Viewport in Material Editor shows default gray grid instead of previewing the material, no matter how much time need to wait.
The few ways to see the preview is to minimize the UE4 window or open any external window over UE4 for a few seconds. Saving material make also preview visible and also until any parameter will be changed.
We are looking into this issue, but looking at your system specs, your PC is extremely under powered when compared to our minimum recommenced specifications, which can be found here and here. While we do not have a minimum required spec, we find that using below the recommended specifications can result in issues like you are experiencing.
Yes, and I want to mention that on version 4.0.2-2034640 preview material is updates in 2-4 sec after changing any node parameter, without any alt-tabs to different window.link text
Known about system specs. Reported only because of the strange of this issue.
Also binary build 4.0.2-2034640 seem to work good with previewing.
On the top UE4 have better performance and faster tools than UDK, so looking forward to use it. Unreal Tournament 4 also giving 40~70 fps on the medium settings.
Switching the Scalability settings to the lowest, did not fix the problem.
Another interesting thing that I found in 4.0.2 that if material editor is extended and not a part of main window (not a tab), than material preview won’t work, but if I connect material editor back into main window, all start working.
I read about many issues with TeamViewer and graphics system. Black screen, black windows, BSOD, crash, etc. Especially when there is a card that does not support hardware DirectX 11.
I have an assumption, that maybe this is happening because of 2 cored cpu, when I look in the task manager, the CPU loaded on 80% by the ue4 editor, and when I open material, it’s on 100%, 80-90% is used by editor itself, and shader compiler is using about 0-10%, but when editor window is inactive, the CPU consumption by editor is getting low(about 5-10%), and shader compiler is on 50%, and after that material is loaded quick and correct.
So yeah, better cpu(and probably a quad core) is equal to fast(and possible) material loading. But I still hope that you will fix that, because it is really annoying to switch between the windows just to relax CPU use for editor, so that shader compiler can actually work.
Operating System : Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (10.0, Build 10240)
Processor
Type : Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8600 @ 3.33 GHz (2 CPUs)
Speed : 3333MHz
System Memory
Type : 2048MB Kingston @ 800Mhz (2 Planks)
Speed : 6400 MB/s
Display Device
Card : Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 1GB 256-bit
Driver : 15.200.1062.1003 (2015/07/28)
Preview window is work faster on the new hardware, but still not so fast as when any window is opened above unreal editor. Found that this is strongly associated with Use Less CPU when in Background option of the editor.