Hi all,
I’ve spent some time the past few weeks gathering some details to share on this new feature and how it works. As you know there is a new setting coming on Tuesday with World Update 6 called “Offscreen terrain pre-caching” and will be available on PC. This option defines what level of detail your offscreen terrain will stream into memory.
The definition of “Off screen terrain” is anything not currently visible behind the user.
First question I saw was, “If set to Ultra, all the offscreen terrain will be cached at full quality - does this include buildings and trees in addition to ground terrain?” Yes, this includes not only terrain but buildings, trees, photogrammetry, textures, and everything else in the world.
It will have four settings:
- Low - This setting will improve performance but a lot of terrain data is streamed at a lower quality behind the user, while FPS drops may increase when turning your head.
- Medium - This is what you currently have right now in the current build. The terrain behind the user is streamed at a lower quality and reduces the impact on memory and FPS, but when turning your head will need to stream the terrain.
- High - High will be an intermediate state between Medium and Ultra
- Ultra - This is will have no offscreen caching at all, and everything will be maxed out based on your graphics setting. The quality in front of the user is the same as from behind the user, so nothing needs to be loaded. This could come with some FPS drops when turning the head, but would result in higher FPS and lower memory usage when looking forward and not turning your head quickly.
Hope this answered some questions, and I am working on gathering information like this to help out with new features in future updates as well.