The Vanishing of Milliseconds: Optimizing the UE4 renderer for Ethan Carter VR
原文：
https://medium.com/@TheIneQuation/the-vanishing-of-milliseconds-dfe7572d9856#.auamge3rg
As a game with very rich visuals, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (available for the
Oculus Rift and Steam VR ) has been a difficult case for hitting the VR performance targets. The fact that its graphics workload is somewhat uncommon for Unreal Engine 4 (and, specifically, largely dissimilar to existing UE4 VR demos) did not help. I have described the reasons for that at length in
a previous post; the gist of it, however, is that The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’s game world is statically lit in some 95% of areas, with dynamic lights appearing only in small, contained, indoors.
【The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 作为一款视觉效果很不错的VR游戏，在性能方面达标非常非常的难。事实上要很好的去优化渲染的话，你要对整块知识有足够的了解，这个游戏的渲染工作流和基本的UE4渲染工作流区别也很大，主要的在于大量的采用了静态光照，只有在很少的地方采用动态光源。】
Important note: Our (The Astronauts’) work significantly(显著的) pre-dates Oculus VR’s UE4 renderer. If we had it at our disposal back then, I would probably not have much to do for this port; but as it were, we were on our own. That said, I highly recommend the aforementioned article and code, especially if your game does not match our rendering scenario, and/or if the tricks we used simply do not work for you.
【我们的工作是在出 Oculus VR’s UE4 renderer 之前，因此我们花了大量的时间搞了一套自己的renderer。 在此作者很推荐 Oculus VR’s UE4 renderer，非常值得一看。】
Although the studied case is a VR title, the optimizations presented are mostly concerned with general rendering and may be successfully applied to other titles; however, they are closely tied to the UE4 and may not translate well to other game engines.
【尽管在优化的时候我们尽量考虑通用性，但事实上优化本身就是一个特殊化的过程，很多优化内容和实际使用场景息息相关。】
There are Github links in the article. Getting a 404 error does not mean the link is dead — you need to have your Unreal Engine and Github accounts connected to see UE4 commits.
【请将Github帐号关联UE4后才能打开这篇文章的一些链接。】
Show me the numbers
To whet the reader’s appetite(胃口), let us compare the graphics profile and timings of a typical frame in the PS4/Redux version to a corresponding one from the state of the VR code on my last day of work at The Astronauts:
【首先咱们来比较一般的frame以及我们优化后的数据结果。】
GPU profiles from the PS4/Redux and VR versions, side by side. Spacing has been added to have the corresponding data line up. Detailed textual log data available as Gists: PS4/Redux and VR version.
Timing graphs displayed with the STAT UNITGRAPH command, side by side.
Both profiles were captured using the UE4Editor -game -emulatestereo command line in a Development configuration, on a system with an NVIDIA GTX 770 GPU, at default game quality settings and 1920×1080 resolution (960×1080 per eye). Gameplay code was switched off using the PAUSE console command to avoid it affecting the readouts, since it is out of the scope of this article.
【上面数据的依赖规格】
As you can (hopefully) tell, the difference is pretty dramatic. While a large part of it has been due to code improvements, I must also honour the art team at The Astronauts — Adam Brya, Michał Kosieradzki, Andrew Poznański, and Kamil Wojciekiewicz have all made a brilliant job of optimizing the game assets!
【结果也和艺术和代码方面相关。】
This dead-simple optimization algorithm that I followed set a theme for the couple of months following the release of Ethan Carter PS4, and became the words to live by:
- Profile a scene from the game.
- Identify expensive render passes.
- If the feature is not essential for the game, switch it off.
- Otherwise, if we can afford the loss in quality, turn its setting down.
【优化算法的思考流程：首先选定一个游戏场景，然后确定耗费资源的render passes，接着考虑关闭不重要的部分，如果可以接受效果的下降就去掉他或者调整他。】
Hitting the road to VR
The beginnings of the VR port were humble. I decided to start the transition from the PS4/Redux version with making it easier to test our game in VR mode. As is probably the case with most developers, we did not initially have enough HMDs for everyone in the office, and plugging them in and out all the time was annoying. Thus, I concluded we needed a way to emulate one.
