks sivan I understand.



@sivan Should you rather save a few copies of a tree model out of MED with different sizes instead of scaling at runtime?

I do not scale them, I said apparent.

@ DevoN - I read this and thought that the part about alpha and merging grass (or your cast trees -[think merging is only good with low poly objects]) might be some help to you.
Link to -

Also I believe that sivan has talk about this merging but can't remember where (maybe "what are you working on").