Extremely basic project gets '‘Video memory has been exhausted' message

[NeoMurakami]

Hi, I am new to UE having dive deepeed for about 14 days so far. I am not sure what details matter so I will try to add what I can.

I have a new project ThirdPerson template that I created with UE 5.0.3 and converted to a UE 5.7.1 project. I downloaded and added a few assets from Fab such the Paragon Greystone character, some environment spruce assets such as trees, plants, and grass, a single creature animation asset I used to create an enemy, some audio, and a few visual effects, most of which I am not using.

I am constantly getting ‘‘Video memory has been exhausted (#### MB over budget) Expect exetremely poor performance” messages even though my project is not that large and my level only included a few actors. I have a Geforce GTX 2070 with 8GB.

Is my graphics card not adequate?

I have tried a variety of things to help fix the issue that include the following changes:

• reducing all my textures’ max size to 2k (2048)
• Setting r.TextureStreaming=True
• Setting r.Streaming.LimitPoolSizeToVRAM=1
• Setting r.Streaming.PoolSize=3500
• Setting r.Streaming.MipBias=2
• Set viewport scalability down to Low/Medium presets

The viewport scalability change seemed to cause the error messages to go away in the default ThirdPerson level but then I created a new level that only contains a PCG element to generate a forest scene. Again, I’m not sure what aspects matter but here are some details about that level:

• The landscape actor is 1009x1009

• The PCG is a PCG graph that expands to cover the same size.

• The PCG has references to several static meshes which are used to determine what should be spawned, 5 tree meshes, 7 grass meshes. (I read something about Instanced Static Meshes and from what I can tell, the PCG uses them)

• I included a screenshot of the PCG Graph

  

The out of memory messages just got worst scaling up to 4000 MG out of budget. I tried doing a development/shipping build thinking the release builds would only cache textures that are used, but running either the development or shipped build I see the same extreme frame rate drops.

As a new UE user I need help identifying would could be bottlenecking my performance. Clearly I am doing something wrong here. I understand an 8GB video card MIGHT NOT be enough for development, but this should most certainly be enough for a released game.

[unit23]

Try this, delete the Intermediate and DerivedDataCache folder.

[NeoMurakami]

Thank you for a response. I have been routinely deleting these folders along with the ‘Saved‘ folder as well just to make sure nothing has been cached. I do notice my PCG changes are not always immediately reflected even after the regeneration so I delete those folders at that point sometimes.

With that said, I havent noticed much of a difference, if any, from deleting these folders.

I have been playing with my PCG settings and got some performance back in some cases, but the look of the level starts to lack.

In both examples I dont see out of video memory messages until I start spawning actors for spells. But the one with heavier gress I start to see framerate drops.

I am wondering if I am just going about this wrong with the PCG?

I also have my scability presets set to Medium in these screenshots. Is there anything else I can for performance?

[Infant_Zero]

I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re referring to but; are you utilizing virtual textures?

Enable support and (right click and select) convert normal textures to virtual textures. You can find many resources/videos online; but essentially, you’ll need to increase the threshold to something high (usually 8K). This can be don’t in bulk as well, I believe.

See the difference it makes below.

Without:

With: