4.26 Performance Concerns - Looking at you MostHost_LA

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Hey @MostHost_LA
I have noticed a nice run of .26 heat coming from your direction in a good few posts and for the most part related to performance.
I have a genuine question (I am not being facetious in the least).

I have been SERIOUSLY considering dropping any futher dev in UE4 in favour of UE5 despite it not being ready for primetime yet I have serious concerns I am going to hit a significant problem if I try to release early on UE5 (the project we are starting is not a huge project and expect about 6 months dev time).

I see in many posts of late you are commenting on the terrible performance of .26 and suggesting in a number to just go .27 depsite it not yet being production released.

If this has some merrit from a performance and stability perspective I might actually consider that instead of a pure jump to UE5.

If not too much trouble, could you provide some guidance on the issues you have with 4.26 and what specifically in that arena is solved with 4.27.
I love Lumen, don’t yet neeed Nanite, but could live without Lumen if 4.27 was going to be a better choice that 4.26 (or going with UE5 for that matter).

Appreciate any insight you would like to / be able to throw my way.

Cheers.

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When I tested 5 the performance was far worse than anything else.
I have not kept on testing the releases, but unless you go through and essentially disable all the new stuff I have a feeling you’ll never reach anything near 60fps at native 4k.

.26 runs around 20fps less than. 25 when at 2k (more on larger res) – just for running. No reason to it.
No explanations.
Basically 1 year plus of reports and not a single post or message from a UE dev saying “yes we screwed the pooch fix it by doing this” or similar.

.27 preview 1 any way seemed to pick the slack back up a bit for a test scene, returning the stolen FPS.

Overall, unreal has made it actually impossible to develop something professional for a year plus. (I would say since .22 it’s only been problem after problem linked to really bad releases and no quality assurance on OFFICIAL releases. We even spent about 6 months or so without the landscapes returning the correct physical element for sounds…)

About 4 months ago I jumped over to cryengine.

Possibly the best decision I ever made when it comes to stability and performance.
It has some rather severe lacks as well, but - at least so far - I haven’t has any reason to feel like the company I’m trying to work with has literally screwed me over without any explanation.
You won’t find many tuts. It’s mostly c++. You won’t really get marketplace assets (this is perfect for me because I never include anything that isn’t made by us directly in a game anyway).

What you should do is test at the resolution you need on the lowest end system you want to support.
Try .25 first, see where performance should be.
Try .26 to see the adverse effects of its existence.
Try .27 to see if it gets better or not in the current preview.
And if you need to, try ue5 too.

Assuming one of these works for you, what you have to do is forget about further updates, download the engine’s source for the version you want, build it. And stick to it for however long you keep the project up to date.

Absolutely do not count on epic updating stuff ever. Or on the epic games launcher version of the engine (it will also possibly update without informing you, leading to further issues).

Once you start the project, lock in the version, share and have your team build the engine on their machines from source so that everyone is on the same exact page and there’s no nonsense.

Maybe even prevent installation of the launcher on your worker bee machines…

The more aggressive you are in this, the more of a chance you actually make it to market in the end without major complications arising.

Hope that helps.

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I really appreciate the insight @MostHost_LA.

This has given me a lot to think about. We jumped from Unity once we decided HDRP and all the “new features” where going to remain a horrible mess for years to come.
We had previously developed on Unreal back in 4.24 so are comfortable with it and to be honest have only used the source versions.

I am worried about a lot of the comments I see about Epic not fixing a lot of issues and more or less ignoring developers (admittedly we produce adhoc bespoke apps and aren’t the size that Epic would listen to anyway). I do know even from a few posts I have put here there is very little feedback which is disappointing.

I looked at CryEngine long ago but just never really trusted them to be honest, I recally about 7 years ago sending them an email regarding mobile support for something or other and the support rep gave me some response that scared the hell out of me regarding licensing and the future of the engine so we actually went back to Unreal at the time (and then paid licensing for Unity for a project and regretted that :frowning: )

In any case, you have been more than helpful, we have always fealt the 4.26 just seemed “off” but couldn’t put our finger on it.

