Speed up UE4 expensive processes significantly by implementing these 2 features

General Feedback & Requests
1

1 Add button to use max power of computer
Often when using Unreal Engine, developers see expensive operations like “Compiler Shaders (7123)” take a couple of hours to complete while the CPU is not even going to more than 50%. A button next to “Compiling Shaders (7123)” with “use max cpu” would be great that uses the max possible power of your machine to complete the task. I know now I can still work on other things on the same computer but the reality is that I am just waiting for it to complete. Another expensive task is e.g. when launching a project on to e.g. Oculus Quest, there is an initial build that is also rather heavy that took almost 3 hours to complete fot he first time which is just too much, especially if the CPU did not went over 50%. Here as well a button to speed it up would be nice. A popup warning can be shown statign that teh computer will be relatively unusable until that operation completes but at least users around the world would not be just waiting on the action to complete that much.

  1. Download common expensive results rather than executing the expensive operation over and over again on each development computer.
    E.g.: Instead of “Compiling Shaders (7123)”, just NOT having to compile at all but rather download a pre-compiled version of the result at a trusted UE4 location. Downloading that content would take significantly less time to complete than compiling it over and over again on each device, for each developer around the world again and again. I know its possible as when you start UE4 for the second time, the Shaders don’t need to be compiled again. These 7000 sshaders tales hours to complete but can be reduced to the amount of time to download it (seconds maybe?). Same for e.g. launching you project on e.g. Oculus Quest. The first time took hours to complete but the second time took a minute. Surely some of that common process results could be downlodable rather than compiled again and again. I propose that the things that are common to all developers around the world should be downloaded rather than processed.
1 Like
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1 - “Max power button” sounds something out of scifi from 50’s. I think UE already uses as many CPU or GPU cores as it can, some calculations simply are not optimized or don’t use all cores, this exists in every software, some are 100% multithreaded other functions are 50% or single threaded. Its normal and only can get better over time or a complete re-write of said function.

2 - this may be already possible if you find the right folders and arrange them accordingly, but I wouldn’t trust it, I would rather wait an hour if I have to compiling shaders than have folders copy pasted in UE. Especially when renaming a folder alone can cause havok in the project.

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@TimothyBrake
Actually shader compilation uses all the CPU cores it can and it loves to utilize 100% of beefy Threadripper CPU.
If it doesn’t happen in your case, you probably have hardware bottleneck - i.e. not enough RAM or slow hard drive - causing your CPU underperforming during shader compilation.

Or you’re simply using some engine setting decreasing CPU usage, i.e. limiting it while there’s no focus on the editor currently.

Plus, you can use Shared DDC if working on LAN with other people.