My game is running at 40-45 fps . Sometimes the game runs fine with an even frame rate. But increasingly at any given point in the game the frame rate plummets from 40-45 to 9-14. Restarting UE4 doesn’t fix the problem. If I restart my computer (Windows 10), the problem is resolved…until it happens again. All other games are running fine on my computer. Any thoughts would be great as I don’t have a clue where to start.
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Hello Marko Pollo,
Sounds like a bottleneck issue. The first thing you can do is look into the frame timings, and look by what you’re bound by (cpu/gpu). You can use stat unit console command and give us the numbers. It would also be great to know, where/when these drops happen.
You can also take a look into unreal’s documentation, a good starting point would be here: Performance and Profiling Overview | Unreal Engine Documentation .
Regards,
Vecherka.
Hi Vecherka,
Thanks for your reply.
A bit of background.
Drop in frame rate happens while playing in editor, playing stand alone packaged file and perhaps more worryingly on completion of a build. These are all random. Sometimes it happens other times not.
I have an Enemy_AI character in my game that has 7 elements (guess this needs to be optimised) 4 of which are made up using 2k files.
I have had a texture pool size warning every now and then for sometime before the introduction of the Enemy_AI. It was at reasonable level but have noticed it blows out when the AI is in view.
I reduced Enemy_AI texture files (12 in total) to 1k. When I rebuilt after doing this the frame rate plummeted again. I restarted computer, opened project and rebuilt again. This worked. I packaged and tested for a couple of hours with no frame rate drop. Maybe it was the texture files but am not convinced yet as the game has run for extended periods before without the problem occurring. Although the red Pool Size Warning has disappeared.
unit stat results (DynRes: Unsupported)
When working:
- FRAME: 17 to 22 ms
- GAME: 2 to 4 ms
- DRAW: 17 to 22 ms
- GPU: 17 to 22 ms
- RHIT: 17 to 22 ms
After FPS drop:
- FRAME: 40 ms
- GAME: 17 ms
- DRAW: 0.17 ms
- GPU: 42 ms
- RHIT: 0.77 ms
Does this help with whether it is the GPU or CPU. I think I’m hoping for GPU.
Mark.
Forgot to mention. These stats were gathered running game at 1920 x 1080.
When I run it at 1280 x 720 they look alot different and are much more stable. The drop in FPS has also happened when running at 1280.
Working properly at 1280 x 720:
- FRAME: 16 ms
- GAME: 2.2 ms
- DRAW: 2.7 ms
- GPU: 16 ms
- RHIT: 16 ms
Hi Mark,
Seems like you’re GPU bound, but there’s also a sudden increase in CPU usage. I recommend, you use the stat gpu console command to get the real-time GPU profiler and look for the highest timings.
Since you mentioned a memory warning, I also suggest you take a look at those commands: stat rhi, stat rendertargetpool and stat texturegroup.
Here’s an article about GPU profiling from the documentation: GPU Profiling | Unreal Engine Documentation . It might also be worth taking a look at profiling.
Do you mind sharing your rig specs? And here’s another question, just because it solved the last issue someone else had, are you using ray tracing?
If your screen get’s cluttered with stat windows, just use stat none, it should disable all currently active stat windows.
Hi Vercherka,
Thanks again for the information above.
Using Engine version 4.21, so no ray tracing.
Processor: Intel(R) Core™ i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz (8CPUs), 4.00GHz
Memory: 32 RAM
Direct X 12
VRAM: 2028MB (Could this be the problem?)
I looked up hitch dumping but cannot find any info on it?
Mark.
Hi Mark,
I’d need more info on your video card (manufacturer, model).
What I meant by that is the ‘Session Frontend Profiler’, found inside the developer tools (Window > Developer Tools > Session Frontend) – sorry used the wrong term here and edited the post for clarification. But I’d encourage you to read through the documentation, debugging and profiling are quite time consuming and require some underlying knowledge.
But back to your frame timings, which are the highest of the GPU one’s?
Hi Vecherka,
I see now that I will have to spend some time looking into the documentation and trying to understand it. Thanks for all the reference material and suggestions. Going to try and finish my project and then I can put my mind to troubleshooting performance issues.
Mark.
Hi Vecherka,
Yes , I’m back again.
