Low performance/FPS, lowering LODs and resolutions

Development Asset Creation
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1

Hello!
Complete beginner here.
I started playing with Unreal Editor and my focus is now the making of terrain with different textures and materials attached to it. The big issue I am facing now is that my FPS is very low so in preview and so after the built+rendered package. I’m using 2k and 4k textures that are available on the Epic store and I want to know if there is an option of reducing the LODs on my mesh that I used on the terrain or reduce texture’s resolution, from within Unreal Editor.

I also thought about exporting the assets to some other app like zBrush where I have a tool called Decimation Master which is basically lowering the number of polygons without affecting the visuals too much.

2

I don’t think you need to look at these option as mipping of the textures processing of LODs is done automatically by the engine.

You would probably have more luck taking a look at how you have composed the level.

I’m assuming you have a huge amount of foliage?

3

The amount of foliage I apply usually is with some few trees around with a random seed parameter set to around 20 and lowered collision.
It lags a lot when I apply a texture on my terrain. And that’s how I wonder how I can decrease that texture’s resolution. I don’t want to move to another game engine yet.

4

There’s a few questions you must ask regarding the scene, or check into in the engine. Is it using PNT or another form of Tesselation in the landscape materials? You have to go in the material editor for those materials to check that. Is Tesselation enabled in the project (in Rendering category)? What is the landscape grid composition (size, resolution, etc)? If no tesselation, what are the LOD settings for the landscape meshes? If they’re unchanged (Default), then you would need to generate LODs and modify the settings to get the right resolutions at different view distances. May also need to check if the landscape materials have “Use Mipmaps” checked or not. Mipmaps are the basis of the LOD system.

Doesn’t sound like enough foliage to cause an FPS drag. However, something else in the engine settings might be disrupting the rendering of the terrain. Try lowering scalability settings to High to see how it affects FPS, or even Medium. Based on if it’s still slow FPS, return it to previous scalability and try lowering Material Quality (Settings dropdown) to Low or Medium to see if it affects FPS. If it doesn’t speed back up, then it’s time to go deeper into the material workups and LODs / texture resolutions.