It would be great to be able to force the max number of cores that Unreal uses when it comes to building shaders (or at least lower the priority to lowest). It seems to be launching one shader compiler per core, but the problem is that the computer is crippled when this happens. I dev quite often online with other via voice chat, but when my pc starts building shaders (which is quite often for me), it’s more or less useles and our chats are cut until the compiling is done.
I also looking for this feature. I don’t care that it take more time compiling shaders, but let use my computer and keep the CPU fresher. If you watch your processes there is 3 instances of ShaderCompilerWorker.exe running at full cpu load + the Editor.
I have found a good solution for me.
Go to this path or similar and edit:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Epic Games\4.11\Engine\Config\BaseEngine.ini
find: bAllowCompilingThroughWorkers=True
Modify to disable the workers!
bAllowCompilingThroughWorkers=False
Don’t worry It will compile anyway, now I takes more time to compile all shaders but meanwhile you can use your computer keep editing your materials or levels. I’m very happy with this, I don’t care it takes more time while I can do something else.
that’s awesome. I’ll try this asap. thanks for the tip!
You can play also with: “NumUnusedShaderCompilingThreads=3” it should control better the number of threads, but is not working for me. Maybe because I have 4 cores. If you have more try it, increasing the number, not sure.
I’ve ony been using this IDE for a little over a week, so I just use task manager to set processor affinity when I first launch UE4Editor.exe so that cores 1,3,5,7 are used by it and any child processes it spawns then that leaves me cores 0,2,4,6 for other things I m doing like listening to music, gaming & surfing the web while waiting for the four shadercompileworker.exe processes to complete.
basically what I was asking is if there was a way to do this within the editor instead of always changing the affinity from the task manager. But I only want the shader compiler be affected not the rest of the editor. The editor alone doesn’t use up enough power to cripple the pc, not even remotely close to it, so I don’t want to slow that down (unless working on a ma. It’s really only the shader compiling that does. Ideally it would be awesome the offload shader compiling to another PC running some sort of server app. That would be fantastic.