I heard, that VS2022 should be in better shape, see for example This Microsoft Blog, but the Epic Docs on Setting up Visual Studio do not mention this version at all. But the link also states, that it “has been written for an older version” - so updates might be still missing here.
Is there any official statement on VS2022?
The main reason I ask:
I just wonder, what Visual Studio actually does under the hood.
Currently using VS2019 with UE4.26. I already did switch to an SSD, because with a HDD this is definitely unusable at all.
Now, things are running quite smooth, but VS2019 is still very annoying. I monitor my TBW value of the SSD. During a normal day using UE4 without C++, I get somewhat around 10GB written per day - quite consistently.
Having Visual Studio opened, this value drastically increases.
Example: opening the project, editing, having one single compile of a small module. After 2 hours, 30GB have been written while almost having done nothing.
It also does not seem to be related to compilations only, looks like simply having VS open and editing keeps on writing huge amounts of data to the disk.
At the end of the day, 100-120GB have been written. OK, with a max TBW of 300 for my SSD, this still takes a long time, but I am always concerned about resource usage.
I’ve been using it for more than a year. And, at least for me, it is waaaaaaay easier and pleasant to work with Rider, than with Visual Studio. It is easily configured and officially suppored by Unreal.
@Bojann Thank you for the tip. I already came across Rider. Yes, this one looks great. Unfortunately it is payed software and currently, I am not doing enough C++ coding, so that it is too expensive for me in terms of bang for the buck.
@alberto Yes, everything installed as described. Yes, that’s fair, not having more development for UE4 - but what about UE5? I am not bound to UE4 - have UE5 installed as well, but as it looks, there’s also no official statement for UE5 regarding VS2022?
About to migrate to ue5, I think as soon is possible, because things are changing too fast
At the moment I do keep some projects in ue4 (because are huge or complexity), migrate some, and all new to 5 because Lumen
Is not perfect yet of course, and I guess VS2022 at some point will be supported is new…
Thank you for the video link. Yes, I know, that I CAN install VS2022 with UE - while not officially supported. That video mentions the reason, why this could be useful, referencing the Microsoft Blog I mentioned. That’s why I believe, that VS2022 can bring a lot of improvement.
My takeaway is, that since time of the video in 01/2022 there is no change in official support.
I’ll consider to go for UE5 and test with VS2022.
Just to show, what I mean: Here’s some of those WRITE!!! peaks, that happen while simply editing code. I’m quite sure, that this is intellisense, doing more write than read.
Hi, I just want to share some of my results after experimenting with VS2019 and settings.
I disabled the Automatic Precompiled Header Option, which automatically grays out the Cache section and disables the cache.
The Effect:
In <ProjectFolder>\.vs\<ProjectName>\v16\ipch directory, no more PCH file content is written now. Before, at VS start and at each compile, 1.2GB PCH file stuff was written here. I deleted that ipch subfolder completely (size around 4GB) - saving quite some GBs of write traffic here.
In the v16 subdirectory only some db files remain now. The Browse.VC.db file is not affected by disabling the cache. This file is around 750MB in size and still gets updated. But as it is a database, only changes are commited, not complete rewrite of the file. This seems to handle all the fancy hightlighting and checking stuff without hammering the SSD.
My apprehension, that disabling some caching could impact performance was unfounded - I even have the impression, that the VS2019 editor is working smoother than before. Also, I thought, that removing Precompiled Headers could impact build times of my module - but it works with no difference. Yes, I know, expectations would be a decrease in performance, but as the help text in VS2019 says:
BTW: as a side effect, I found how to get rid of the annoying Microsoft BING as search provider
Let’s see, how things will go with these settings, but at least for today, in 5 hours I have only 4GB write data load even with lot of editing. And I know from the last days, that at that time and workload, at least 40GB would have been written without that change.
