Unreal Engine* Optimization Guide

YouTube* Playlist for GDC 2018

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Hi, I'm Scott La Fetra. I'm here with the game team at Intel. And we're showing off some optimizations we've done for Unreal and some simple optimizations that developers can do to increase the performance in their game.

So what we're showing off here is the multicore improvements that were made to Unreal. You'll see those show up in Unreal 4.19, which was released a few weeks ago. So any multicore system that you see—so cloth meshes, particle systems, destructive objects, anything like that—you should see about a 20% to 30% increase. So 20% to 30% more objects on-screen.

We're also showing off a few simple optimizations that people can do easily with the blueprints. So right here, we're doing an optimization, where if it's not on-screen, it will freeze the physics data of the cloth mesh. So if I move this up to where we're having a lot of FPS problems, you'll see if we look away, the FPS will pop way up back to 60.

And the way we're doing that is we're simply taking the what is rendered node, that Unreal makes available to us, setting a decent tolerance. And then, if it was not recently rendered, then we're going in and suspending clothing animation, targeting our mesh. And then, if it was recently rendered, then you want to pop that simulation back into play mode. So we use this node here.

Now, the reason we're suspending animation and not using the LOD system is because the LOD system will completely clear the physics system. That takes all of the data that was remembered—all the position data from the mesh—and wipe it clear.

What this will look like is it will pop. If you have a flag, it'll pop to being straight. If you have clothes on your character, it will revert back to the T-pose so when the player looks back at the object, we'll get this sort of pop-in effect, where the clothing sort of falls from it's first point. By suspending it, we're avoiding that.

So these changes that we're making to our scene in Unreal should apply equally across all platforms. So whether you're doing mobile, desktop, console, you'll see this improvement across all parts of your game.

To learn more about this and other optimizations you can make in Unreal Engine, you can go to Intel Game Dev. We have several optimization guides posted there. And in general, we try to keep that updated with all the most recent tips and optimizations that you can make to your game so that you're hitting your max performance and your max visual fidelity.