For MONTHS now I've been in a horrible loop of optimizations for Tanks VS Bugs that amounted to nearly nothing.

And-blender-render

In small maps with < 30 enemies things were... okay. Not 60 FPS but not below 30 either. When we boosted up to 100 enemies (our current cap) things would tank... 6 FPS at the best, and we REALLY want at least that many to be able to swarm and still be fun.

So what does one do when hit with performance issues in Godot? The first answer is the profiler. So the slowest bit is definitely in the path finding. We're using regular navigation agents and nav regions with a behavior tree to manage the logic. We apply a number of techniques (staggering queries, batching, delaying the queries etc). With 100 units we end up with this...

mob-profile

This could be better, but it shouldn't be tanking my FPS as much as it is tanking... so what is the real issue here?


Well there is a SECOND profiler that I did not fully understand. This is the Visual Profiler and this told a VERY different story.

Visualization of Tanks vs Bugs GPU performance. After a point FPS tanks.

Well there is my answer, what is happening thats causing such catastrophic FPS loss in the renderer?

The rendered using 287% of the frame time

What is Cull 3D scene exactly? Is it Occlusion culling? What's going on?
A lot of this progress only came from the help I received from the Godot discord. It was clear when I made the meshes invisible I got ALL the FPS back, so it was something about the model or what the model was doing...

After testing nearly everything on the model in engine, I found the answer... it was the animations themselves. When animations were disabled completely the FPS was back above 60fps! Taking this back to the Godot discord, and showing the model and rig, it is more or less confirmed... not only did we make this thing a bit too detailed for how many of them we want on screen at once, but skeletal animations have some big performance bottle necks.

So what is the solution here? I was advised to look up Vertex Animation Textures (VATs). So that is where my journey moves next, research on VATs, VAT related plugins and seeing if I we get the performance boost we've been searching for.