VFX Performance tanks when camera is within the particles

Hey @Donion,

I believe this is expected and not necessarily VFX Graph specific, but a general rendering consideration. Even if you were to add a few transparent quads and zoom in on them, you will probably get a similar performance drop.

When you zoom in, you are rendering a big portfolio/all of your screen multiple times; once for the opaque level itself, and once for each transparent particle. If your shader is more complex, that will add further strain to your rendering.

To make sure effects like this don't tank your performance, you should control the particle size so they become smaller when you get closer to them. This forum post has a few examples of how you can control your VFX particle sizes relative to the camera.

Hope this helps!

p.s. another note, unless you need the smoke to dynamically animate, it would probably be faster to just bake the noise into a texture rather than using the noise functions. If you want some animation, take a look at using flipbooks, it will also save you some performance

 

Check to see that your main camera in the Scene is tagged 'MainCamera':


Alternatively, you can also expose a Vector3 in Blackboard (PlayerPos in this example), add a Position Property Binder script to your VFX object, and link it to the exposed Vector3 and your player Transform and then use that PlayerPos instead of your Main Camera position in the graph to check the distance: