How Do I Handle Dynamic UI Updates Without Causing Performance Issues in Unreal Engine?

Development Programming & Scripting UI
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been learning Unreal Engine for a little while now and have made significant progress on my game’s UI using UMG. One of the key features I want to implement is a dynamic HUD that updates in real-time, displaying things like health, resources, or game stats. However, I’m running into performance problems when updating UI elements frequently, particularly on lower-end systems.

For example, when I update the health bar or resource meters every frame, I notice a drop in performance, especially when the game is running at high frame rates. I’ve looked into optimizing things like reducing the frequency of updates, but I’m wondering if there’s a more efficient way to handle these dynamic UI updates, especially for elements that need to update frequently.

So far, I’ve considered a few approaches, such as:

  • Using “Visibility” to hide or show UI elements instead of constantly updating them
  • Using “Tick” events sparingly to avoid constant updates
  • Leveraging custom events in Blueprints to trigger UI changes only when needed

But I still feel like I might be missing something important, especially with more complex UI interactions like animated health bars or multiple dynamic stats updating simultaneously.

I’m curious if anyone here has had experience optimizing UMG for frequent, real-time updates and could suggest any strategies or best practices for improving performance without sacrificing the responsiveness or visual quality of the UI.

Any advice on when to use data binding versus manual updates or how to reduce the overhead of frequent updates would be really appreciated.

Thanks for your time and help!

2

Here is some interface architecture tips in unreal also applicable to other dev environments.

  • Try building ui as standalone. Even there is no ui elements or you delete whole ui, game still should work without any single warning or error. Try building ui event based, they bind to events when spawned, they are just listeners.
  • You can have ticks however have a good reason. Like you have an indicator that gets the world position of an object and converts to screen. Quest objective icon. That is something meaningfull.
  • Use invalidation boxes for not frequently updated elements. You can tell those elements to repaint when a change happens.
  • Use collapsed rather than hidden where you can. Cause on collapse it takes up no space in viewport, no ticks and also layout calculations are skipped.
  • Use widget pooling and stacking patterns. When you open a menu over another menu. Previous one can be stacked and brought back when you go back, reducing construct and spawn costs.
  • Pay attention to widgets that are not visible to player. An icon that is offscreen doesn’t have to tick anymore.
  • Use stat ui check what is causing issue and optimise most costly ones first.