Intellisense is extremely slow in Visual Studio 2019

So I’m using Visual Studio 2019 instead of Visual Studio Code. It’s just what I’m used to and I prefer to keep using this IDE.

My problem is that intellisense and mainly the auto completion is just so slow to the point that it’s unusable. When I press ctrl + space to show suggestions, nothing happens. The color of the code also only changes after a minute or so. Error lines don’t disappear after fixing an error until a minute later.

I already googled a bit, but the only suggestions I keep getting, are to use Rider or Visual Studio Assist, which are both paying pluggins/software.

Can some one please help me with this? It’s driving me nuts.

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It is an issue. Rider is a great tool and If you can afford it, it is the best tool to use but is paid for as you say.

As for speed of Visual Studio, your setup could be a factor. The recommended configuration for Unreal is 2 SSDs, one for projects (which they suggest a 2Tb drive) and one for OS. This is a good setup. You can get away with a single SSD but bear in mind that studio does use the OS drive to cache things to having a standard disk or everything on one disk can slow things down.

Having projects on a HDD also impacts performance for intellisense.

The other thing they recommend is an i7 or equivalent CPU. It should be noted they also have minimum requirements for UE5 which are a good bit lower. They also suggest 64Gb of RAM if I recall but 32Gb should do the job.

Lastly, one thing that can have a serious impact on performance is anti-virus. Ensure you tell it to exclude your project folders. This can help. There’s also a cache folder for VS you can exclude.

Aside from this, remove/disable any unused plugins and consider using VS 2022 as it is a bit more performant but requires/tends to use a lot more RAM being 64-bit.

Generally, VS intellisense is about the same as Rider but rider is a little bit faster and a lot less memory intensive so many use this which is probably why people recommend it. You can pay monthly and after a year you get a reduced price.

Aside from these, VS Code is your only alternative but it has its own issues and why I’ve never used it. It is just a glorified text editor and you still need visual studio to use it for Unreal.

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Thank you for your reply.

For the storage drive, I indeed have both the OS and the project on 1 SSD of 1TB. So maybe that could be a factor.

I had a look at the recommended settings for UE though (Hardware and Software Specifications for Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation), and I see that they recommend a “Quad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz or faster”, so my Ryzen 1500X should fit that bill perfectly. Even though it’s not the most recent.

As for RAM, they recommend 8GB, I have 16GB, so this also shouldn’t be a problem.

I also kept an eye on the performance tab in Task Manager and nothing seemed to be maxing out.

Anyways, I gave up and installed VS2022 (even though the documentation for UE specifically states that for UE 5.0 you should use VS2019: Setting Up Visual Studio Development Environment for C++ Projects in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation)

With VS2022 it is a lot better. It’s not instant, but it pops up after about a second. I guess this will have to do.

It is really mind boggling to me that Unreal has so much issues with a simple thing like simply being able to code with auto complete. I come from Unity and everything there in terms of coding is SOOOOOO much smoother. I just can’t understand why I had to encounter so many issues (intellisense, the generated.h file not being able to include, the live code bug mentioned in the video) to simply be able to start coding. I heard some good things about UE 5.1, would that be an improvement for these issues?

The recommendations there are the minimum and if you look into it further, the specs are a lot higher if you start factoring in lumen, world partition and other new features. There’s another document that lists 6 crore cpu and 64gb ram, and 2 ssd as the recommended system. Those mimimum requirements work for UE 4.27 but I wouldn’t even suggest 8gb ram for using word these days.

Took a screenshot of it as I can’t find the exact link

Hmm, it clearly says “Recommended Hardware”, so if that is actually meant as minimum specs, they really need to word that better. All other software ever uses recommended and minimum specs.
I’m not even using lumen, I’m talking about the very first Actor class you create in the course, so that is video 44 or something. It shouldn’t be that slow.

Either way, I still find it very weird that there is no issue whatsoever when I use VS 2019 for Unity, but for Unreal it’s suddenly the slowest thing ever :confused:

The difference is C# is a simpler language compared to C++ and the similarity in basic syntax is all they really have in common. C# isn’t natively compiled whereas C++ is so the processing involved in intellisense is significantly more complex.

Basically it is apples and oranges.

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