【早期的VR接口是简陋的，而且设备也不是那么多，作为开发者对VR游戏测试会非常头疼，因此我们首先需要一个可用的仿真环境。】
Turns out that UE4 already has a handy – emulatestereo command line switch. While it works perfectly in game mode, it did not enable that Play in VR button in the editor. I hacked up the FInternalPlayWorldCommandCallbacks::PlayInVR_*() methods to also test for the presence of FFakeStereoRenderingDevice in GEngine->StereoRenderingDevice, apart from just GEngine->HMDDevice. Now, while this does not accurately emulate the rendering workload of a VR HMD, we could at least get a rough, quick feel for stereo rendering performance from within the editor, without running around with a tangle of wires and connectors. And it turned out to be good enough for the most part.
【UE4已经实现了硬件检测，可以方便的切换在不同设备上预览和显示，但是问题在于没有相关硬件就不给你 Play in VR的选项。作者的做法是 FInternalPlayWorldCommandCallbacks::PlayInVR_*() 函数里面不去做VR头盔检测，而是默认就开启VR渲染，这样就解决了设备不够的问题。】
While trying it out, Andrew, our lead artist, noticed that game tick time is heavily impacted by having miscellaneous editor windows open. This is most probably the overhead from the editor running a whole lot of Slate UI code. Minimizing all the windows apart from the main frame, and setting the main level editor viewport to immersive mode seemed to alleviate the problem, so I automated the process and added a flag for it to ULevelEditorPlaySettings. And so, the artists could now toggle it from the Editor Preferences window at their own leisure.
【接着我们的艺术团队的头头发现编辑器窗口开着的时候也很耗性能，因为需要运行渲染大量的Ui。最好的方式就是运行的时候直接把这些最小化，把执行窗口全屏，我们把这些工作也写到工程设置里面，以便自动这样子执行。】
These changes, as well as several of the others described in this article, may be viewed in my fork of Unreal Engine on Github (reminder: you need to have your Unreal Engine and Github accounts connected to see UE4 commits).
Killing superfluous renderer features
Digging(挖掘) for information on UE4 in VR, I discovered that Nick Whiting and Nick Donaldson from Epic Games have delivered an interesting presentation at Oculus Connect, which you can see below.
【关于 UE4 VR方面内容的讲解，下面这篇talk讲的不错大家可以看一下。】
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oM6Xe7fT-8
Around the 37 minute mark is a slide which in my opinion should not have been a “bonus”, as it contains somewhat weighty information. It made me realize that, by default, Unreal’s renderer does a whole bunch of things which are absolutely unnecessary for our game. I had been intellectually aware of it beforehand, but the profoundness of it was lost on me until that point. Here is the slide in question:
【这篇内容让我们意识到UE4有大量的预置的耗性能的选项是我们的游戏所不需要的，我们需要去考虑如何去做取舍。这里37分钟的PPT给了一个测试比较符合VR开发的设置例子。】
I recommend going over every one of the above console variables in the engine source and seeing which of their values makes most sense in the context of your project. From my experience, their help descriptions are not always accurate or up to date, and they may have hidden side effects. There are also several others that I have found useful and will discuss later on.
【我们非常推荐你去引擎仔细看上面的每一个选项的内容与设置会对你的游戏的影响。以我们的经验，别人的设置不一定适合当前的你的需求。】
It was the first pass of optimization, and resulted in the following settings — an excerpt from our DefaultEngine.ini:
【给一个我们使用的设置如下】
[SystemSettings]
r.TranslucentLightingVolume=0
r.FinishCurrentFrame=0
r.CustomDepth=0
r.HZBOcclusion=0
r.LightShaftDownSampleFactor=4
r.OcclusionQueryLocation=1
[/Script/Engine.RendererSettings]
r.DefaultFeature.AmbientOcclusion=False
r.DefaultFeature.AmbientOcclusionStaticFraction=False
r.EarlyZPass=1
r.EarlyZPassMovable=True
r.BasePassOutputsVelocity=False
The fastest code is that which does not run
May I remind you that Ethan Carter is a statically lit game; this is why we could get rid of translucent lighting volumes and ambient occlusion (right with its static fraction), as these effects were not adding value to the game. We could also disable the custom depth pass for similar reasons.
【这里要提醒你的是Ethan Carter是一个静态光源的游戏，因此我们不采用 translucent lighting volumes and ambient occlusion 和 custom depth pass】
Trade-offs
On most other occasions, though, the variable value was a result of much trial and error, weighing a feature’s visual impact against performance.
