New user. First time using UE a few things seem off

Hi there,

This is my first post here, I’m a long time C4D and Blender3D user.
Today I installed Unreal Engine and I’m ready to follow some introductory tutorials.

I started my first project and a few things seemed strange.

  1. After I created a new project in the project browser, it took several minutes before opening the actual UE editor (I started with a Film template, blank, and Raytrace on).
  2. My PC fans were spinning quite a lot with CPU usage very high for the entire process (CPU temp spiked above 60 degrees).
  3. As soon as the editor opened I noticed a few notifications, one saying the “Project File is out of date” (but this is the first time I created it, so it sounds confusing)

Perhaps all of the above is normal, not sure, just wanted to check here to make sure everything is working as it’s supposed to.

My machine specs are as follow:
Ryzen Threadripper 1950x
64GB ram
dual 1080ti
NVMe 512GB + SSD 2TB

UE is running on my main UHD monitor.

Thanks for any hints.

Best

The first time you open the engine, it will spend a fair amount of time compiling shaders, building engine textures etc. If you enable/disable raytracing, this requires different shaders and permutations to be compiled too, and this may be true if you enable or disable other specific rendering features (but this usually doesn’t change often once your project is setup). The editor appears to be unresponsive around this time (39-45%), but it is doing something. You can Ctrl+Alt+Del to see the shader compile workers in progress.

This can take a fair amount of time, depending on system and what needs compiling - but a 1950x should handle it pretty quickly, unless for whatever reason it’s not using all cores.

Thanks for the explanation @TheJamsh

That makes sense in fact, now every new session starts definitely faster and things work smoother.

I spoke too soon.

Saved sessions start faster, but new sessions with new content still take time. I understand UE it’s building the shaders and doing other work under the hood but with a new scene I’m testing right now it’s been going for at least half an hour and it’s not done yet (I’m trying City Park Environment).

It’s not stuck as I can see it working in the Task Manager. Still, more than 30 minutes to build the scene it’s quite a lot. CPU spikes this time were also higher, about 70 degrees.

Your GPU doesn’t fully support raytracing so I would turn that off. Also, it doesn’t support SLI so if you have that enabled turn that off too, you won’t be able to take advantage of the second GPU.

Hello @peitharchia -
The free City Park environment is very heavy and not optimized. The textures are huge, and I believe there is some other kind of heavy data too (terrain ?). So even though UE4 is a very slow application on startup in general, what you are experiencing here is probably not representative of an average session with well-crafted content.

(FWIW I would consider that anything over a 30 seconds from launching the app to being able to be productive in it is unacceptable. So it really is a shame that UE4 doesn’t offer the option to not compile shaders if not desired, as some fields like movie previz and archviz don’t always have the luxury of using optimized game assets with tightly packed textures and lightweight materials. Since you are new to the engine I would unfortunately recommend to lower your expectations in regards to ease of use and responsiveness).

Was this bought or built?

Thanks for the info.

Due to the poor performance result, I slowed down my studying of UE but I’ll try to pick up again as I know it’s an important tool to know (and at this point, probably regardless of which industry one works for).

That said, I wasn’t totally off when I thought something wasn’t right with the CPU spike:
Epic Games Launcher will receive a fix for high CPU usage bug - VideoCardz.com

Bought, it’s an Alienware R53 Threadripper.

I used Dell for quite some time and I’ve always been a happy customer.
To be honest, after this latest experience though I’ll simply go with a custom-built PC. My previous custom-built PC is still rocking.
I’ve experienced issues with the R53 since the beginning. I understand problems can happen but the amount of time I spent even with premium support it’s something that made me think twice about my next PC. If I have to spend that amount of time when things go wrong I might as well take care of it by myself.

@peitharchia No problemo. If anything one can always rip out all the texture assets and materials from a project (in regular Explorer) before launching it. Overall the engine is very powerful of course but imho the claims about it being so fast to iterate with are not quite telling the whole story.

On a side note, these environments by Aleksandr Ivanov are extremely well crafted and optimized. Not archviz/realistic but a great resource still :