Put a Print String there and see for yourself. Why trust internet people.
Am I better off to use an event driven system to show and hide the icons?
Yes, as per official documentation (and common sense!, and it’s easier to debug):
One thing to note:
Widgets that are off screen (hidden, out of screen space, etc) do not tick. So if you’re brining up the inventory widget and the game is paused in the background, it does not really matter if you’re polling variables 60 times per second.
So great it works fine, but has me wondering if there’s a lot of wasted processing going on under the hood with this arrangement?
As much as I try to do everything Event Driven way, I seriously doubt you’ll be able to measure a performance impact of a couple dozens widgets casting, taking structs apart, formatting data and setting fields.
If you’re targeting a 360MHz displays, that’s another issue and I’d avoid UMG / Blueprint altogether.