How can I lower my render times in UE4?
I make mobile games that have simple assets yet render times can take hours.
I only used the low poly city package that was free on the marketplace.
Changing a config can cause the epic banner to freeze for up to 30m or more.
Then once the editor loads it renders out 3k shaders.
Then once I hit es3 preview it renders even more.
By the time I am back into my game it is HOURS later.
I understand shader rendering depends on the complexity but I feel like these times are absurd.
I have seen this issue turn others away from switching to unreal. It is pushing me to that point as well.
Are there any plugins that give more insight to what is happening during this time?
This has nothing to do with shader rendering. Your shaders are being recompiled which can indeed take a lot of time. Making lots of config changes that relate to rendering will often trigger a recompile of the existing shader library. You should therefore consider to evaluate settings in a separate, lightweight project that doesn’t require a large amount of shaders to be recompiled whenever you switch a setting.
Especially importing packages from the marketplace, which often feature a whole library of assets, will lead to an immediate, large increase in shader permutations in your project. All of the shaders in your project’s library, not just the ones that are currently in-use, will then be recompiled every time the config is updated with any settings that influence them.