Slow flickering on my meshes

I have a weird problem. I’m playing my scene, everything looks fine like this :

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and then suddently, for a couple seconds i’m going to see this :

ac3abe0cfeaac12a960748bcc7fa8e3fe995fe20.jpeg

Then, if I move a little bit, it revert back to how it is in image 1, then goes bad to image 2…It happens with most of the meshes on my scene. Even when the lighting is built, it’s the same. I was thinking it’s a performance issue but I’m running at quite high fps actually… Do you have an idea what it is? Some kind of textures streaming when I don’t want it…

I started the ‘‘game’’ with the command ‘‘notexturestreaming’’ and the problem is gone for now.

Another solution would be to just choose an higher value for the texture streaming distance or disable the mip maps :slight_smile:

"I found out you can adjust the distance of the texture streaming using the “Streaming Distance Multiplier” setting in the mesh window. Since I create my models in meters and have to set the build scale up to 100, I figured I need to set the Streaming Distance Multiplier to 1000 to get it look right. I hope this helps! "

Oh i’ll check this out. I’ve never had this problem before tho. Thanks

It is possible something about the mesh is causing an bad value for the texelfactor on those meshes. The editor attempts to figure out the texel factor by looking at UVs, but issues in the model can skew these results.

If you want to debug it, type “investigatetexture name” where name is the name of your texture. It doesn’t have to be the whole name, just a unique enough part of it. It will tell you what resolution the editor thinks is needed based on the current distance as well as the texel factor. If it think it needs a low res, and the texel factor is crazy, you will get bad results.

If you change the streaming distance multiplier it will change the texel factors though. It has been a while but IIRC, most characters in gears had a texel factor of around 300-500. broken assets either had way lower or higher values.

This particular couch texture has a texelfactor of 502.45 when I check.

I’ve done more tests. With -notexturestreaming, I play in 4k and I get absolutely no popping, everything is perfect.

Without -notexturestreaming, even at lower res, I see constant popping, sometimes a black contour appear on my walls for a second (like huge dark AO), next second the couch texture flicker, etc.

I’ll always use notexturestreaming anyway but It was the 1st time that happened to me. I doubt it’s the streaming distance because the couch can look good 10 meters away and flicker when I literally sit on it!!!

I was wondering, maybe I went a bit overkill with lightmaps (if it has something to do with it). My lightmap density visualizer shows red everywhere hehe! :slight_smile:

Anyway guys, thanks a lot for your help!!!

Well that at least rules out a problem with your source mesh (at least most likely).

You could type ‘stat streaming’ to see if it lists you as over budget. Also pay attention to what it says for num streaming textures and num pending textures…

I’m not quite sure I understand everything on this picture but it looks like I’m a bit over budget…my scene isn’t optimized at all lol I might want to look at that. Is there a way to raise the memory pool? I have a 4gb video card. Thanks

I have a ton of materials in my content browser that I don’t have applied in the scene right now, do they count in that pool? or is it only when they’re applied to a mesh in game?

It says you are ~250mb over budget.

Textures that are not in the scene do not count towards the memory.

If you want a list of every texture that is referenced in the scene, type “listtextures”

You can then copy the output from the output log and paste it into excel and use comma as delimiter to make a table of the values that you can sort through and sort by ascending memory usage. Then you can hit the worst offenders.

I remember having a lot of 8k textures…might be that. I’m also wondering if it’s a big deal if my textures aren’t all power of 2? I don’t use LOD because my scenes are small and I need the best visual fidelity as possible.

I found quite a lot of infos here :https://docs.unrealengine/latest/INT/Engine/Content/Types/Textures/Streaming/index.html. It’s good to remember that the official doc is indeed really complete!