I’ve been using UE4 for about a year now, looking towards a replacement for Unity. Whilst it’s been difficult to transition the biggest issue so far has to be performance as a whole. We have 3 test bench machines and one type of shared design for dev with the following configurations:
Dev Machines: I7 5820K @ 4GHZ, Nvidia GTX 780, SSD, 32GB RAM
TestBed 1 (Laptop): I7-4810MQ, Nvidia 780M, SSD, 16GB RAM
TestBed 2 (PC): I5-3330, AMD R9 270X, 7,2K RPM HDD, 8GB RAM
TestBed 3 (PC): I3-3250, Nvidia GTX 750TI, 5.4K RPM HDD, 4GB Ram
More information:
On our testing with most UE4 demo’s and our own game we get around 35 - 55 FPS on average @ 1080P, Testbed 1 get’s on average 20 - 30 FPS on most demos. We haven’t even bothered testing our base spec machines…
Problem 1 Scalability:
Reducing scalability is fine until a certain point, anything past “medium” after tweaking texture quality if you reduce further franly doesn’t look great.
Problem 2 Lighting and shadows: A lot of issues I’ve noticed can be resolved by lightmapping, which is great for small scenes that are easy to manage in a specific load order. For larger games, it might be useful to control shadow complexity (Resolution) via scalability settings and in the worst case scenario decide what shadow types to use per light (soft / hard shadows etc.) and also control the amount of cascades for near view CSM even if you’re using RT shadows.
Problem 3 Batching: I was wondering why there is no static batching yet? Even if there is a memory overhead (which I’ve never had a big issues with) it can vastly help draw calls.
Problem 4 Occlusion:
Consider some sort of baked occlusion to further increase performance, like Umbra :).
The Epic team are doing a great job, but I know in terms of performance there is a lot that can be done without sacrificing too much.
Would be great to hear some opinions: