I understand they are 2 different levels but...

I am creating a level in FPSCR and I have alot of objects in the level. When viewing most of the level, the polygon count is around 240,000 to 470,000 and 740 draw cells. The can really lag and I get an average of 40ish fps, and 58-64 fps with everything on low.

Yet, another level I made with the same, if not more amount of objects, which I also entirely covered in grass gets around 80fps yet with a view of the whole level, it uses more polygons ( 500,000+ ). One thing I did see tho is that it uses 500-700 draw cells only.

I'm guessing draw cell count is the issue here. How can I reduce the count? I really wanna keep working on my level but playtesting keeps getting slower and slower the more objects I add

Also, what do draw cells mean/do and what usually increases/decreases them? If draw cell count isn't the problem here, what would be? All the other meters are well below 30%/40% full

The performance of the current builds is a known issue very little time has been spent optimising the engine, it will improve in the next beta.

Draw calls are effectively image calls, technically memory in reality, but that is the easiest way to think of them. Rule of thumb fewer images=fewer draw calls.

If you use only one image you should use only one draw call. You generally use an atlas texture to take advantage of this, although with reloaded you are obviously limited to your media. That way you can get many sprites from one image and thus avoid further memory calls to grab different images. This keeps speed up.

The only way you can keep the draw calls down is to use lot's of media with the same image texture. Even so, I am not sure that Reloaded treats the same image as one if loaded several times from different directories. I haven't experimented, as I don't have many objects that use the same texture. It might be worth playing about with and could possibly speed things up a lot.

Also, Reloaded uses 3 maps for each object so every object you load and place down will eat 3 draw calls minimum. Shadows and such increase that. As I said above it may be possible to reduce by playing about and trying to use the bare minimum amount of textures for your scene.

I'm not sure though if Reloaded treats each object the same regardless of the image it uses though? You would imagine if you clone an object, a tree for instance, it would use the same texture for each and thus the same draw call for the diffuse at least. Speed is being worked on at the moment, with reducing draw calls one of the items already covered. So next release should really help smooth some of this out.

Thanks for the explanation on them. I don't think reloaded treats multiple images as the same as my level uses the same textures for most objects.

A nice idea DVader, and in the next build with the light-mapper, objects of the same image can be batched when in close proximity to reduce draw calls. In V1.0085 you can reckon on one rendered entity = one draw call.

so that means the skybox alone is six draw calls.

Yes, six planes rendered only if the plane is visible. Normally madness I know, but the texture is HUGE so the trade-off is that a huge chunk of video memory never enters the cache if you are only looking one way.