From the beginning, I see that UE4 gives very low FPS. If I set everything to low I get 120 FPS on a blank scene which is maximum I can get from the engine.
Here are the settings for this scene:
When I worked with cryengine, I got FPS around 200 on a black scene.
Now I tried to do some test between them. I tried to place some trees to make a dense environment and CE3 did it nicely. I can still get around 60 FPS from it.
There are around 12K trees.
Then I used same tree models on UE4, With same LOD settings but lower dense than CE3. It gives me less than 30FPS.
There are 7.44K trees, same tree models from CE3, yet lower dense.
What can be the workaround for this issue? Is there any way I can get better performance from UE4? Just because I’ll only work with UE4 and never want to go with CryEngine, I really want to get better perfomance with a nice graphics on UE4.
Please everyone share your own way of optimizing scenes.
Just because Cryengine runs faster it doesn’t mean UE4 should run as fast too. UE4 is just slower.
I noticed this too when I switched engines a few years ago.
The problem with UE4 is mostly the ShadowDepths cost being higher than expected, there are several bug reports on it as well.
The blank scene will give you 120 fps for 2 reasons:
the editor is capped at 120 fps. try using the console command t.MaxFPS and set it to 200 or whatever
despite your scene is blank, the renderer is doing a lot of things. some of which you have some control (i.e. post processes) and many more that will happen no matter what
in your latter tests where you compare UE4 to CryEngine you’re using quite different camera angles (despite somewhat similar) which disrupts any viable comparison.
on top of that your CryEngine viewport spans much more of the screen compared to UE4 so that will disrupt your results no matter what (if you make the viewport in UE4 as big as the CryEngine one, it will be even slower)
so going back to your initial questions… Why UE4 gives too low fps?
because it’s slower
*Is there any way to increase it? *
yes. look around articles and tutorials, learn how to optimize it.
there’s a ton of factors that affect performance, and UE4 just cannot come out of the box with ‘optimized’ values that will run fast and look good for every possible game type
Thanks for the quick replies. I’m not actually comparing them both. Also I’m I’m not expecting same performance in UE4 as like as CryEngine.
I just want to make sure that my game is smooth enough and optimize to a playable performance with a nice graphics and that will do it
As my scene is outdoor, I’ll want to make it look good with dynamic lighting with some mix of distance field lightings. But this makes it slower too. Also there are issues with anti aliasing which was asked a lot of time before. I checked so many threads, articles and questions on answerhub. But didn’t come to any solution Looks like everyone uses their secret techniques to optimize games and maintain visual quality.
If you’re gonna create an outdoor game then Directional Light and Landscape material are by far the two most expensive features you’d be dealing with.
In your images above since you’re not using any material on your landscape, most of the performance hit is coming from directional light. Try reducing the directional light shadow cascade count from 3 to 2 or 1.
As for landscape material, when you get to it, it should be as simple as possible because material layering in UE4 is beyond expensive due to lack of many required features.
Overdraw is also a major issue. Very dense foliage placement results in ultra high performance hit due to so much transparency. Try placing your trees with less density than you currently have.
you’re also comparing a realttime-only lighting solution (cryengine) to a hybrid realtime-baked solution (UE4).
try something for me: set your lights to stationary (sky and directional), and set the trees to static, and bake lighting and tell me what the results of that are.
^ That’d basically take an eternity to be baked on a single PC. That’s why dynamic lighting should be improved since static lighting for open world isn’t really a viable option, without a workstation to calculate it.
I went from a 4GB to 8GB GPU still have the same FPS was told to make any kind of outdoor game for a newbie would need a new 1000 dollar GPU to get any more FPS so looks like will only make tiny in house games with just one person running around and sell it to make more money to buy the bigger card
This should not be the case. I have open an open world map with a lot of trees and grass on it, and some other objects. In this scene for example i have 85 fps, 1920x1080 res, dynamic lighting:
And this is sunset position where shadow count is a lot higher because shadows are much longer. I have a decent komp; i7 2600k, 16gb ram, gtx 1070. So my entire komp costs around 700usd.
Sure, back then in 2016/17 UE4 was slow, but looks like things have changed. Although shadows performance are still an issue, i mean shadows should not be so demanding.
Looks like everyone uses their secret techniques to optimize games and maintain visual quality.