Animation Not Playing on Low-End Android Devices

Development Platform & Builds
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Hi everyone,

I’m wrapping up development on a mobile game built with Unreal Engine and running into a critical issue during testing on some older Android phones.

On devices like:
Galaxy A8 (2018) – ARM Mali-G71 @ 1.1 GHz
Galaxy S8 – ARM Mali-G71 @ 546 MHz

Animations do not play on these devices. The skeletal mesh shows up in-game, but it’s completely frozen. No walking, idle, nothing.

To double-check, I even packaged and deployed the default Third Person Template straight from UE5 (no changes), and the issue is exactly the same — mesh is there, but no animation plays.

I’m using Unreal Engine 5.6.0, and everything works fine on higher-end Android devices.

Anyone else seen this before? Could it be a compatibility issue with Mali GPUs or something in the project settings I’m missing?

Appreciate any help!

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Hey there @noriggun! It sounds like this could be an incompatibility with some rendering feature of the engine for the older devices. I had run into a similar issue with GPU compute skinning in that most devices would be fine, but skeletal meshes of any sort wouldn’t display any animation.

Can you try disabling the GPU skin compute in your project?

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I can’t believe it — that actually fixed it.
Thanks so much, seriously. Your help solved the issue and saved me a ton of time. Really appreciate it!

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No problem! I’m glad it worked out! This shouldn’t break compatibility with other devices, but you may see a small drop in performance on devices that utilized it.

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