Hi friends,
I am just wondering if anyone has measured if there is any observable performance hit of using the new Runtime (Realtime) Retargeting feature in UE-5.1.
I have seen numerous tutorials all over the net moving away from the old process of retargeting Animation Blueprints for playable characters or even deleting and reassigning skeletons and moving to “compatible” skeletons and using pose retargeting in the Animation Blueprint.
I am keen to use this feature for my thirdperson controller so I can minimise work of multiple characters, but I have serious concerns it is all smoke and mirrors and there is significant performance impacts of using these methods.
Long story short(er), has anyone measured the impact of using the “new” methods that are out there? I really like the new method so am hoping the impact is very minimal (I expect some of course for convienience).
I couldnt find any info so i ran a test with 100 animations playing simultaniously.
You can see it has quite a significant performance impact.
I think its best used for cinematics and prototyping - or for a game that features one or two enemies.
There wasn’t anything new about it 3 years ago. It’s funny how they kept lying to people for media clout and no-one caught on. Its been 3 years; the engine is in a worse state than it ever was, so are the forums… maybe people did catch on?
Anyway
Runtime retargeting’s cost is minimal but still present - you can imagine it this way:
Is it computationally faster to read a value as is, or to have to multiply that value times some other value before using it?
That’s exactly what the “retargeting” bs does under the hood.
Negligible cost on one instance with up to a sane amount of bones - and exponentially detrimental the more of the same SKMs you add that all need that same computation done.
There are other cost cutting ways though, for instance animation sharing would put that cost back to 1 instead of loading it up for every instance differently, so you could theoretically afford the retargeting cost even though you really should never have built things that way in the first place…
