Staticmeshes or Brushes?

[Cruce]

Hopefully what I put in the subject line above doesn't make this too confusing. I am trying to determine which is better. The current map I am working on has lots of Staticmeshes of boulders. Most of the boulders are under ground... wasted polys. I could convert the staticmeshes to brushes and deintesect the brushes. I have found that it cuts off part of the boulder not seen... Therefore, reducing the number of polys, and potentially increasing the fps. I am not sure if it is worth it. Fisrt, It seems that the terrain is not the intersecting point used to remove part of the brush, but actually the edge of the map (the huge area subtracted out). I don't think anything outside of the map is generated anyways, so no gain there. Second, I have read that staticmeshes are loaded into video RAM to increase fps. If this is true, will the newly created brushes decrease fps, or are brushes also loaded into video RAM? Or do I have to convert newly created brush back into a staticmesh?
Thanks for your assistance with this.

[MrWright]

I have heard in several VTMs that a static mesh is only drawn once and helps the FPS. I have also read it in some tuts. As for whats better to use, I don't know. I like the meshes because you can resize them easy, and most of the time they have the textures on them already. If you don't like the tex. you can change it.

Also zone portals will help with the FPS. Don't know alot about it yet but it is on my things to do list.

[THEXFILES]

make a big zone portal, the size of your whole map and put it just under the lowest part of your map, like the bottom of the river under the water then nothing below that will be rendered.

[AsToRoTh]

K I know its an old topic but I was just reading stuff... anyways this is an old argument UT2004 wise (the BSP vs Smeshes). There was a statement early on about Smeshes taking less processing power etc meaning a FPS improvement... However. The advice I was given said firstly try and cut down on the number of textures on the mesh as the textures are drawn indivudually and therefore take up gfx... so if you use a Smesh with crap loads of polys and textures it still hits FPS. What was advised tho was if you have a lot of duplicated Smeshes in the same area, rather than have them as individual Smeshes select them all and Right Click -> Convet to Static Mesh. For some reason this helps as all teh SMeshes are rendered at once rather than individually so the textures are only called on once. Something like that anyway LoL.

[Centurion]

I remember the Static meshes are rendered in the GPU once - so once it is loaded- its just run around all the place - populating the map.

And yeh - like X said - dropping a ground sheet to keep all the rest from getting rendered would help too.