Compiling shader 30x faster in Macbook Pro vs. GTX 1080 WTF!!! WHY EPIC?

General Feedback & Requests
1

I knew something was up. I wondered why opening any basic project takes 3 minutes to load and shaders sometimes takes half hour to compile. Its ridiculous. Working in the material editor is sluggish, every node change takes 5 seconds to take into effect. Hitting apply leads to another 5-10 wait.

Its ridiculous. UE4 was way faster years ago (back in 4.8) and i had GTX 970. Now its sluggish with 1080?

Today i installed UE on my work MacBook pro and loaded up the same project. Its took SECONDS to open up. SECONDS!!!

My workflow on the macbook is 30x faster than a desktop with GTX 1080, top of the line Intel Core i7 and 16 GB RAM. WTF?

2

Sorry, but I had to ask to be sure. Are you using SSD on both machines?

3

Macbook has ssd but my desktop doesn’t but it shouldn’t matter. The spec difference i staggering… i have every ounce of compute power devoted to it!

4

The GPU doesn’t matter for shader compile, so I’m not sure why you’re mentioning that. Shader compile is purely CPU. And on Mac you’re compiling Metal shaders I think, while on PC you’re compiling DirectX shaders, so it can be that the Metal Shader Compiler is just faster than the DirectX one. The shader compiler isn’t written by Epic, as far as I’m aware.

5

Actually, it does matter a lot. SSD is the best possible upgrade for workstation nowadays :slight_smile:
Asset loading time depends on the speed of your hard drive and RAM.

Modern engines crunch crazy amount of data.
Personally, I wouldn’t even try using UE4, Visual Studio or any heavy software without SSD.

6

Yeah, I also fully agree with that.

7

Apple vs oranges.

8

Not sure why you call Microsoft “oranges”?

9

hue hue hue

10

But when i can run the kite demo flawlessly on 970 and then now i can’t even run it on 1080 and a upgraded cpu. the lagging and the constant 1 fps drops. its ridiculous. seriously whats going on?

Im gonna test with 4.8 engine.

11

Update your drivers.

12

I have also heard that there are problems with the kite demo, yeah. It does run bad in recent engine versions, that’s not related to shader compile though.

13

look look at the stuff i have to deal with.

this is 4.8 mind you, its even worse than 4.19. I’m averaging 1fps.

This used to run flawlessly years ago when i had a garbage GTX 970 and a garbage cpu.

is anyone from epic seeing this right now? look!!! would you look at it?

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14

looks like that was an isolated bug and the demo is now running fine on 4.8… looks like the lighting is different… it looks waaay darker smh
(after further review, looks like what we got initially was a different version than what was shown at GDC. after doing side by side comparison. idk if its just post process but thing are definitely different…

15

BTW, I didn’t profile it but I get the impression shader (and C++) compilation became noticeable slower after the Spectre+Meltdown exploit mitigations hit.