I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 tablet, and installed one of my projects to it. However, I get literally 5-8 fps on it, compared to running it on my Note5 or other mobile devices. Even some of the other well known ArchViz UE4 demos I downloaded from the Android Play store runs at 15fps tops.
I am running with mobile HDR, and running using ES3.1. ATSC packaging. I know mobile HDR is expensive, but aside from those settings, I guess I just assumed the tablets could handle it if than phones can. Unless the size of the screen/resolution factors into this.
What are my options to help troubleshoot and to optimize performance? Are there limitations to Android tablets that I’m not aware about? Thinking about returning it and getting an Nvidia Shield tablet instead otherwise.
So a lot of the mobile bottleneck is going to be on the GPU since much of Unreal Engine handles how it renders on the GPU. This is why something like the Nvidia Shield can essentially run all the new mobile rendering features and bells and whistles because it has a very high-end gpu along with a fairly powerful CPU to handle the draw calls etc.
So just to make sure you are aware, the OpenGL ES 3.1 Support will only work on code based projects that are downloaded and compiled from Github. This information is outlined in our documentation in the link below.
To add to that, ArchViz projects are usually pretty un-optimized and tend to have large lightmaps sizes to produce a more realistic visual quality. It is due to this that ArchViz projects do not run well on mobile for the most part. This transitions into the next topic of optimizing performance for mobile. We have a couple of documents that I believe will help you better understand the limitations of mobile, and how to workaround those limitations to maintain performance.
Hopefully all of this points you in the right direction, and provides you with some useful answers when troubleshooting performance on your mobile devices. Depending on the year of your Galaxy Tab A 10.1 and its internal components, you might need to return to ES2 and disable mobile HDR.
Thanks Andrew! Yeah I ended up returning it and will get a shield instead. I guess my expectations were that since it ran perfectly smooth and fine on my Samsung Note 5 phone, a tablet of similar specs should be able to as well.