Hi,
I’ve tried both Tappy Chicken and Swing Ninja on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus. I know, I know, it’s two years old.
But it’s the phone I use for establishing a base-line.
Anyway, both samples work, but they are choppy. In Swing Ninja, the character also moves in a sickening wavy motion that’s not present when playing the game in the editor.
I really hadn’t expected this sort of (lack of) performance in UE4 for android… Especially not for these simple 2D samples.
I’m comparing this to what I can get my phone to do in Unity without breaking a sweat, and there’s such a big difference! I would have thought that UE4 would be the more optimized engine, not the other way around.
In unity I get my phone to display over 100k verts (215 drawcalls) with cubemaps for reflections and what not without a problem.
If I create a new project, and create just a simple box in the level with as simple material as I can find, I get about 3-4 fps on my phone when navigating with the FPS controls that comes with UE4. That’s with all eye-candy that I can find turned off. No reflective materials, no mobile HDR, no post-effects, only one static light.
Sure, I don’t have an actual counter on-screen, but it’s pretty much stop-motion movement. And there’s also duplicates of all geometry visible when moving, it seems like som sort of motion-blur gone bad.
Please tell me that this is not expected behaviour. I get it that high visual fidelity might be very taxing on mobiles in UE4, but I don’t even get that fidelity.
If I use all eye-candy that’s turned on as default on one of the sample-projects, I still get the same fps as without it, but I don’t see any reflections or other effects on my phone. It’s just different shades of gray for different materials. And I use the correct texture compression for my phone.
Anyway, I’m stopping this rant now. All I want to say is that this is nowhere near what I had expected since playing with Epic Citadel for Android. I really hope that the situation will be better once you’ve finished optimizing drivers and what not for android, but right now I see no use in using UE4 for my android development.