Hey guys,
I’m currently researching how to do sound design/implementation as efficiently as I can within UE4 (finding a nice balance between sound quality and memory usage). I’ve been browsing the web for information on how I can keep the memory usage for sound as low as possible, but can’t seem to find much. I came here to ask you guys for some tips or point me to documentation, if you have any it’d be greatly appreciated!
Also, I read about Sound Groups but can’t find any documentation on it. I’d also like to know if the 44.1 kHz sample rate is still the engine standard and I wonder if I can get away with not compressing the assets further in-engine.
Thanks for your help!
You can lower the sample rate of sound assets that you know don’t need the spectral bandwidth, for sure. The Engine does SRC on the fly because target devices can have all kinds of sample rates. You can also adjust the “Quality” level on the asset itself, which adjusts the compression scheme when the Asset is cooked.
Sound Groups basically allow you to adjust the file length thresholds which determine whether the Asset will be loaded fully in to Memory or will decompress in real-time.
It will always be a balance between CPU load vs. Mem load.
With that in mind, there is a console command AudioMemReport which allows you to log the current Audio Memory status–I believe it saves it as a CSV, so you should be able to view it in your SpreadSheet tool of choice.
In general, we have an initiative to look at ways we can improve profiling and performance reporting–this is definitely something that’s important to us.
Hi Dan,
Thanks a lot for the information. I will look into the things you talked about!