【在不同的场合对上面的数值都要好好的去权衡。】
One such setting is r.FinishCurrentFrame, which, when enabled, effectively creates a CPU/GPU sync point right after dispatching a rendering frame, instead of allowing to queue multiple GPU frames. This contributes to improving motion-to-photon latency at the cost of performance, and seems to have originally been recommended by Epic (see the slide above), but they have backed out of it since (reminder: you need to have your Unreal Engine and Github accounts connected to see UE4 commits). We have disabled it for Ethan Carter VR.
【r.FinishCurrentFrame 这一个选项如果打开则 每一帧都会创建一个 CPU/GPU 同步的点光源来渲染，而不是允许光源在GPU复用。这个是以性能为代价降低对光子运动处理的延迟，但是是作为UE4的推荐设置默认打开的，这里我们将它关闭了。】
The variable r.HZBOcclusion controls the occlusion culling algorithm. Not surprisingly, we have found the simpler, occlusion query-based solution to be more efficient, despite it always being one frame late and displaying mild popping artifacts. So do others.
【r.HZBOcclusion 控制的是遮挡剔除的算法，我们发现occlusion query-based solution尽管有效的瑕疵但是效率更高。】
Related to that is the r.OcclusionQueryLocation variable, which controls the point in the rendering pipeline at which occlusion queries are dispatched. It allows balancing between more accurate occlusion results (the depth buffer to test against is more complete after the base pass) against CPU stalling (the later the queries are dispatched, the higher the chance of having to wait for query results on the next frame). Ethan Carter VR’s rendering workload was initially CPU-bound (we were observing randomly occurring stalls several milliseconds long), so moving occlusion queries to before base pass was a net performance gain for us, despite slightly increasing the total draw call count (somewhere in the 10–40% region, for our workload).
【r.OcclusionQueryLocation 控制顶点在渲染流水线遮挡处理中的处理顺序，她控制的是遮挡处理的精度和CPU失速，原因是越精确的比对越耗时，而整个过程需要CPU等待空转，就会导致变慢。我们的游戏在此采用了这个选项，虽然moving occlusion queries会导致draw call总的数量增加，但是其带来的CPU性能的释放会给游戏总的性能增益。】
Left eye taking up more than twice the time? That is not normal.
Have you noticed, in our pre-VR profile data, that the early Z pass takes a disproportionately large amount of time for one eye, compared to the other? This is a tell-tale sign that your game is suffering from inter-frame dependency stalls, and moving occlusion queries around might help you.
【不知道你有没有注意到遮挡处理时一只眼睛的画面更耗时，如上图，这是因为你游戏没有使用帧间依赖， moving occlusion queries 可以解决这个问题。】
For the above trick to work, you need r.EarlyZPass enabled. The variable has several different settings (see the code for details); while we shipped the PS4 port with a full Z prepass (r.EarlyZPass=2) in order to have D-buffer decals working, the VR edition makes use of just opaque (and non-masked) occluders (r.EarlyZPass=1), in order to conserve computing power. The rationale was that while we end up issuing more draw calls in the base pass, and pay a bit more penalty for overshading due to the simpler Z buffer, the thinner prepass would make it a net win.
【 r.EarlyZPass 为了保证上面的设置起作用，这一个选项需要开启。= 2 的时候是为了 D-buffer 通道贴图起作用， = 1 的时候只是用来处理透明，这里就是，足够用了。】
We have also settled on bumping r.LightShaftDownSampleFactor even further up, from the default of 2 to 4. This means that our light shaft masks’ resolution is just a quarter of the main render target. Light shafts are very blurry this way, but it did not really hurt the look of the game.
【r.LightShaftDownSampleFactor 我们将这个值调的很高，默认是2，我们使用4。这意思是光照的精度处理只是一般渲染目标质量的四分之一，这样在这里也够用。】
Finally, I settled on disabling the “new” (at the time) UE 4.8 feature of r.BasePassOutputsVelocity. Comparing its performance against Rolando Caloca’s hack of injecting meshes that utilize world position offset into the velocity pass with previous frame’s timings (which I had previously integrated for the PS4 port to have proper motion blur and anti-aliasing of foliage), I found it simply outperformed the new solution in our workload.
