UE 5 Unreal Frontend Profiler removed?

Development Platform & Builds Debugging, Optimization, & Profiling
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I am migrating my project from UE 4.27 to UE 5.3.2 and I am encountering a severe performance drop. Normally I use the Unreal Frontend Profiler to determine what is causing the performance problem but it seems it has been removed.

I have tried using Unreal Insights for profiling this issue but I find this tool much more cumbersome and it doesn’t point me in the direction of the blueprints taking up all my performance.

What was wrong with the profiler inside Unreal Frontend? and why was it removed for UE5?
Is there any way to still access this profiler?

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Greetings @Legendary-P1geon

Frontend is still in 5.3 to my knowledge. Are you looking under the ‘Window’ dropdown? If so, it was moved from there in an earlier version to Tools>Session Frontend. I hope this helps!

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Thank you for the response @FrostyJas,

My question is in regards to the profiler tab inside Unreal FrontEnd.

I have included 2 screenshots;
one of the UE4 FrontEnd, which has the profiler tab selected,
and one of the UE5 Frontend, which doesn’t seem to have this profiler tab.

Is there any way to access this profiler tab in the UE5 FrontEnd that I am missing?

Unreal4FrontEnd
Unreal4FrontEnd960×641 68.8 KB

Unreal5FrontEnd
Unreal5FrontEnd930×640 68 KB

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Have you used Unreal Insights with UE5, by chance? A lot of user have moved over to it for profiling. Here’s a link to the information on it.

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I have tried using Unreal Insights but I find the data that this tool gives me much harder to analyze. I struggle finding the blueprints that are causing the performance issues using Unreal insights.

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Same still looking for it. Thought it was in the Tools > profile visualizer but you cant open a profiler file type.

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So it seems that UE 5.2 still has profiler and can open files created in 5.3. That is a work around for now. Insights is great but way too much info and not as direct as profiler.

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I recently encountered an issue in Unreal Engine 5.4 where the Profiler tab seemed to be missing. However, I discovered that profiling still works—you just need to take a slightly different approach.

You can start profiling your project by using the commands stat startfile and stat stopfile. This will generate a profiling file, which you can find in the Saved/Profiling folder of your project.

Once you’ve got the file, you can load it in an older version of Unreal Engine that still has the Profiler tab available. This way, you’ll be able to view all the profiling data just as you did before.

Hope this helps anyone facing the same issue!

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I found some information about the missing profiler panel in this file Build.h last line:

// Controls whether old Profiler (UnrealFrontend/SessionFrontend/Profiler) is enabled or not.
// Old Profiler is deprecated since UE 5.0. Use Trace/UnrealInsights instead.
#ifndef UE_DEPRECATED_PROFILER_ENABLED
	#define UE_DEPRECATED_PROFILER_ENABLED 0
#endif

And this file SSessionFrontend.cpp Line 203:

#if STATS && UE_DEPRECATED_PROFILER_ENABLED
	else if (TabIdentifier == ProfilerTabId)
	{
		IProfilerModule& ProfilerModule = FModuleManager::LoadModuleChecked<IProfilerModule>(TEXT("Profiler"));
		TabWidget = ProfilerModule.CreateProfilerWindow(SessionManager.ToSharedRef(), DockTab);
	}
#endif

We can use it by enable the macro.

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