Optimizing lots of meshes with limitations

Questions
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1

Babylon Version: 7.54 | WebGL Engine

I am trying to give my scene a performance boost and am looking for any suggestions on how. I have an application that displays data sets of models. The problem is the number of meshes in the models can get quite large.

In the worst case I am seeing about 6000 meshes, with ~96000 active faces and ~3000 draw calls.

I can’t use instancing because each mesh has the capability of being unique, and I can’t merge meshes because I need to be able to select and highlight each mesh individually.

For a lot of angles the meshes are almost all active in the scene, and using occlusion queries seems to result in worse performance than without.

With most systems I test this on the FPS sits around 10-20 on my worst case scenarios.

Looking at the chrome performance profiler, the majority of time is spent in RenderSorted with the bind calls.

babylonRenderProfile
babylonRenderProfile1406×406 29.1 KB

BabylonInspectorProfile
BabylonInspectorProfile284×335 3.71 KB

(My active meshes is weirdly only displaying the meshes in a viewport camera)

Has anyone optimized a situation like this to be more performant? Or have any general solutions to look into that may boost performance when dealing with a ton of meshes than cant be instanced or merged?

Any ideas are appreciated, and I’ll do my best to answer any questions I can about my scene setup

2

One angle could be to reduce the overload of selecting active meshes. At least worth a try:

Optimizing Your Scene | Babylon.js Documentation

in a nutshell:

  • Make sure to have all meshes always active with :mesh.alwaysSelectAsActiveMesh
  • Freeze the list: scene.freezeActiveMeshes();

You may also want to try this:
Optimizing Your Scene | Babylon.js Documentation

3

Discovered that the number of model faces contains decimal points

4

That’s just a heuristic (activeFaces = activeIndices / 3)

image
image1756×148 38.3 KB

5

But I feel that this algorithm is incorrect, it needs to traverse each mesh to be accurate

6

The scene can get pretty dynamic with lots of assets loading an unloading as the camera moves (using asset containers to speed up the process so I can do it without disposing), or gltf files being loaded on delays over a network download.

I make use of all the other suggestions in the Scenes with Lots of Meshes section already.

I don’t think the active mesh evaluation is that time consuming based on the profile (2ms of the ~90ms render time) but do you think its more or less performant to unfreeze the active meshes when adding/removing and then refreeze or to just leave it dynamic.

7

Well it is worth testing :wink: