I have been building small games and looking at content packs in order to get a better idea of how things are made and I have quickly been getting bogged down in performance issues. I understand the general ideas behind optimization - lower res textures, low poly counts, the basics of draw calls and occlusion but my projects still start to bog down before too long - it seems that keeping texture and polycount overheads low and using as few dynamic lights as possible etc, but I feel like I need to build these games from the start with some key optimizations in mind. I really want to build a game that runs ultra smooth on a potato, and I’m not really interested in the latest PBR rendering techniques - good old fashioned dif+spec is fine by me!
Is there a way to hard-disable some of the more advanced features of the engine so that I’m not spending cycles on features that I’m not using? Are there any resources that provide a deep dive on how to optimize UE from the get-go, and how to build the entire project for ultra-optimization? I’d love to be able to spin up my game on a fairly low-spec device and have it look only slightly worse than a high-spec device.
In particular I remember the Epic Citadel demo that ran smooth as butter on a really trashy old samsung of mine. How did they do that??