What are some strategies you guys use to get better looking landscape materials?
Since Nanite landscape displacement isn't available in UE5.3, World Partition isn't working with mods, and the Virtual Heightfield Mesh plugin is disabled, I resorted to using POM. While it looks better than an obviously flat landscape, it turns the game into a slideshow. So I gave the landscape material a POM on/off variable connected to a DynamicBranch node, tuned on "Use Dynamic Material Instance" on the landscape actor, and made a subsystem blueprint to turn POM on/off, per landscape component, based on the player's distance to the component. From what I can tell, according to the log, the subsystem is enabling and disabling POM per component, but in the game I'm still getting 15-20 fps when the camera is looking horizontally but 60-75 fps looking up or down (in an empty, new save). Visually, POM is obviously enabled around the character. Setting the subsystem’s POM radius variables to be very low, so no component should ever have POM enabled, visually disables POM, but performance doesn't improve. Setting the update interval variable to a very high number obviously delays the POM switching on components, but again, I still get 15-20 fps. It's as though the game is constantly rendering both POM on and off and just masking one based on distance, even though no mask has been applied.
Sorry for the short novel. I’ve just been banging my head against a wall with this for the past few days, and it’s starting to drive me nuts.