UE5.5 Niagara Gas Simulation are unbearably slow in editor

Development Asset Creation FX
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I have upgraded to UE5.5 to start exploring some of the newer features, such as Fluid Sim inside of Niagara. However, I am running into the issue that while inside the Niagara editor window the whole process comes to a crawl while a Gas Emitter is present. Changing variables takes several seconds of hang time, which isn’t ideal while noodling around in the settings and changing parameters.

It runs absolutely fine in game. I also have a decent GPU and it constantly maxes it out while changing parameters. Which feels very unusual.

I’ve seen video online of people editing their Gas sims without so much of a hitch, and as far as I know are using the default settings.

Are there any settings that might make this system needlessly power hungry? Are there things I might be able to change to improve performance?

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Greetings! Credit goes to this thread: Is Niagara fluid template Grid2D_Gas_Color broken in 5.4 / 5.5 ?

Apparently, Niagara Fluids runs very smoothly in UE5.3, but becomes nearly unusable in 5.5, even with the same setup.

One trick I found to temporarily fix the lag: just click the Compile button in the Niagara System editor whenever the editor starts to lag. Boom, everything runs smooth again… until you make another change to the system. Not ideal, but it works for now!

So now you have two options:

  1. Use UE 5.3 for fluid simulations
  2. Wait for Epic’s next 5.5 updates to (hopefully) fix the performance issues

Hope this helps someone else stuck with the same frustration :wink:

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Perfect reply! Thank you so much for all of the information :slight_smile: