Last night I was working on my project and everything was going great! I’m nearing completion on the game I’m working on, and while play-testing, the development computer I use had a “thermal event” (I call it) and shut down. (There’s no AC in the place where I work, so this is not uncommon. I just leave the PC off for a while then resume my work. I usually use t.MaxFPS 30 and keep my development window in wireframe just to minimize the heat generation as much as possible.)
Anyway, today I woke up to discover that the PC was powered up. (I did not do this, so Windows must have done something overnight. That’s usually what makes things like this happen.)
But now, when I load into the editor, everything seems to be locked down at 8 FPS. The entire editor. Everything. The rest of windows seems fine and not sluggish at all.
There was a 5.8.3 update to the engine (I previously was on 5.8.2) so I decided to try that. No change.
I can’t work like this, and it just happened overnight. Nothing new was loaded or added. Just the PC shutting down unexpectedly. (Everything was saved, and I was in an extended play-test when it happened.)
Checked my NVIDIA drivers. (RTX 3080) and they’re all up to date. I updated last week, I think.
I tried issuing several t.MaxFPS settings, but nothing matters. And, as I said, it’s not just the game, it’s the entire editor. It’s almost completely unusable at this laggyness.
Has anyone else experienced this?? And is there any solution?
Thanks!
-Marc
NOTE: I also want to mention that it’s a hard 8.00 FPS. I see the FPS head upwards, then it slows and stays at exactly 8.00.
An editor locked at exactly ~8 FPS across the board after a crash is very often a throttling or saved-setting issue rather than the project itself. First check Editor Preferences > General > Performance: make sure “Use Less CPU when in Background” isn’t stuck and that the realtime viewport is on, and run stat unit in the viewport to see whether Game, Draw or GPU is the bottleneck. Since you use t.MaxFPS 30, also check that nothing lower got saved: type t.MaxFPS 0 in the console and look in Saved/Config/WindowsEditor (EditorPerProjectUserSettings.ini / ConsoleVariables) for leftover values. After an unexpected shutdown Windows sometimes resets the power plan to Power Saver or the NVIDIA driver drops to a low-power state, so set Windows to High Performance and in NVIDIA Control Panel set Power management mode to “Prefer maximum performance” for UnrealEditor.exe. Watch GPU clocks and temperature in Task Manager or HWiNFO while the editor is open; if the GPU or CPU is pinned at a low clock, the thermal event may have left the cooling (fan, paste) degraded. If none of that helps, deleting the project’s Intermediate and Saved/Config folders (back them up first) resets cached editor settings without touching your content.
Appreciate the advice. I think that Windows may have performed some sort of update overnight (why the PC was powered up this morning instead of being in what should have been off) and the processes were somehow clogging things. Anyway, I was coming here to close the question because things appear to be back to normal. There were some processes that should not have been running, and with them suspended (and ended) I’m good to go again.
It was just annoying, especially since I’m at a spot where I’m specifically trying to tweak the timing of in-game events, which is something you can’t do at 6 FPS. lol
I’m going to mark your answer as the solution because those are things I also tried, and your logic may help anyone else who has a similar problem like this one.