Draw distance and frame rates

Paul_Bert

Train Enthusiast
I have a question regarding the draw distance and frame rates. One base board is 720 meters on a side. So the maximum draw setting distance of 15,000 meter sees images a little over 20 baseboards away.

My question is this. Assume you have a layout on 8 baseboards by 8 baseboards. For this layout an 8,000 meter draw distance would be sufficient to see from one end of the layout to the other. In this scenario would the frame rate be increased by changing the draw distance from 15,000 to 8,000. In other words is the frame rate dependent upon the distant viewed as opposed to the draw distance setting.

Any thoughts?
 
I have found that the long draw distance affects frame-rates due to the amount of content being included in the scene. I think the problem has a lot to do with poor LOD on many assets. In an ideal world, all objects would have a perfectly spec'd out LOD and work as it's supposed to but due to the disparate quality of so many assets, this does not work well.

I have also found having a draw distance of 15 Km on a smaller route doesn't matter because you're not going to load any more content that can be seen from the camera. I have used the 15 Km draw distance only when warranted. If the route is open valleys with beautiful distant mountains or the route travels up on the tops of mountain ridges with open valleys below, I want to see this beautiful landscape, which gets cut off by the short draw-distances, but if the route is all forests, or in my cases lots of tree-tunnels because I model a lot of the east-coast and New England dilapidated branches with lots of industries and city-like environments, I don't bother with anything above 8 Km. There's just too much content in the scene and the program tries to load it all up at once causing very poor performance.
 
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