Great course so far, but UE5 Has Awful Performance + Glitchy

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#1

Really good course, it’s been alot of fun so far. However, UE5 is just so bad when it comes to editor performance. I have a single directional light, with lumen turned off, and the framerate is just awful. I have a laptop with a RTX3080, 64GB of ram and a Samsung EVO 970 SSD, running at 1080p… You would think I would be able to maintain a reasonable framerate, yet the game really struggles. I feel like the megascans are just really unoptimized and/or nanite doesn’t actually help with performance – maybe a combination.

Anyways, here is my progress so far:

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If anyone has any suggestions for a better performance or troubleshooting, I would really appreciate it.

Also, something I forgot to mention is that a handful of the megascan cliffs are super low resolution mesh and texture – it looks like they are using some really low detail LOD, though when I placed the assets in teh scene, they looked fine. Odd behavior in any case.

#2

Just a side note: it maintains ALMOST 60fps when I am standing still in a corridor, but it drops to 48fps or so, with alot of stuttering when I run around.

#3

A few notes on performance:

  1. Megascan assets do use a large amount of video memory at their highest quality setting, though these particular assets that we download are not the nanite versions (I don’t think they have one)

  2. Metahumans, while still experimental, does also have a steep performance cost to it.

  3. The editor itself is going to eat up some resources and thus cause framerates to drop more abnormally as well (though not by much). Packaging a project can give you a better sense of what a game’s actual performance will be.

That said, in terms of improving performance. Turning Lumen and Virtual Shadow maps off will certainly improve performance but may not give the results you’re looking for. UE5 is still a relatively new release as far as engine life-cycles go (recall UE4 stopped at version 4.27), and even UE4 was seen as a performance beast until hardware and optimization could catch up.

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#4

Thanks, Tuomo_T. I realized that Virtual Shadow Maps were enable, so I changed it to just regular Shadow maps.

I noticed that I get a big red warning in the editor that says “TEXTURE STREAMING POOL OVER #### GiB BUDGET”.

Following this video helped, by increasing the texture pool streaming memory to 2GB with this command:

r.Streaming.PoolSize 2000

Then, following the video, I bulk edited all Megascan textures. The issue is that alot of the “high quality” Megascan textures are like 8K, which is kind of obscene. So, we just lower the texture size to something like 2048.

  • Select the Megascans folder in content editor
  • Filter by Texture
  • Right click on one of them and selected “Edit Selection in Property Matrix” to build edit the textures
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  • Expand Compression and set Maximum Texture Size to 2048.

** NOTE: UE5 was almost maxing out my CPU and ram while doing this. It might be best to do textures in smaller batches. The editor was unresponsive for about 5-10 minutes as it lowered the texture quality**

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The end result is that the editor does have better performance, though I wouldn’t call it buttery smooth, it’s an improvement.

I might write a blog post on my little journey, I was thinking about starting a gamedev blog soon.

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#5

That’s an excellent write up there! One option to note for others, to save time in having to pair-down textures, is that you can always download a lower-quality version of a Megascans asset. I imagine the “high” preset is meant for cinema and probably not games.

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