I think you sumed it up well, run tests on the base supported system with the features we need on all engine versions and lock that in! (or not LOL)

Thanks heaps for sharing your story!

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Either way, if epic peeps but in.

The real problem here is lack of acknowledgment of problems, and diminishing quality of releases.

IF the epic team was proactive and forthcoming about labeling issues as issues.

If the bug report form weren’t broken for months at a time, and if the reports were actually addressed like they USED to be before the covid outbreak.

IF a bug report tracker with dates for fixes was kept and published…

A million other ifs (if this forum wasn’t made to totally suck even after a ton of feedback?).

You wouldn’t be disenfranchising developers as badly as you are right now…

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Opinion wise

When Unreal 5 was announced I started to suspect that EU4 was an alpha being sourced developed and with Meta Human future development in UE5 is more towards developing a real time rendering engine over and above the practical application of the needs of the video game.

I can’t help it but everything feels so unfinished

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I am also disapointed at the ever dropping performance, Engine has become too bloated with all non gaming related plugins and code.
As @FrankieV said I too feel Metahuman and ue5 features are mostly suited outside gaming.
I am also thinking of moving out because of these and other things, especially the Device lost error which happen on both directx and vulkan, affecting packed games on all OS. I am yet to find an engine which can work offline and does not have too many broken features. Cryengine had too many broken thing the last time I tired. Has it changed?

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No. But you know this ahead of time.
You most definitely aren’t told things like “character hair rendering is out and not beta” only to find a system that doesn’t even support multiple grooms, or no documentation on the very specific file type you need to manually parse for a year, etc.

@FrankieV
The problem is that CURRENTLY whatever they have isn’t good at EITHER thing.
4k rendering is a joke, even with sequencer and 20m per frame of computing time (aside from the fact, just use ray trace at that point and IN that case, you are MUCH better off using the Nvidia ray trace branches).

And before the PR team actually does do it, I’ll write it here in black and white so they cannot.
DO NOT EVEN TRY TO blame Covid for your team’s short comings.
Those short comings aren’t even really your Team’s fault, it’s whatever egghead who’s behind deciding what the team works on that is at fault.
On top of whoever fired your quality assurance people - because at this point you can show me a payroll screen that has QA people on it, and I still will never believe you actually paid them to do QA.

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I went back to unity HDRP.

The lack of communication is something I know I will despise once I get deep into a project.
Epic’s Unreal developers aren’t that active on this forum, alright, I can accept that.

But something THIS critical and massive, going unnoticed with no comment to the masses, even after all the comments, posts and questions – is just messed up.

Updates starting to feel like they get next to no QA. Not really interested in UE5, going to be even buggier and slower I imagine. a slight interest in Nanite and the new animation tools I’m interested in, but that’s about it – frankly for indie projects it won’t make the change people seem to expect. You’ll have a much better time if you’re targeting next-gen consoles only with these new features.

I liked the new UI, but the UI/node workflow is still far behind unity for me. The last straw was a ton of bugs reported by me with no replies, no comments, and no news about them. On the other hand, the handful of bugs I reported to unity got a reply and someone actually opened the repro project. Every single one of them.

Doesn’t help that there’s an unbelievably small number of successful indie games made with UE compared to other engines. When I say indie, I’m thinking 5 developers and under. Not really interested in studios bigger than that.

People seem more interested in creating typical scenes in unreal then creating games, I can already imagine the pain I’d go through If i stuck with it. I’ll keep an eye out for the UE5 release out of tech curiosity but that’s about it.

I can also rightfully rant about the documentation for a few hours, but I’d rather not.

Even with all HDRP’s flaws, the team is actually ■■■■ active. You ask a question in discord or the HDRP forums, good chance you get an answer from one of the leading devs for HDRP.

A few days ago I talked about an API that would make it possible to change the upscaling filters in runtime through code. One of the devs replied with a helpful comment, 2 HOURS later that same dev made a pull to add a new filter API to HDRP, that makes changing filters in runtime possible.

