Tidal 2 URP

Performance

What Tidal 2 optimizes for you, and the knobs that matter in order of impact.

Tidal 2 does a lot of scaling automatically - the underwater stack, planar reflections, and mask passes cost nothing when nothing on screen needs them. When you do need to tune, work down the list of knobs below; they are ordered by typical impact.

Automatic (no user action)

Handled for you
  • Dry skip. When the camera is safely above water with no visible cross-section volume, the entire underwater stack and the from-below surface passes record nothing. Hysteresis prevents oscillation near the waterline threshold.
  • Planar pause. The reflection camera disables while it is more than 1 m below the waterline (nothing on screen samples it there) and resumes instantly on surfacing.
  • Mask culling. Off-screen cross-section volumes are frustum-culled on the CPU and cost nothing; with no masks anywhere, the mask pass does not run.
  • Per-body gating. Bodies with Has Underwater off never pay any from-below cost.
  • Fixed-size caustics. Caustics are a fixed-size baked tile (resolution set by the material dropdown) that repeats to the horizon at near-zero cost.

Knobs, in order of impact

Start here: Vertex Density
  • Vertex Density (TidalBody → Core, range 8-400, default 15) is the single biggest mesh quality/cost knob - it sets the vertices per tile side, so cost scales with its square across every rendered tile. If a scene is geometry/mesh-bound rather than underwater-bound, this is the first thing to lower.
  • Each extra Point of Interest adds a high-detail region (and interaction coverage), so keep the POI list to what actually needs detail.

The list below is ordered for a typical underwater-heavy scene. For open-ocean or top-down scenes with little underwater, mesh cost (Vertex Density + POIs) usually dominates - tune it first.

  1. Volumetrics Resolution (renderer default or per-body override). Fixed budgets (Half Screen / 1440 / 960 / 720 / 480) decouple volumetric light cost from display resolution - the buffer is blurred by design, so lower values mostly soften the glow. Same cost at 1080p and 4K.
  2. Volumetric Lights / God Rays toggles. Underwater point/spot lights are capped - at most 8 contribute to the volumetric march. The material's _UWLightSteps sets the number of march strata.
  3. Planar reflections. Lower Downscale, reduce Update Hz, shorten Distance, trim the Reflection Mask, or set Planar Reflection Strength to 0 (which disables the reflection camera entirely).
  4. Vertex Density plus the number of Points of Interest. The single biggest mesh quality/cost knob; each POI adds a detail region.
  5. Canvas Tile Resolution and Max Lod - the interaction canvas simulation cost (foam / wake / flow layers).
  6. Caustic Resolution (on the material). The caustic tile bakes every frame from the live FFT, so its resolution dropdown scales that bake cost.
  7. Physics field Update Hz. The CPU readback cadence for water queries - lower it when gameplay tolerates a slightly staler height field.
  8. URP Render Scale. Raw fill-rate lever; the water surface shading is inherently per-pixel, so render scale is the last resort for GPU-fill-bound scenes.
Note: Deep Body Max Depth values do not cost performance - keep them generous with big waves. Disabled interaction-canvas layers and disabled subsystems cost nothing, so turn off what a scene does not use.