Does substance designer improve performance of games?

DataDragon

Hi,

I'm thinking about buying substance designer in the future. I'm thinking along the lines of using it within an UE4 project. UE4 having it's own material system, makes me unsure of whether or not Substance Designer is worth it; however, I have heard that it may improve performance, in terms of reducing the gpu or cpu load.

I'm quite the neophyte when it comes to these subjects, so I may be way off the mark.

So in essence, Does substance designer have advantages over Unreal's material system? If so, what are they?

Thanks!

ZacD

It probably depends how you are texturing and setting up a scene. Substance Designer does offer some huge advantages in being able to change, manage, and alter textures for an entire game/project. It also allows you to have an incredibly small download size by basically compressing full resolution textures into small substance files. But a direct performance benefit? It's really hard to say.

DataDragon

Those sound like useful features. Although I think I'm going to have to push buying this back a bit. Thinking that there were direct performance benefits, I thought this was a must have. So thanks for clearing everything up!

ZacD

Might want to wait until one of the Substance guys chime in, they know more about it than I do.

EDIT: There are situations if you wanted a layered material that you could adjusted (either during run time or just in the editor), Substance designer could produce a much less performance intensive material, because substance designer basically bakes out flattened textures after a parameter is adjusted, but if a UE4 material, it's going to be a heavy material.

EarthQuake

It sort of depends. While procedural textures can save a lot of disk space, they generally have to be unpacked and stored in VRAM the same as any other texture would, so you wouldn't see any performance benefit there, but I don't know enough about how substance files work to say for sure.

Zack Maxwell

I believe you're right, it only reduces the size on disc. And even then, you have to generate the texture purely within SD for that to be the case (bitmaps created elsewhere and embedded in a substance add their size to it, offering no benefit there).
In fact I've read that they actually increase initial loading times in return, since the game has to generate the textures from the substances when you start it up.

Jerc

It really depends on a lot of factors.

Substances are small, footprint wise. Even if you embed a bunch of bitmaps in it, the compression will make it most likely smaller than a regular asset.

Then the substance can be generated at different times: install, loading or run-time.

The only performance hit you may get would be if you wanted to generate at runtime: animated or in-game customizable textures. And the performance hit will happen only during the generation, and only on the CPU, so no framerate drop.

Generating at loading can make your load time longer if you are usually loading from a hard drive. If you are loading from a blu ray or downloading data, it will actually be faster to generate those textures.

In short: No performance gain and no performance hit unless you modify the substance in real time. Small footprint which make them ideal for downloadable/streamed games.

Paradan

@jerc you guys got any seats left at the Tuesday meetup? I sent off the RSVP and it's been all most 24 hours with no reply. :P