【r.BasePassOutputsVelocity 这个UE4.8以后的新特性我们也关掉了。这边应该说的是这种方法对于我们项目中使用的运动模糊和反锯齿方式来说反倒会起到反作用。】
Experiments with shared visibility
If you are not interested in failures, feel free to skip to the next section (Stereo instancing…).
Several paragraphs earlier I mentioned stalls in the early Z prepass. You may have also noticed in the profile above that our draw time (i.e. time spent in the render thread) was several milliseconds long. It was a case of a Heisenbug: it never showed up in any external profilers, and I think it has to do with all of them focusing on isolated frames, and not sequences thereof, where inter-frame dependencies rear their heads.
【你会发现上面我们的截图的渲染时间长达几毫秒，这是Heisenbug，因为这里只考虑孤立的帧的情况而不考虑帧间关系。】
Anyway, while I am still not convinced(相信) that the suspicious prepass GPU timings and CPU draw timings were connected, I took to the conventional wisdom that games are usually CPU-bound when it comes to rendering. Which is why I took a look at the statistics that UE4 collects and displays, searching for something that could help me deconstruct the draw time. This is the output of STAT INITVIEWS, which shows details of visibility culling performance:
【不管怎么样，我还是非常怀疑对CPU/GPU运算的解耦，我想看看在我对GPU绘制的优化过程中CPU有啥反映，这就是为什么我要收集统计UE4相关信息的原因。具体展现信息如下图】
Output of STAT INITVIEWS in the PS4/Redux version.
Whoa, almost 5 ms spent on frustum and occlusion culling! That call count of 2 was quite suggestive: perhaps I could halve this time by sharing the visible object set data between eyes?
【视锥和遮挡剔除花了5ms，那么我们是否因该考虑两只眼睛渲染之间的关系来做优化。】
To this end, I had made several experiments. There was some plumbing required to get the engine not to run the view relevance code for the secondary eye and use the primary eye’s data instead. I had added drawing a debug frustum to the FREEZERENDERING command to aid in debugging culling using a joint frustum for both eyes.I had improved theDrawDebugFrustum() code to better handle the inverse-Z projection matrices that UE4 uses, and also to allow a plane set to be the data source. Getting one frustum culling pass to work for both eyes was fairly easy.
【接下来我做了很多实验，最终使得一次视域剔除作用在两只眼睛的渲染过程中是可行的。】
But occlusion culling was not.
【但是遮挡处理不可以】
For performance reasons mentioned previously, we were stuck with the occlusion query-based mechanism (UE4 runs a variant of the original technique). It requires an existing, pre-populated depth buffer to test against. If the buffer does not match the frustum, objects will be incorrectly culled, especially at the edges of the viewport.
【基于性能方面的考虑，我们坚持occlusion query-based mechanism，他必须要一个预填充的depth buffer来做遮挡测试。如果这个buffer不匹配frustum，会出错。】
There seemed to be no way to generate a depth buffer that could approximate the depth buffer for a “joint eye”, short of running an additional depth rendering pass, which was definitely not an option. So I scrapped the idea.
【这个很难去生成一个双眼近似的depth buffer去做处理，因此放弃。】
Many months and a bit more experience later, I know now that I could have tried reconstructing the “joint eye” depth buffer via reprojection, possibly weighing in the contributions of eyes according to direction of head movement, or laterality; but it’s all over but the shouting now.
【我现在觉得可以根据双眼的物理存在感去重构depth buffer的reprojection算法来达到上面的目的。】
And at some point, some other optimization — and I must admit I never really cared to find out which one, I just welcomed it — made the problem go away as a side effect, and so it became a moot point:
【还有一些其他的优化，反正总的目的就是有效，有些具体细节我也没有去深入探讨。】
Output of STAT INITVIEWS in the VR version.
Stereo instancing: not a silver bullet
Epic have developed the feature of instanced stereo rendering for UE 4.11. We had pre-release access to this code courtesy of Epic and we had been looking forward to testing it out very eagerly.
【UE 4.11 提出了 instanced stereo rendering，我们对此非常非常的期待。】
It turned out to be a disappointment, though.
【虽然最终是很失望的结果】
First off, the feature was tailored quite specifically to the Bullet Train UE4 VR demo.
【首先这功能是对Bullet Train demo 量身定做的。】
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmaxmnPzMWE
Note that this demo uses dynamic lighting and has zero instanced foliage in it. Our game was quite the opposite. And the instanced foliage would not draw in the right eye. It was not a serious bug; evidently, Epic focused just on the features they needed for the demo, which is perfectly understandable, and the fix was easy.
