Why Does Enabling Cascaded Shadows Increase Triangle Counts in High-Quality Settings?
Is the increase from hundreds of thousands of triangles to more than 1 million related to enabling cascaded shadows in high quality settings?
Yes. Cascaded shadows can cause some objects to participate in shadow rendering multiple times. In addition to normal rendering, the same object may need to participate in additional shadow rendering, increasing the amount of geometry the GPU needs to process. According to the GameOptim GOT Online report, the geometric workload differs significantly between the two quality settings: https://uwa overseas public.oss us east 1.aliyuncs.com/uploads/markdown/83d78a0b fc7e 4480 a662 6f015d0bdd79.png Medium quality: Triangle counts remain in the hundreds of thousands across most scenes, with a peak of approximately 621,000 . https://uwa overseas public.oss us east 1.aliyuncs.com/uploads/markdown/c43dc043 97ca 4800 9a89 e07a5e4a396d.png High quality: Triangle counts approach or exceed 1 million multiple times, with a peak of approximately 1.306 million . However, other rendering configurations may also have been changed in the high quality setting, so the entire increase cannot be attributed to cascaded shadows alone. To determine the impact of cascaded shadows more precisely, keep the scene and camera view fixed, change only the cascaded shadow related settings, and then compare the changes in Triangle or Input Primitive counts. https://uwa overseas public.oss us east 1.aliyuncs.com/uploads/markdown/bd1f0626 f134 41a5 87de 336650263ef0.png In addition to triangle counts, GPU Fragment Shaded can be used to evaluate GPU side pressure. In the report, Fragment Shaded has an average of approximately 3.322 million and a peak of approximately 9.661 million , indicating that fragment processing is another aspect worth monitoring beyond geometric workload. Therefore, when GPU pressure increases under high quality settings, do not evaluate the issue based on triangle counts alone. Triangle, Input Primitive, and Fragment Shaded should be considered together.