shader using time input gets choppy after a while

Development Rendering
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1

I have a shader that ‘scrolls’ the texture over time to mimic movement. Works fine on pc but on mobile (kindle fire hd) animation gets choppy after a minute or two while rest of the game runs smoothly.

here’s my material setup: - YouTube

2

Howdy laggyluk,

Thank you reporting this issue. Would you be able to attach your Dxdiag and your project log files to this post?

I have attempted to reproduce this issue and have been unsuccessful so far. is there a step by step way that I may be able to reproduce this issue internally. Any additional information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and have a great day!

3

Hey

Ain’t DxDiag PC only? As I said, it happens on kindle fire tablet, not on PC. Today I’ve checkd on google nexus 7 and couldn’t reproduce so this might be kindle specific.

4

it is a possibility that your project may be overheating the CPU in the device causing the choppiness that you have been seeing. Kindle devices are known to be on the lower end of tablet performance as well.

5

maybe but game runs pretty smooth except for that shader animation

6

This issue may involve the shader compression of the project when it is packaged. Are you package the game for a certain android specification?

7

I’ve also run into this same problem when using time as the input for a sine wave in a material. It works fine on PC but gets choppy after a minute or so on my Nexus 5. It seems like there is a loss of precision as the number gets bigger.

8

nothing more than: file menu> package project> android> ETC1 but this is only texture format, right? I don’t do any custom apk compression if that’s what you are asking

9

Howdy laggyluk,

I have just checked the Device Compatibility Sheet, located on our wiki, and we no longer support Kindle devices. We are hoping to support those devices in the future, but at this moment they are unsupported. This does not mean that the project will not be able to run on those devices, but it means that you may see sub optimal performance.

As for the Nexus 5 issue, I have not seen any choppy gameplay when testing with it. Would you be able to provide more information they may help see this choppiness?

Thanks and have a great day!

10

To replicate the issue that I was talking about, make a simple unlit material as shown in the image I attached below. It should give you a material that pulses between black and white. Put the material on a mesh in the scene and run on the device. Let it run on the device for about 2-3 minutes and the pulsing will start to get very choppy.

I’m using version 4.5.1 of the engine.

21632-screenshotofmymaterial.png

11

Howdy laggyluk and TickleForce,

Thanks again for reporting this issue. With the quick setup the TickleForce has provided, I have been able to recreate the issue that has been occurring for you both. I have gone ahead and written up bug report UE-5639 and placed that report into our bug database so that it may be addressed in a future release.

Thanks again and have a great day!

12

Any news on a fix for this as I am seeing this on the IPad pro also for a simple time/sine node in material blueprint.

Becomes choppy like the other members and users have described

13

Being older and smarter I’d say it’s float precision being lower on some mobile devices. What you could try is instead of using Time node in material, make some code/blueprint that will accumulate delta time on tick and send it to material via SetScalarParameter. When value is larger than i.e 100 then reset it to zero. Where 100 probably should be some Pi multiplier to have smooth transition.