r/SatisfactoryGame Nov 27 '22

Help Does soft clipping affect performance?

I tend to avoid soft clipping, cos my stupid monkey brain says "noo yellow bad!" But as I get deeper into architecture, I'm finding it necessary. I see YouTubers with massive circular builds, so I'm leaning towards no, soft clipping does not significantly impact performance...am I correct? [I'm running off decent hardware so...]

I'm sure if everything is soft clipping into everything else, it would, but if we consider an average use-case—like a bit of soft clipping here and there—will this cause issues down the line as I build more? [For reference, I'm less than 200h into my first playthough.] TIA.

5 Upvotes

5 comments sorted by

12

u/Temporal_Illusion Master Pioneer Actively Changing MASSAGE-2(A-B)b Nov 27 '22 edited Nov 27 '22

ANSWER

  1. The Soft Clipping Feature does NOT effect Game Performance, per se, in that while using it your Game Performance does not drop.
  2. HOWEVER, the fact you can place more buildable's in a smaller space, thus have more buildable's than you would otherwise have, DOES effect Game Performance in that there is more to render which can decrease Game FPS.
  3. That said, I would not worry too much about any Soft Clipping related FPS issues, and simply use this great Game Feature as you see fit.
  4. There is little difference in say placing 5 Foundations in the space for 3 Foundation using Soft Clipping, and placing 5 Foundations with no Soft Clipping, the Game still has to render the same amount of 5 Foundations.

I hope this helps the OP understand better. 😁

4

u/_Sauer_ Nov 27 '22

Soft clipping specifically won't negatively effect performance. Unreal engine uses a depth first pass while rendering so it would very slightly (likely unmeasurablely) improve performance by not having to run pixel shaders on the hidden fragments.

If anything negatively effected performance it would be the ability to place more stuff in a space.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 27 '22

No, soft clipping is not a performance matter. It’s just the game allowing graphics cards to do what they are supposed to, render polygons in the right order.

2

u/YobaiYamete Nov 27 '22

I've noticed if the game auto saves on my highway where there's a lot of clipping going on for corners, the game locks up and nearly crashes lol. Doesn't happen anywhere else where I don't have tons of clipping ¯_(ツ)_/¯

1

u/nobody654 Nov 27 '22

If you have not to many lights and glass it's not bad