I’m really disgusted with 5.X. A tremendous disappointment. I spent $1000 upgrading my computer’s GPU and RAM and feel I wasted that money. After 2 freaking weeks, the HLOD build crashed. It took nearly an hour to delete HLODs and then it hung b/c it had buffer overflows. It’s perennially griping it hasn’t enough GPU RAM with a 3070ti. There is zero documentation for this beyond that absurdly insufficient hw suggestion that my hw is better than. I just tried building Nanite and it crashed to the desktop. What are we supposed to buy SPECIFICALLY? I’ll mortgage my house! What SPECIFIC settings should we use to BUILD HLODs in LESS THAN 2 WEEKS! What incredibly advanced motherboard and GPU must I buy to do the simple tasks involved in software development? I’ve wasted months. I used to get up excited to work on this. Now it’s drudgery. I hate the thought of developing in 5.X. What are we to use? Tell us! We’ll bless your offspring! I’m just so sick of being stuck I’m thinking of selling the computer. A professional coder for decades, you’ve finally given me burnout. Great engine when it works. Absolute crap to build. WHAT DO WE BUY? I’ll pass the word to 1000’s of people online trying to answer that question in the dark.
First off, I have no idea. Never used HLOD. Seems to take a TON of time though for just 104 meshes:
Building Hierarchical Level of Detail Meshes in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation
Depending on your HLOD Settings, the complexity of your scene, and your computer specifications, this process can take a long time to complete. As a frame of reference, a system with a 12-core i7 processor, a GTX-980 video card, and 64 GB of RAM took 10 to 12 minutes with default settings on both HLOD Levels, with 100+ LOD Actors per HLOD level.
I can’t find a single post about performance gains / benchmarks. Last time I had to wait a week for some operation to complete was on a shady 15 year old engine I could barely translate. Think I’ve seen enough…
Alright,
"Using HLOD may lead to increased performance as they reduce draw calls down to one call per Proxy Mesh as opposed to a draw call for each individual Static Mesh Actor. "
But still no benchmark on that. 2 FPS or 100FPS? What’s it compared to using instanced static meshes? Need numbers EPIC.
hi @Roy_Wierer.Seda145
The hardware for 5.2 is given here
Hardware and Software Specifications for Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation
Oh. Down the page there’s another set of specs. This page has changed since 5.0 was released and I bought based on what it said then. When did it change? 5.1? So I allocate about $6000 more just to get this thing to build after spending $1000 already. I see. Kind of leaving the indie market on fixed incomes behind, but what can you do? Whee. I get to go into debt to build a game’s HLODs and maybe get it to stop crashing. How many of you have a box like that? All of you, I guess, if you’re making progress. Joy.
Well all the way top left on the page you can pick what engine version you are looking for on documentation. I don’t see a date of editing anywhere if that is the case.
Average gaming PC is 1500 euros in the netherlands if you don’t go crazy on GPU/CPU/RAM and that is way out of budget for most people on an average or low income. Not to mention that game dev is not a business most people expect to make money from, it’s risky. Definitely don’t get into debts. Does this HLOD thing give that much of a performance gain? Asking out of curiosity because this is new to me. There are various optimization methods that seem to be simpler like instanced static meshes and Nanite. If you do need a ton of power but for a very short time, it is also possible to rent processing power in the “cloud” for X cents over time.
@Jimbohalo10
What they wrote on the “Performance Notes” down on that hardware spec page as system requirements is absolutely ridiculous. As in “just write down the latest stuff and add 3 of them in a big case” ridiculous. You can do about everything on an old 1070 card and any quad 3 / 4 GHZ intel processor of the past 10 years. about 28GB of system RAM and a cheapo 1 terabyte HDD is more than enough as well. Only if you need to work with the latest DLSS and raytracing and whatnot you might look into a newer GPU, the other things don’t scale up that well at all until you hit a memory limit.
I have no idea how much better it is than doing nothing because I haven’t gotten it to build HLODs in months of trying, lol.
It’s for World Partitioning for large worlds. This is for an 8K map. If you do not use World Partitioning, it’s high overhead. The behavior without HLODs but with World Partitioning is for the landscape to be cut into pieces, and the pieces flash into view as you get close to them, which is very bad. It’s the lowest overhead. In the middle you build HLODs for things you don’t care if you can see at a distance. Interiors don’t count. Underground doesn’t count. Landscape needs it. So instead of the land suddenly flashing into view it uses lower-quality graphics which cost less. It’s all a matter of degrees with World Partitioning. Without a map it’s easy to get lost if the landscape isn’t visible until you are on top of it and are reminded of the Yes song where they sing “mountains come out of the sky and they stand there.” Literally. They do.
This isn’t an issue for World Composition.
I thought in UE4.27 Landscape automatically altered its poly count depending on camera distance. Haven’t worked with world partitioning yet afaik so this is quite interesting. Documentation states that some actors like water components and landscape are actually not supported as HLOD actors, so I believe you are referring to meshes as mountains and trees placed manually on top of a landscape? Foliage actors? Docs do mention foliage meshes but not foliage actors in particular, which also has its own visibility per distance settings if painted on landscape. Quite confusing.
World Partition - Hierarchical Level of Detail in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation
Another thought, things popping in and out can be reduced with shader transitions. That’s still common to do at distances where detail is so tiny it looks like pixel noise (birds flying, grass waving), or when characters spawn nearby in vision.
This is different. I’m working in 5.2 with World Partitioning on. This link gives an idea: Build correct landscape HLODS in World Partiton
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