What is a reasonable frame budget (ms) for the post-processing pass in a custom Deferred Renderer?
Hi everyone,
I am currently building a custom DirectX 11 engine from scratch for my portfolio. The project is a high-end action RPG inspired by Lost Ark, utilizing a deferred rendering pipeline.
Right now, my post-processing pipeline includes:
* SSAO
* Exposure / Auto-Exposure
* Bloom
* Tonemapping
As I keep adding more shader passes to the post-processing stage, I am starting to feel a noticeable drop in frame rate. I've been trying to research the typical "frame budget" or average milliseconds (ms) allocated specifically for the post-processing phase in high-end or mid-to-high-end PC games, but I couldn't find any concrete numbers online.
**My Specs & Target:**
* **Current Dev Environment:** 1600 x 900 resolution on a Laptop RTX 4070.
* **Target Spec:** I am aiming to optimize this for mid-to-high-end mainstream PCs (around desktop RTX 3060 / 4060) targeting 1080p 60 FPS.
**What I'm doing & Looking for:**
I am currently implementing progressive downsampling (1/2 -> 1/4 -> 1/8) to optimize the Bloom and SSAO passes. However, I want to make sure I am measuring and optimizing the performance correctly.
For a shader-heavy game targeting 60 FPS (16.6ms total), how many ms does the post-processing stage usually take in professional pipelines under these target specs?
At what point should I look at my post-process cost and say, "Okay, this is too high, I need to optimize"?
Any profiling tips or best practices for debugging shader/bandwidth bottlenecks in DX11 custom engines? (e.g., specific ways to measure GPU time accurately per pass or what to look for in RenderDoc).
I would really appreciate any insights, industry standards, or optimization advice you could share.
Thanks in advance!