I’ve recently started copying UE4 over to my work laptop, so I can work on the game on the go, and because much of my development software is on that laptop rather than my home PC (for work of course).
It’s a decently specced laptop, Samsung 880Z w/ dedicated video card and running above 3ghz, and before anyone assumes it’s the laptop itself it actually runs the pre-built download of UE4 nicely. Problem is, I recently setup a build for the C++ compiled version, setup instructions (the same exact way I did on my home PC), but now when I run the editor it has horrible performance. I mean even with graphic settings turned to low and unlit shaders I get 1 frame every 5 seconds or so. That’s worse performance than the prebuilt editor with max settings in the (small) project I’m testing.
Any idea what could be causing this? I thought it might be the initial compiling, but I left it idle in scene after launching for awhile and it has not shown any improvement. Is there any reason there should be such a drastic difference in performance that I may have missed?
Did you build it in the Debug or Development configuration? I don’t know if that laptop can switch between the Intel IGP and the dedicated GPU, but assuming it can you should double check it’s running the editor you built on the dedicated GPU.
Yup that was the first thing I checked, since even the built engine runs bad on the wrong GPU. I confirmed with the application monitor that both are running on the same GPU.
And it was built as “Development Editor” as instructed in the build readme
Question… Should performance be better if opening the source version with “Debug” from Visual Studio, or would it be better performance simply running the editor.exe from the bin folder?
Out of interest, what compiler are you using? are you using vs pro? because the express compiler I believe doesn’t have the optimization features that the pro compiler does. That might be one explanation at least.
You have to build in Shipping to get the best performance. Development applies some optimizations, but not all of them, and it also includes debug information. Shipping will create a fully optimized build with nothing extra. The build that we provide through the Launcher is a Shipping build.
So I just tried 4.1 build as shipping/Win64… and there is no UE4Editor.exe? There is only UE4Game-Win64-Shipping.exe, UnrealHeaderTool.exe, UnrealLightmass.exe, UnrealPak.exe, and UnrealVersionSelectorwin64…
So it seems if you build as “Shipping” it isn’t really a Shipping “editor” build, as soon as you tell it to build it says in the Output window “Shipping_Game x64”. This type of build does NOT include an editor. The only other “Shipping” options are ShippingClient and ShippingServer.
How can you get an actual shipping “editor” build and not a shipping “game” build?
(PS - Also a bit confused by the build types as it is not very documented. The programming guide only has debug, debug game, shipping, development, and test. Does not mention development editor at all, but does Development build in the example. Yet GitHub states you should build as Development Editor (not sure why they would do that if it is not as optimized?). Nowhere states the difference between development build and development editor. But the shipping build on the manual programming guide states it does not have console, stats, or profiling tools, which I believe actually “are” included in the automatic download of UE4?
Are you sure the version provided by the launcher is actually a shipping build? Because I’m finding no way to make a similar build with the solution file…)