And I don’t have to mess with source, or go through adding Fidelity SR, it all comes with the engine download, as it should be.

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When I submit bugs for some softwares, I used to get some reply. First an auto reply, later on already fixed, already reported, thanks, not bug etc.

My code base is large +30k loc, so I was able to find around 50+ different crashes in ue5 ea. I kept it sorted to submit later as I work offline. But I simply deleted all reports as I felt that the patterns have not changed much here.

I did a rant about the documentation with a positive spin (here) and practically begged with others to get device lost bug fixed (here)

Now days I am porting 1k of my code base to other engines with c++ to see how it works there and is seriously considering my options, to switch to in a couple of years. Because of above reason and uncertainity with apple-epic etc. Switching won’t be extremely hard as everthing is in c++ and I don’t use market place assets. (I do download market place assets, but it’s out of curiosity!)

As others have stated above UE5 is not yet optimized for performace, so I would not recommend OP or anyone to switch to that until it is released. Though there is noticible improvement to culling, there is significant performace drop (1) Physics is also slower in many cases.

NB: Also I am using UE5, but its not for having the latest shiny toy!. It’s for supporting linux gaming properly. Sadly there is no old ue4 branch which work fully and bug free on linux, be it editor or packed game.

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God forbid you need technical support by anyone at this point?
You would literally not be able to find anyone who still remembers what .18 gotchas and issues you have to fight against, not even if you were to try and hire whoever epic canned…

Yes, they named it Chaos because they knew what a darn mess they were going to make way before they even started.

I think they also lied to all of us when they said that fortnite was fully using chaos.
To be completely honest I stopped attempting to play that :poop: (Save the world was just grind. And open matches are just boring after a while.).
I’m not up to snuff, but a few seasons ago their Performance on 1080ti sank by about 20fps, which means they too were publishing on .26.
And all the objects simulating physics at the same time have never actually held up to any chaos engine performance comparison. You can literally cripple a good cpu with less than 100 simulating objects.

Back when I tried it last, if you made it humanoid skeletal meshes in ragdoll you would literally just bluescreen.

So, it’s not “in many cases” its in all cases.

To the point that developing without physx is ill advised if you intend to make a fully dynamic world.

Has this gotten any better over the past year?
From my test projects, no it has not. (Dynofoliage is essentially foliage made with skeletal meshes. If I increase the radius of the swap to 3000 I get an instant 0fps hangup and possibly a bsod).

Though it’s not like I went and specifically tested this in ue5, so I’d defer to anyone else’s opinion on that.

Chaos sounded like a good idea, it was executed as everything else is being executed in the engine the past 2 years or so: very badly.

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Well i had the 20 or so FPS loss in 4.26 , and when i went to 4.27 preview , it did not improve at all. Just 1080 p . Also i have some stuff in project that still use Substance , but this seems not available in 4.27.

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Haven’t benched the latest release on a known scene.
If you get no difference it’s very possible that they re-introduced whatever bug they had.

I’ll say it yet again. Epic DGAF about this.

They have no Q&A on the engine and they DO NOT listen to client feedback.
Or bug reports even, which they used to but no longer do.

So you and everyone else looking for steady performance is better off either staying with .25 Or switching engine to something that actually listens and caters to its users.
Considering .25 is probably 2 years old or just about - the fact epic DGAF is a certainty, not an assertion.

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So has anyone here done any actual profiling to support their claims that 4.26 performance is indeed worse? And with actual profiling I mean comparing GPU and DRAW/GAME thread times with previous versions and using the same config settings as previous versions. (Unreal changes default settings every version) Just stating something trivial like your framerate dropped by 10-20fps in the editor doesn’t seem that valid tbh.

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We have probably all benched the engine. Look it up on the proper thread.

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If 4.26 project requires “Substance” plugin , is it not possible then to move it to a later version , like 4.27 or 5.0? I’m actually not even sure why my project needs substance. thanks