For instance I have a pointer to a created widget but I don’t need it until a certain event in the game happens. Should I keep the widget added to the viewport with visibility as Collapsed, and then show it when the event takes place? Or should I just only add the created widget to the viewport when the event happens?
In both cases, the widget is already loaded into memory since it has already been created. My question is with regards to the viewport.
For rendering widget not much, Slate (which powers UMG) do caching and widget need to be in invalidated state to be updated or be marked as volatile which will cause it to update on every frame. 2D graphics in general is batter for modern GPU, Windows UI is also hardware accelerated yet current GPU can render them even after slowing there clocks 100x for power saving (thats what my 1080ti does), you would need to searisly do some crazy things to make it bad.
As for memory, collapse should be sufficient i think, if you want to be 100% (since you sound like you using C++) you can call this function to release widget reasorces
That said i never used it myself so don’t know how it behaves and don’t know if you can reload resources after that