There are so many visually stunning demos for unreal but when it comes to mobile, I have yet to see one good looking game that runs smoothly on something like a galaxy S3.
The best thing I’ve seen so far is the Sun Temple demo and even that was giving me about 15 fps when it didn’t crash.
UE4 uses some advanced and heavy shaders. Unfortunately there is no alternative lower quality version of those shaders. You need a strong mobile GPU in order to get the “visually stunning” demos running at a decent framerate. Honestly I love UE4 for desktop but I just cannot use it for mobile for this reason.
Basically only 1GB of difference which may be the cause but still here is an example of what you can achieve…
still working on the lighting (not using static lighting!) and added a bunch of things in game since the video was taken and my frame rate is still the same.
Put the quality to 760P in order to get a better idea!
Everything you see here is 3D… the only 2D I have are the orbs (particle effect is 3D) and the “key” to open the trash can. I don’t have any enemies ready but I can show you a scene with pick up that have particle effects and a bunch of moving objects and a fully working HUD (score, timer, update numbers, win/lose screen, etc.). Should be ready, hopefully by tomorrow night so stay tune
I’ve setup a quick video with a workable HUD, pickup and particle system and more movable objects in the scene. Nothing as been optimized, the particle system as been scaled to look bigger and it’s packaged as a development build.
You will notice in one area, I place a lot of pickups and there again, the FPS is still very good.
FYI this level with all of the menus (3 maps total and 11 UMG widget plus all of the save game implemented = 35 MB APK/OBB development build)
poor 20 on Galaxy Tab S (these vids are made on Nvidia Shield) but this one has no optimization at all.
30-40 fps on Galaxy Tab S, higly optimized, no landscape used but static meshes with custom collision and 3 level LODS, level composition for level streaming and modular player meshes (so 6 drawcalls for mesh which is a bit of an overkill - probably would drop fps if there were more of these meshes on the screen)