【注意这个demo采用的是动态光源且has zero instanced foliage in it，这与我们的游戏非常的不一样。对于 instanced foliage不能借鉴一只眼睛的绘制于另一只眼睛。这个不是Bug，但是明显的，epic只在乎的是在这个demo里面很好的使用和容易实现。】
But the worst part was that it actually degraded performance. I do not have that code laying around anymore to make any fresh benchmarks, but from my correspondence with Ryan Vance, the programmer at Epic who prepared a code patch for us (kudos to him for the initiative!):
【但更坏的是这其实反倒导致性能下降。我没有能力去对这块做修改，但是非常需要demo里那样的性能提升，希望Epic能给我来个补丁。（还讽刺了一下Epic哈哈）】
Comparing against a pre-change build reveals a considerable perf hit: on foliage-less scenes (where we’ve already been GPU-bound) we experience a ~0.7 ms gain on the draw thread, but a ~0.5 ms loss on the GPU.
【在一个foliage-less的场景测试结果是绘制线程快了 0.7ms， 但是GPU整体慢了 0.5ms】
Foliage makes everything much, much worse, however (even after fixing it). Stat unit shows a ~1 ms GPU loss with vr.InstancedStereo=0 against baseline, and ~5 ms with vr.InstancedStereo=1!
【Foliage 会让一切变得更坏，vr.InstancedStereo=0 的时候GPU慢了1ms， vr.InstancedStereo=1 的时候慢了 5ms】
Other UE4 VR developers I have spoken to about this seem to concur. There is also thread at the Unreal forums with likewise complaints. As Ryan points out, this is a CPU optimization, which means trading CPU time for GPU time. I scrapped the feature for Ethan Carter VR — we were already GPU-bound for most of the game by that point.
【我和其他的UE4 VR开发者谈过这个问题，他们也很同意。也有人在论坛里面抱怨过这个问题的，总的来说这可以看作是一个CPU的优化，利用GPU的性能来降低CPu的消耗。】
The all-seeing eyes
The problematic opening scene.
At a point about two-thirds into the development, we had started to benchmark the game regularly, and I was horrified to find that the very opening scene of the game, just after exiting the tunnel, was suffering from poor performance. You could just stand there, looking forward and doing nothing, and we would stay pretty far from VR performance targets. Look away, or take several steps forward, and we were back under budget.
【这里开始讲VR游戏的一个特点就是，用户在全开放的世界里面的关注点是你没有办法能够预测的，这一点在一开始我们做游戏的时候最让人觉得惊讶的，也给我们带来了程序性能上的问题。】
A short investigation using the STAT SCENERENDERING command showed us that primitive counts were quite high (in the 4,000–6,000 region). A quick look around using the FREEZERENDERING command did not turn up any obvious hotspots, though, so I took to the VIS command. The contents of the Z-buffer after pre-pass (but before the base pass!) explained everything.
【我们将整个区域分成更多块，然后去测试用户比较关注的块，结果找不到任何的热点。】
Note the missing ground in the foreground, in the bottom-left visualizer panel.
At the beginning of the game, the player emerges from a tunnel. This tunnel consists of the wall mesh and a landscape component (i.e. terrain tile) that has a hole in it, which resulted in the entire component (tile) being excluded from the early Z-pass, allowing distant primitives (e.g. from the other side of the lake!) to be visible “through” large swaths of the ground. This was also true of components with traps in them, which are also visible in this scene.
【游戏一开始是一个铁道的隧道，因此可以通过Z值来遮挡掉大量的不可见部分。但是到了开阔区域，场景中的一切都可能随时被看到。】
I simply special-cased landscape components to be rendered as occluders even when they use masked materials (reminder: you need to have your Unreal Engine and Github accounts connected to see UE4 commits). This cut us from several hundred to a couple thousand draw calls in that scene, depending on the exact camera location.
【因此VR让我们回到了几百年前，你所站的位置也就是相机位置的四周都必须考虑进去渲染计算，然后通过相机裁剪得到最终结果，但其实性能尚有浪费。】
Fog so thick one might have spread it on bread
Still not happy with the draw call count, I took to RenderDoc. It has the awesome render overlay feature that helps you quickly identify some frequent problems. In this case, I started clicking through occlusion query dispatch events in the frame tree with the depth test overlay enabled, and a pattern began to emerge.
