Screen Percentage very difficult to understand in UE 5.3

[Rawalanche]

Hi,

trying to understand how screen percentage works in UE 5.3 is giving me some brutal headaches. Being an indie developer, I feel like pretty much every Unreal dev team in near future is going to need someone like “Screen Percentage Engineer” dedicated just for this complex system.

There are currently 3 separate places to set screen percentage settings:

1. Editor Preferences>General>Performance:
   
   
2. Project Settings>Editor>Performance:
   
   
3. Project Settings>Engine>Rendering:
   
   

I have an issue:
The Third Person template runs at about 105 FPS because the viewport reduces screen percentage to about 66%, which makes sense since TSR is not expected to generally be used at full display resolution, but rather upscale to it.
BUT:
As soon as I run PIE, the FPS drops to about 60-ish, because in PIE, the screen percentage is set to 100%.

I have so many questions:

1. Why are there two sets of screen percentage settings for Editor? Why are preferences for Editor stored with the Project Settings and not in the Editor Preferences, where they are also duplicated, but incompletely?
2. Why is there, out of the box difference between the resolution the Editor viewport runs at and PIE runs at, especially when the PIE runs in the exact same viewport?
3. What’s the magic constellation of settings to have always same resolution in the editor and in the PIE mode of the editor, so that I don’t get significant performance jumps between editor and PIE? I tried turning off “Override project’s default screen percentage settings with editor viewports’ settings in PIE” but it did nothing.
4. Why, if I set “Screen Percentage Mode for Desktop renderer” to “Manual” and “Manual Screen Percentage” to 50 does still PIE run at 100% screen percentage?
   
   

There seem to be about 20 interdependent knobs which all interdependently control and mutually multiply/affect/limit resolution of the Editor time viewport, and not a single of them seems to affect screen percentage during the PIE session. Not even scalability settings seem to affect it.

Another drop to the pool of the frustration is that the new helper menu, which is supposed to tell us what is setting the screen percentage (which setting it originates from) is NOT accessible during PIE. Pressing F8 during PIE keeps the game logic running but exits into “Editor” more reverting the resolution back to Editor one. So I can’t even check what is it that’s keeping PIE screen percentage at 100%:

As much as I love this engine, I am afraid this has ben overengineered into oblivion. Controlling the resolution your game runs at should not require a multi-hour lecture or several dozen pages of manual to read

[Pequod]

So it turns out the screen percentage is acting weird. I thought performance of 5.3 is significantly worse than 5.2

[AtsK]

To have the default resolution scaling behavior active in PIE mode change the resolution quality setting to default (default behavior as of 5.3.2 is to have this setting be Manual/Native which defaults to r.screenpercentage 100 when play mode is active)

[Rawalanche]

Yes, it took me a while to figure that out, since the panel will tell you you are not in PIE if you escape the PIE using the F8 key. It’s terrible.

I am still very anxious about this. For example changing scalability settings resets it back to manual value every time. Also the packaged build seems to run at different resolution then PIE build. It’s horrible situation for developer to never be certain about what resolution your game runs at and all the performance optimization issues that come with this fact.

This has been really overengineered to hell.

[GXMark]

Putting it frankly. Screen percentage at the moment is a bloody mess.

I want two screen percentage settings

In Editor and Game Mode