[Community Project] WIP Weather & Water Shader

[anonymous_user_0df12f74]

@tosith

Hi, we are using excellent project in our game and on the PC front, performance wise, everything is absolutely fine (Unreal 4.18.3 and 4.19.2). On the (original) Xbox One though - it is a different story. On 4.18 we managed to run the chapter that is using BP_ocean class to run at almost 900p at mostly steady 30FPS which at point is good enough for the original Xbox One (pre S version). Sadly, we cannot ship with 4.18 version of the engine and on 4.19 there’s a huge performance hit. For the records, on Xbox One X the same chapter is running almost all the time at a native 4K (using dynamic res option of 4.19). On the original Xbox however, even at 720p with the same settings like those in 4.18, the game is running between 20-23FPS. After a few debug test it is more than clear that is GPU related problem (frametime is between 65-70ms).

My question is - are there any specific 4.19 changes that can impact our performance and also, does anyone know any specific optimized settings just using the variables in the BP_ocean class?

Thanks in advance.

Hello,

Unfortunately, I don’t have good news for you… I’ve been reading through issues on Answerhub and came across a post (can’t find it atm, will edit and post the link when I do) detailing a huge performance bug in 4.19 with the Planar Reflection actor. If I remember correctly the bug affects lower end systems much worse, which makes sense why it only becomes an on xbox.

It really sucks that occurred when you are ready to ship, I wish there was some way I could help out. Good news is that 4.20 preview should be coming out soon. I know you aren’t going to want to release from a preview build, but there have been a lot of performance issues and crashing in 4.19 so I can’t see them continuing to support it beyond 4.19.3.

To confirm it is the Planar Reflections, select BP_Ocean, then in the details panel select the PlanarReflection component and scroll down to the Rendering section and deselect the visible checkbox. effectively disables planar reflections as you can see from the lack of reflections in the image below.

In my testing on a GTX1080 & 8700k the difference was a little bit more than 1ms faster without planar reflections, but is in the demo project, a game project targeting xbox should see a big increase in performance. Do on the 4.18 project as well and then compare the numbers to see if they are similar, if they are then something else is causing the so please let me know what you find out.

Thanks!