Dear Friends at Epic,
I just did a whole bunch of performance tests.
In 4.5, skeletal mesh actors with 25+ bones are causing a terrible performance loss, even with shadows turned off.
The skeletal mesh actors are spawned into level to match 100 target points I placed in level.
The skeletal mesh actors have no physics asset, shadows are turned off for every material, and they do not have an animation blueprint.
The light in the level is set to not cast shadows
#As Compared With 4.4
In 4.4 I could get up to about 400 of my playable character units in the game simultaneously, WITH AI being active, and I was still around 60fps
That is completely unattainable now.
Now, with 30 skeletal mesh actors of the same skeletal mesh, that dont have physics or shadows, I am down to 60fps.
I set my frame rate cap to be 90, I am sure it is not my frame rate limit
#Proportional
This incredible performance hit in 4.5 seems to be proportional tot he number of bones, with skeletal mesh actors with only 9 bones, 100 units of them did not cause any fps drop
With 100 skeletal mesh actors with no shadows and no physics asset, but with 33 bones, the drop was around 60 fps
With 100 skeletal mesh actors with no shadows and no physics, but with 70 bones, fps drops to around 40.
So it seems to be proportional in some way
This also makes making an RTS game in UE4 completely unviable at the moment
Cause I need to get a minimum of 200 units per player in the game, with up to 8 players
Again in 4.4 I got up to 400 units WITH AI and collision as actual characters, and maintained 60 fps
In 4.5 I cant even get 30 skeletal mesh actors with no capsule that dont move and dont have AI and dont have anims to maintain 60fps
#What is Going On Here?
#
Rama
PS: its perfectly fine for you to tell me that you’ve utterly changed the rendering system in 4.6 so my research and concerns will be irrelevant when 4.6 comes, just please do tell me that or tell what is going on here in 4.5 in relation to rendering of Skeletal Mesh actors (not even talking about characters here:)