【对于Drawcll的数量还是不满意，我们来使用renderdoc来分析一下，它具有叠加呈现的功能可以让你快速的识别一些常见问题。在这里我用来分析遮挡问题。】
RenderDoc’s depth test overlay. An occlusion query(遮挡查询) dispatched for an extremely distant, large (about 5,000 x 700 x 400 units) object, showing a positive result (1 pixel is visible).
Since UE4 dispatches bounding boxes of meshes for occlusion queries, making it somewhat coarse and conservative (i.e. subject to false positives), we were having large meshes pass frustum culling tests, and then occlusion, by having just 1 or 2 pixels of the bounding box visible through thick foliage. Skipping through to the actual meshes in the base pass would reveal all of their pixels failing the depth test anyway.
【UE4采用基于包围盒的遮挡测试，粗糙但是快速，避免了实际的网格之间的测试。】
RenderDoc’s depth test overlay in UE4’s base pass. A mesh of decent size (~30k vertices, 50 x 50 x 30 bounding box), distant enough to occupy just 3 pixels (L-shaped formation in the centre). Successful in coarse occlusion testing, but failing the per-pixel depth tests.
Of course, every now and then, a single pixel would show through the foliage. But even then, I could not help noticing that it would be almost completely washed out by the thick fog that encompasses the forest at the beginning of the game!
【当然，时不时的，会有些非常小的pixel的深度值很突兀，包围盒方法错的很难看，这也可以通过雾来遮挡掉。】
This gave me the idea: why not add another plane to the culling frustum, at the distance where fog opacity approaches 100%?
【这给了我一个灵感：为什么不在雾导致完全不透明的距离上加一块板来遮挡掉后面的所有。】
Solving the fog equation for the distance and adding the far cull plane shaved another several hundred draw calls. We had the draw call counts back under control and in line with the rest of the game.
【这样可以大量的减少drawcall数量】
Insane LODs
At some point late in development, AMD’s Matthäus G. Chajdas was having a look at a build of the game and remarked that we are using way too highly tessellated trees in the aforementioned opening scene. He was right: looking up the asset in the editor had revealed that screen sizes of LODs 1+ were set to ridiculous amounts in the single-digit percentage region. In other words, the lower LODs would practically never kick in.
【在开发的后期，AMD的大神看了demo后说我们在开放场景中用了太多的树的高模。他说得非常对，我们需要在离用户比较近的地方使用这些模型，远距离的时候采用LOD。】
When asked why, the artists responded that when using the same mesh asset for hand-planted and instanced foliage, they had the LODs kick in(起作用) at different distances, and so they used a “compromise” value to compensate.
Needless to say, I absolutely hate it when artists try to clumsily work around such evident bugs instead of reporting them. I whipped up a test scene, confirmed the bug and started investigating(调查), and it became apparent that instanced foliage does not take instance scaling into account when computing the LOD factors (moreover, it is not even really technically feasible without a major redecoration, since the LOD factor is calculated per foliage type per entire cluster). As a result, all instanced foliage was culled as if it had a scale of 1.0, which usually was not the case for us.
Fortunately, the scale does not vary much within clusters. Taking advantage of this property, I put together some code for averaging the scale over entire instance clusters, and used that in LOD factor calculations. Far from ideal, but as long as scale variance within the cluster is low, it will work. Problem solved.
【必须要说的是，LOD会带来视觉效果上的一些BUG，对于这些问题处理起来很让人受不了。主要是实例化后比例上的问题，通过打组解决】
The money shot
But the most important optimization — the one which I believe put the entire endeavour in the realm of possibility — was the runtime toggling of G-buffers. I must again give Matthäus G. Chajdas credit for suggesting this one; seeing a GPU profile of the game prompted him to ask if we could maybe reduce our G-buffer pixel format to reduce bandwidth saturation. I slapped my forehead, hard. ‘Why, of course, we could actually get rid of all of them!’
【最重要的优化就是运行时G-Buffer切换，我们需要去减少G-buffer的使用来减少带宽的负荷来提高运行速率。】
At this point I must remind you again that Ethan Carter has almost all of its lighting baked and stowed away in lightmap textures. This is probably not true for most UE4 titles.
