Unreal Engine FPS Drop on Movement Input — Seeking Insight
Issue: In my UE5 project, pressing any movement key (WASD) causes an immediate and repeatable FPS drop—roughly halving the frame rate and doubling frame time. This happens even if the character doesn’t visibly move (e.g. tapping W), and even before any animation visibly plays. The drop is isolated to movement input only—camera rotation, crouch, roll, and other inputs do not cause it. (using forward shading msaa, but taa/tsr make no difference)
What I’ve Tried
Blueprint Audit: Movement input is gated by a branch (Axis != 0) and uses Add Movement Input. No loops, no tick-bound logic, no excessive polling.
Animation Blueprint: Swapped to a minimal AnimBP. Issue persists. Even idle state shows active animation evaluation across multiple worker threads.
Leader Pose Component: Disabled Set Leader Pose Component syncing across multiple skeletal meshes. No change.
Character Movement Component Tweaks:
bAlwaysCheckFloor = false
bUseFlatBaseForFloorChecks = true No improvement.
Collision & Physics: Disabled physics and collision on mesh and capsule. Still drops.
Profiling Results:
stat game shows high World Tick Time (~48ms) when movement input is pressed.
stat anim and thread profiling show constant animation evaluation—even when idle.
Any help or other ways to debug would be appreciated
I’ve run into this problem! After several attempts at a solution, I found the problem.: this is because my character was simultaneously in many static collisions (Sphere Collison in one of the objects). These collisions checked whether the player was in them with every movement of the player, and this is what caused massive fps drops. By removing these collisions, my fps became normal again.
I don’t know if it fits your situation, but it helped me!
you mean overlapping actors in a scene (say a game level, with overlapping actors like box/checks for collisions for event triggers or volumes for gameworld effects like postprocess / pfs / blocking volumes etc?)
i use all of the above. trigger boxes are usually on begin play or small pass through *used once, and have a do once on the use also. its not that.
i have collision sphere on my player (root cyl and another for checking for collision for loot)
??
to test this component i increased its tickrate to 5seconds,
i am able to start stop char movement inside 5 seconds and it still drops by close to half fps.
so i dont think its the sphere collision.
disabling “set leader pose” and a camera checking component on construction doesnt effect, maybe 5fps .
another note. if my character is against the wall and i press input and cant physically move my fps doesnt drop. so its tied to controller or animbp? but stat anim is constant.. ? ??
im confused now.
checking through most of the stat dont show any decrease,
the only one is “game time” in stat game shows increase in msec corresponding with above report.
What I’ve Tried