Performance benchmark

The Benchmark tab renders an animated crowd of your character using the current LODs — a quick way to see the LOD set working at a distance and what it costs.

Benchmark tab with an animated textured crowd and performance readout — 2 025 animated, textured instances with soft shadows; settings on the left, performance on the right.

Instanced Crowd panel

Crowd and camera settings — Crowd and Camera.

Appearance, lighting, LOD and performance settings — Appearance, Lighting & Floor, Level of Detail, Performance.

Section	Settings
Crowd	Running starts/stops the crowd. Right under it: Show perf window and Unlimited FPS. Count (instances are laid out on a square grid, up to 45 × 45 = 2 025), Seed (variation), Anim phases (how many different animation offsets), Animate, Anim offset.
Camera	Mode: a fixed view that fits the crowd, or Fly-Through along a path (Play Path / Pause Path, Restart, Duration, Loop, Scrub).
Appearance	Shading (Solid, Textured, …), Lights, Wireframe.
Lighting & Floor	Floor, light direction and intensity, sky/ground colours, ambient, and Soft shadows with shadow-map size, coverage, the LOD used for shadow casters, darkness, softness and depth bias.
Level of Detail	Mode (Auto chooses by distance), Bias, LOD tint overlay (colour instances by level).
Performance	Run Benchmark.

The settings panel fills the height of the view and is fitted again when the window is resized. The panels can be moved by their title bar and resized from their lower-right corner; drag the panel's scrollbar to reach the lower sections (the mouse wheel moves the camera). The Perf window opens to the right of the settings.

Defaults and saving. The crowd starts with 256 instances, textured shading, soft shadows (a 4096 shadow map focused on the near view, cast from LOD 4), the camera flying through the crowd and the Perf window open. The settings are saved with the project and kept between sessions; loading a project brings back its settings. Unlimited FPS always starts off, because it affects every 3D view of the application.

Perf window

FPS and Frame CPU time.
Instances, joints, draw calls, main-pass triangles.
Geometry per LOD: how many instances use each level, triangles per instance, total triangles, and the distance band of each level.
Timings for animation (palette compute and upload), draw submission, the crowd pass and the shadow pass.
Renderer stats and Animation state.

Crowd coloured by LOD level — LOD tint overlay: instances coloured by the level they use, from green (near, detailed) to red (far, coarse).

Getting representative numbers

Other live 3D views slow the benchmark down. Keep the Benchmark tab as the only visible 3D view — do not have the Atlas Editor docked beside it.
Turn on Unlimited FPS to measure rather than sync to the display. Without it LODinize draws at most 30 frames per second, and the Perf window says so ("capped at 30"); the Crowd pass and Shadow pass times still show the real GPU cost.
Uncheck Running before returning to the other tabs.

Example: Checking a LOD set in a crowd.