Is it normal, that when I add an actor, character, mesh, or other things to a scene it has to compile shaders and stuff and it takes about 5 minutes to do that? At this rate, it would take me a month to build a small village.
It just compile shaders once for each material present at those. If you place again the same actor at the scene later on it won’t compile the shaders again.
Even thou, 5 minutes for a single actor seems a lot. Things that could speed this up follows:
- minimum 8 core CPU (16 threads would do better)
- minimum 16GB RAM on your system (not GPU, and 32 GB minimum if you work as Environment Artist)
- fast system RAM speeds - at least 3200MHz
- SSD to storage the project files (the faster the SSD, the better)
- SSD to storage the Derived Data Cache or fast network drive with at least 10 Gbps speed
The settings for the Derived Data Cache can be found at Editor Preferences:
As far as I know, I meet most of those requirements. I know I have an 8 core CPU and 16GB RAM. I’ll check on the others. I also know I have a SSD. I wonder if maybe I just have too much stuff open. I’d love to have 16 core CPU or 32GB RAM, but those are some very expensive computers.
If you don’t set the Derived Data Cache (the place where compiled shaders go) when you install UE4, it will most likely use the OS system drive, or wherever the folder “users” is created at, to store the cache and if that drive is not a SSD you can expect bad performance when compiling shaders, but not as much as not having enough CPU cores to compile them. The engine will make a compiling pool for all the CPU cores, so as many you have the faster the work will be done.
Ok. Thanks for the information. I appreciate it.