I’m doing some tests with Blender 4.2.1 LTS and Blender 4.3.0 Alpha trying to obtain projected shadows that runs faster on Eevee, for realtime visualization.
Do you have any advice or tip to achieve such result?
Decreasing Rays and Steps values doesn’t seem to help. Decreasing the shadow resolution eitheir not. Increasing the Light Threshold helps a bit…
Maybe some combination of render with the kind of light I’m using? (A point light for example…)
As far as I can tell, you have pretty much the cheapest shadow settings possible right now.
There is one last thing I might try. I am not sure if it applies to the way new Eevee does shadows, but shadow maps traditionally tend to be more expensive with point lights than with spots, as they need to be sent in every direction.
Eevee isn’t quite designed for fully realtime applications. It’s fast enough to preview a render and adjust lighting, but don’t expect 60 fps like in a game engine.
What you have right now is about as fast as it can get. Is it not enough for your needs, even in an empty scene? If it isn’t, you should use a game engine, which is adapted to those needs.
I tried a spot and the results are the same or worst…
So the plan now is that Cycles will be dropped out in favor of Eeevee?
And “Material Preview” will be the realtime renderer? If so, do you when the devs will deploy projected shadows on it?
I don’t get why they removed “cube size” and “cascade size”… When those options were available, Eeevee runned much faster!
Do you know when this option was taken out and why? As far from I can tell was after Blender 4.0.0…
I don’t know where you heard those things, Cycles isn’t going anywhere. The material preview mode is not using a different renderer, it’s just Eevee, you can even go in its settings and activate “scene lights” and “scene world” and you will turn the material preview into a full Eevee render that follows all the render settings.
Eevee was completely rewritten in Blender 4.2. The shadow options were removed because the New Eevee does shadows in a completely different way than the old. That new method allows for a much finer max resolution, which is why it was chosen.
The new Eevee is still a new product and is not as optimized or as feature complete as it will hopefully be in the future.
What are your computer specs, do you have an old computer? I don’t have issues running Eevee, especially not in an empty scene with low quality shadows, and my computer isn’t really powerful or new. An important part of progress in 3D graphics happens because newer hardware allows things that weren’t possible before. If you can’t run the new version on your hardware, there is nothing that forbids you from staying in Blender 4.1 until Eevee is better optimized or you can get stronger hardware.
First of all thank’s a lot for such a long, detailed and direct reply. It’s like a tutorial!
I learned a lot from it. Just to mention an example I was having a difficult time downloading and comparing versions until I could figure out, more or less, where the radical change on shadows was implemented.
The computer I was using when I wrote the initial post is an Asus Tuf “Gaming” Notebook with an Intel Processor Core i5-12500H de 12ª generation 2,5 GHz (18M Cache, to 4,5 GHz, 12 cores: 4 P-cores e 8 E-cores) and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, 4 GB GDDR6 running Ubuntu 24.04 with Nvidia’s proprietary drivers.
I guess this configuration is weak to support Vulkan, I guess the Blenderfoundation is moving towards that, maybe the lag (on my side) is partially because this particular computer can not handle the new Vulkan paradigm.
I’m anxious to see the optimization work that you mentioned! I hope that it speed things up. But I understand if it doesn’t.
I think I was to comfy and pampered with the old implementation and now I can´t tolerate lags! Blame on me!
But, again, thank you very much for your reply and patience!
The new Eevee is in general slower than the old, at least for the time being. Lots of people have been saying it.
I haven’t seen what kind of framerates you are getting, but I find that the performance is useable on my side. Though that might just be because I have been doing 3D art for a while and have used way worse than this (I learnt rendering at a time where renderers didn’t do realtime viewport previews, you only had a crude approximation of your lighting to work with until you pressed the render button).
I am curious what you perceive as lag in a rendered viewport. Are you getting like 1 fps? Or do you consider under 30 fps as lag?
The way I see it, I only really need to use Eevee in the viewport to adjust the lighting and materials, and those tasks don’t need a perfectly smooth performance. The parts where framerate matters are sculpting and animation, and those can be done in solid view.
One last thing, you aren’t using “shader to rgb”, are you? This one part of Eevee is known to work really poorly for now in the new version.
Good question! I don’t know how to measure the frames per second while I’m orbiting this simple scene; with the middle mouse button pressed and moving the mouse in the 3D Viewport to inspect it, for example.
I’m sorry I don’t know what “shader to rgb” is. The .blend file provided in the first post is just the default cube duplicated.
I just find something that changed the situation for this particular machine: Ubuntu 24.04 offers the possibility to start a terminal by “Launch using Discrete Graphics Card”.
So I launched Blender 4.3.0 Alpha from this terminal, and guess what? The shadows renders super fast! Yay!
Now is just a matter of finding out why the fu%!#ing driver is not doing his work if I initiate Blender via double clicking, like someone that resembles a normal person would do.