I am now considering buying a new PC as I run Windows 10 via Bootcamp on an Imac. I have had continual issues concerning my graphics card for the last 2 years. Although games run well on my computer, I believe to make a game is a different matter when trying to run Maya, Photoshop and UE4 at the same time. Although it may seem like I’m avoiding the problem I’ve come to believe that my GPU is not strong enough for what I am trying to do.
The card is: AMD RADEON R9 M390 with 2028MB of VRAM.
I am interested in your opinion on this. Is a 2GB GPU adequate for making a highly detailed first person game?
Mark.
Hi Mark,
That’s an rather vague question, it depends on a lot of factors: scope, fidelity, complexity, frame budget, optimization, etc. Say you’re making a high-fidelity open-world game (I can’t think of an example of the top of my head right now), you’ll have to make some compromises to make it work, and have to invest a lot of effort into optimization, but that’s a given for about every graphics card, because you can never go as far as you really want to. If you’re instead making something that involves a lot occlusion (game takes only place in a building, or something similar) or short view distances in general, you’ll have a lot more leeway.
But well, no one can really answer that with confidence, unless the project is far enough in the development cycle. That above were just some vague examples, it really depends on your scope, and additionally you’re running windows on VM so it won’t be as performant as it can be.
I know that’s probably not the answer you’d hoped for, but I tried to answer it to the best of my abilities and knowledge, there just not enough info me to answer this. Apologies for that.
Regarding you previous post, don’t hesitate to take your questions to the answer hub, there’re a lot of people who are willing to help.
Hi Vecherka,
Nothing wrong with your response. Only confirms to me that only I can solve this particular problem ie. only I can know the performance issues concerning my game. But I’m willing to bet there are no gaming companies out there using 2GB GPU’s. Also, Windows is not running on VM, it is installed natively via Bootcamp. It’s not an emulator and there is no drop at all in performance.
Mark.
Did you ever figure out what was causing your fps to suddenly lag. My project is doing this every few seconds as well and I followed your thread. I’m going to look into my textures! Was that it for you?
Hi Maceo, I would first check how much VRAM is on your system. I have only 2 Megabytes. When I test my game on my friends computer which has 6 Megabytes of VRAM there is no problem. I might be wrong but I believe in my case it is because I don’t have enough VRAM. And yes, the bigger your texture files the more VRAM you will need, so you should always make your textures as small as you can get away with. Also if you haven’t already you should check all your lightmap resolutions, and again set them as low as possible.
Hi. I was having this same issue and discovered that it was being caused by a malware. I downloaded the malwaresbytes and on the first run it didn’t catch any virus. But when i restarted the pc, it sent me a messsage informing that stoped a trojan. After that the problema was solved.
Markop_Pollo was right, I am having the exact same issue even though my project is empty, 0 animations 1 instance of HISM so i can stand on it, only 50 invisible blueprint classes are loaded but are empty and set to hidden.
Firstpersoncharecter blueprint is 7mb which is large but shouldnt be a problem.
Problem appeared after an engine update from 5.0 to 5.1 it was also the same time I added instanced static meshs to the game.
I did fiddle with render in main pass settings tho it was after the issue.
On PC first boot game runs at 190 FPS, after 30 mins or so it drops to 115fps looking at the 1 instace, restarting engine does nothing 115fps, restarting PC goes back to 190FPS for 30 mins, looking at sky is 145fps which is also low, adding more instances or more HISMs has 0 cost on performance 1 instance is 115fps when looking at it and 10000 instances of 20 HISMs are 112fps when looking at them, it makes no sense.
Using 6900xt with 5900x, 32gb ram ddr4 3600, nvme SSD gen4.
Unreal engine 5.1.1
Sun uses distance field lighting, “the only setting that does not perform poorly with runtime edits to objects”
Could be a poor interaction between HISM and something…
I know for a fact that shadows break with any value of dynamic shadow distance movable light thats above 500 when interacting with more than 4000 HISM instances, disabling shadows does NOT fix the problem tho so its not related.
So it could just be some buggy interaction between 2 systems that cause the problem, HISM are set to static, people say HISM is meant for movable objects but it performs like crap so static it is.
Thats all the data I could get on the topic, hopefully someone can help with that.