【说到这里我必须再次提醒 Ethan Carter 几乎采用的全是烘焙好的lightmap来实现光照，这不是大多数UE4的游戏都这么做的。】
Unreal already has a console variable for that called r.GBuffer, only it requires a restart of the engine and a recompilation of base pass shaders for changes to take effect. I have extended the variable to be an enumeration, assigning the value of 2 to automatic runtime control.
【r.Gbuffer 变量就是来控制这边内容的，注意修改这个值需要重启编译器重新编译所有的shader，数值是一个枚举值，数值为2就是自动运行时控制。】
This entailed a bunch of small changes all around the engine:
【这里需要对引擎做一些小的修改】
- Moving light occlusion and gathering to before the base pass.
- Having TBasePassPS conditionally define the NO_GBUFFER macro for shaders, instead of the global shader compilation environment.
- Creating a new shader map key string.
- Finally, adjusting the draw policies to pick the G-buffer/no G-buffer shader variant at runtime.
This change saved us a whopping 2–4 milliseconds per frame, depending on the scene!
【这可以每帧减少2-4ms！！！】
It does not come free, though — short of some clever caching optimization, it doubles the count of base pass shader permutations, which means significantly longer shader compiling times (offline, thankfully) and some additional disk space consumption. Actual cost depends on your content, but it can easily climb to almost double of the original shader cache size, if your art team is overly generous with materials.
【其实他是在变异的时候做了更多的优化工作来减少所需要的shader的cache，虽然增加了编译时间但那是离线的没关系。】
The fly in the ointment
Except of course the G-buffers would keep turning back on all the time. And for reasons that were somewhat unclear to me at first.
【美中不足：G-buffers would keep turning back on all the time.】
A quick debugging session revealed that one could easily position themselves in such a way that a point light, hidden away in an indoor scene at the other end of the level, was finding its way into the view frustum. UE4’s pretty naive light culling (simple frustum test, plus a screen area fraction cap) was simply doing a bad job, and we had no way of even knowing which lights they were.
【可以通过单点光源在UE4里面调试来fit到适合的最好结果。】
I quickly whipped up a dirty visualisation in the form of a new STATcommand — STAT RELEVANTLIGHTS — that lists all the dynamic lights visible in the last frame, and having instructed the artists on its usage, I could leave it up to them to add manual culling (visibility toggling) via trigger volumes.
【通过statcommand可以可视化frame里所有的光源使用情况，便于调试处理。】
STAT RELEVANTLIGHTS output. Left: scene with fully static lighting. Right: fully dynamic lighting; one point light has shadow casting disabled.
Now all that was left to optimize was game tick time, but I was confident that Adam Bienias, the lead programmer, would make it. I was free to clean my desk and leave for my new job!
【到此该讲的就讲完了，作者准备滚蛋开始新工作了。】
Conclusions
In hindsight, all of these optimizations appear fairly obvious. I guess I was simply not experienced enough and not comfortable enough with the engine. This project had been a massive crash course in rendering performance on a tight schedule for me, and there are many corners I regret cutting and not fully understanding the issue at hand. The end result appears to be quite decent, however, and I allow myself to be pleased with that. 😉
【事后来看所有优化效果都是相当明显的，作者非常满意。】
It seems to me that renderer optimization for VR is quite akin to regular optimization: profile, make changes, rinse, repeat. Original VR content may be more free in their choice of rendering techniques, but we were constrained by the already developed look and style of the game, so the only safe option was to fine-tune what was already there.
【优化工作流程： profile, make changes, rinse, repeat】
I made some failed attempts at sharing object visibility information between eyes, but I am perfectly certain that it is possible. Again, I blame my ignorance and inexperience.
【失败的尝试就不再这里废话了】
The problem of early-Z pass per-eye timings discrepancy/occlusion query stalling calls for better understanding. I wish I had more time to diagnose it, and the knowledge how to do it, since all the regular methods failed to pin-point it (or even detect it), and I had only started discovering xperf/ETW andGPUView.
【上面提到的early-Z pass per-eye timings discrepancy/occlusion query stalling calls这部分以后会写的更详细】
Runtime toggling of G-buffers is an optimization that should have made it into the PS4 port already, but again — I had lacked the knowledge and experience to devise it. On the other hand, perhaps it is only for the better that we could not take this performance margin for granted.
【G-buffers方面可能可以更进一步，我还需努力去了解。】