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Does many number of static lights say around 10 to 12 in a single level affect the performance of FPSC ?

Of course, the lights are placed quite far from each other in a sensible manner like street lamps and lights inside buidlings and corridor lights etc.,/ There are not clustered or grouped in one place.

I tested a level with around 10 to 12 static lights. There was no lag in the performance.
But being a newbie to FPSC, i wanted to confirm with people with better experience and knowledge about FPSC.

Opinions, advices, side-effects and recommendations of anyone with similar experience of using many static levels is requested.

Also any information on performance lag relating to use of dynamic lights is also welcome and mixing static & dynamic lights is also requested.

Thanks.

All game elements must be rendered and processed. Lights of any type will need to be processed. Higher amounts of lights will increase the strain on the GPU. Shadows are the product of light, once the shadows are 'drawn' they have to be stored somewhere so they will 'stay that way' so they use your GPU's RAM.

The higher the amount of lights the higher the amount of shadows, the more VID RAM you use and more GPU threads you consume to 'draw' them.

A dozen static lights is nothing though. You can put WAY more than that without noticing a performance loss on a decent computer. It's best to use a lot of smaller scaled static lights than only a few large lights. Using smaller lights you can kinda 'paint' the light into the map.

Kind of the same way a web page loads?
If the page is just a large image, it takes forever to load. But if it is sliced up (broken up into smaller pieces) the way it is suppose to be, it loads much faster.

There is a difference between BUILDING a game and RUNNING a game. I`ve made a test level that has only a few rooms, but ~60 static lights and lightmap Quality set to 99.

Buildign takes a long time in the building lightmaps step, and I need to turn memcap off.

But the BUILT runs then pretty good on a 2*1.8 GHZ Dual Core machine with 2 Gig and X1900 GFX.