Unreal Engine 4.18.3 Runs Slow With Characters and Character Movement

Changing engine quality settings down to Medium and even Low has no impact on frame rate, unfortunately. My friends’ settings were on Epic just like mine as well.

So I ran a few tests on the scene with 100 characters with different settings to see the FPS differences:

  • Remove any code that moves characters: 40 FPS
  • Remove AI controller from characters: 55 FPS
  • Spawn static actors instead of characters: 95 FPS

My hope is that on my pretty beefy machine the game should run at least at 60 FPS. So the fact that even with no code running on characters I can’t hit that is a bummer.

Dumb hardware question. Do characters tax CPU, RAM, or GPU in a way that static actors don’t? My only other thought right now if there’s something wrong with one of my computer’s hardware that is causing this issue.