When I am using UE4 on my home PC it constantly freezes when I interact with UI elements, and if I don’t respond it will crash. However, when I minimize and reopen UE4 after it has frozen it immediately unfreezes and continues working until it eventually freezes again.
I have a 12th Gen Intel Core i5-12400F, 16GB of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060
My drivers are completely updated
I have verified the UE4 files in the epic launcher
I only experience this problem with Unreal Engine 4
my hunch is:
you might be running out of memory.
the fact that you minimize and it works fine might be due to the OS sending the app to the swap.
so when it partially loads it back, it works well, until it keeps loading and runs out of memory.
if you notice your hard disk is very active it might mean it’s running out of mem (swapping a lot of virtual memory).
try narrowing it down to memory (quite likely).
then you can :
get more ram (ideally)
close some stuff, or find lighter alternatives
set in your project the plugins to disable for the ones you don’t use
Thank you for the response nande, I checked the recommended hardware for UE 4.27 (the version I am running) and it specifies that the recommended is 8GB of RAM and I’m not running a particularly heavy project whatsoever. Furthermore, my PC used to be able to run UE 4.27 (and I could run 5 too) perfectly fine this has only become an issue since I upgraded my monitor from 1080p to 1440p. I also checked task manager whilst running UE and my RAM is constantly having 10GB used and 5GB spare. Any further recommendations?
Rtx 4060 has only 8gb VRAM, if you open (or navigate) to folder with multiple materials in asset browser unreal loads them all for thumbnails preview, this alone can waste all of VRAM in your graphics card. With only 8gb it may be extreme.
So load some starting project that has only starting content, do not add any textures into it, just keep working on blueprints or something else, and see if unreal keeps freezing.
For last 5years or a bit more (since 2080TI launch) i had i7 + 16gb ram + that 2080TI, and my unreal never crashed (unless i made mistake with pointers in C++. So 16gb of system ram usually was not big problem.
Also get your unreal and project on TWO separate SSDs. It will work much faster.
ps.
Are you working from some thin, “cool” and “Awesome” “gamer laptop”? If so it may be thermal throttling. 3 years ago i bought some ASU ROG tablet, that ■■■■ is FALSSELY named GAMER Tablet, well ic can run ANY game for 10minutes, then it boils and thermally throttles. I bough it to showcase my unreal projects, and it was HUGE waste of money and just POS device.
So get some temperature monitor installed and check if it freezes because they did not yet made silicon chips that can shrink entropy from heat.
(P.S. This issue didn’t used to happen and I thought the problem started when I got a new monitor but that must be wrong because I changed the resolution of my monitor to 1920 x 1080 and it still froze eventually. The only problem I could think that would cause this would be me accidentally changing a setting that has caused this, is there a way I can reset editor settings to default to see if that fixes the issue?)
That may be drivers, also may be gfx card failing, being damaged.
Swap monitor cable to different output or even better different type of connector. Sometimes card works bad over HDMI or display port, i had slightly damaged Display port cable, and some games had green noise pixels. So maybe something like that causes some problems.
Also some years ago my wash machine cause electricity spikes, and those made my PC go BSOD.
And try some unreal games, see if same stuff happens, or it is only in unreal editor. Try some 4.27 editor + project.
Thanks again for the response, I will get back to you after I’ve tried a different connector but in response to trying unreal engine games - they all work
My usual approach for finding what cause unknown things (like your crashes) is to eliminate things that do not change state. So ruling one cause after another, yes thins sounds really silly, but many people do not do that.
Just try changing one thing after another. If you have friend that can lend you graphics card for a day, borrow it and try in your PC. So you know if crashes are connected or not to graphics card. Do CLEAN nvidia drivers uninstall, And install different driver version than you have now. Get different unreal version, and try that. etc. Maybe default/safe BIOS settings. Swap RAM sticks between slots, those sometimes lose contact.
My friend some years ago had “best” idea ever he used WD-40 to lubricate PCI slot for graphics card, and lol every time truck drove on his street his PC rebooted. So cause of crashes can be anything.
I just changed 2 settings - ‘Enable high DPI support’ (to off) and ‘Disable DPI Based Editor Viewport Scaling’ (to on) and that seems to have decreased the frequency of the unreal editor freezing - but hasn’t eliminated it entirely. A lot of the freezing seems to happen when hovering or interacting with UI elements.
that’s for running a game, not the editor.
most the devs i know struggle with 16 or less.
disabling the highdpi will surely decrease the used vram and/or ram.
close browser and other apps.
use the system monitor to see what’s using resources.
on windows set the swap memory to a fixed value (like 32g for example) this will really help with stuttering and disk activity, potentially freezes. though with only 8 gig of ram id consider a bigger swap. (40 to 64 g maybe) beware this uses the disk.
there are many optimizations you can use on the os level. disabling services, setting to performance mode (will disable some animations and stuff, this really helps, i have it disabled even though i dont need to)
disable plugins you dont use (some are enabled by default)
on unreal change the scalability setting so it uses the low quality instead of whatever is normal.
avoid using lumen and nanite, both consume ram.
try a lighter version of your code editor if you use it.
all good, i don’t get offended. you can also ask for clarification, but if you say nothing our time is wasted.
i don’t really have much time so i can’t write a detailed process. i recommend you can also search for those things online, i’m sure you’ll find how to since they are very general, there are many tutorials already. you might need to learn them sooner or later.
example of setting the system to performance and virtual mem
I set it to 40gb, it is still freezing but I also changed my monitor refresh rate whilst using unreal and that has reduced the amount of freezing majorly but it still sometimes freezes.
awesome, so it helped?
might wanna try increasing it from 40.
also whenever it uses the swap (when it runs out of mem) the whole os will pause until the disk finishes, so you will keep experiencing some hitches.
the way to avoid that is avoiding that is using less ram, or not changing apps too frequently.
I believe it did help, but I’ve just been using unreal for about an hour after switching my installed drivers from game ready to studio drivers on a clean installation and honestly that seems to have fixed the issue (fingers crossed). Thank you so much for the help, I will message continue the discussion if I do run into a problem in the next few days but if not I will mark this as the solution!
Actually never mind! I think the problem may have actually been my OBS studio replay buffer running in the background because as soon as I disabled that I haven’t had a single problem with unreal engine.
