I did some simple tests with my android phone, and found that the performance of paper2D is extremly bad, even slower than static mesh. Here are some sreen shots below from the same android phone (Google Galaxy Nexus):
It’s only one background sprite with a 64x64 texture, no filtering, no mipmaps, using mobile/2D rendering preset, disabled all post process and AA. Still never reach 60 fps at all. Average frame rate is about 50, and runs somehow lagging, sometimes the frame rate drop down a lot suddenly.
Added several sprites, it was running much worse, although they were merged to one group.
This is a static mesh using the same texture. However, the frame rate could reached 60 fps, but not steady, like averge 58 fps. It’s just a background. An actual game runs worse. is a example of static mesh 2D game, running not so good on this phone ( 30~40 fps, and very lagging ).
This is a similar test with Unity5. It was running on the same android phone. I just throwed some random sprites in it, didn’t clip any overdraw, and even the background texture using a larger resolution than the UE4 test. But it was running pretty well, the frame rate sticked to 60 fps all the time.
So, it’s a big problem with UE4. I love the usability of UE4( miles better than Unity ), but the performance is somehow a weakness by now. It’s time to pay more attention on performance improvements now. UE4 needs better scalabilty if you want to get more market share from Unity. I really hope Epic can focus on more of performance improvements in next few releases. Otherwise, you’ll lose many users who couldn’t build a game which can run well on their target hardwares. They’ll immediately switch to Unity just for this reason.
I know the android phone for previous tests is old today, but UE4 should’ve been running better than that, at least running as good as Unity, as a one of the best game engines of the world.
And some screenshots from other games running on the same phone, it’s more convincing :
These games are running pretty good on this phone. Two of them are 3D. The frame rate of these games are alwarys 60 fps even in the most complex situation. So it indicates the problem with the optimization of UE4. I don’t know what’s wrong with the render pipeline of UE4, but I believe the dev team know.
