UI Optimisation for displays

I’m sorry if it already been asked, but this issue can’t be stressed enough.

Is there a work in progress of optimizing the Unreal Editor UI for displays, everything is pixelated, text is difficult to read, enormous loss of precision, really distracting. It’s almost impossible to work with.

We aren’t using Cocoa for any of our UI, consequently there is considerably more work involved in making UE4 support resolution sensibly. Moreover simply rendering the whole Editor, including level viewport at resolution (4x the pixels!) will be far too slow on current Macs. It is on our list of things to do, but there’s no ETA.

the hell with the viewport, just updating the assets and making the text look sharp would significantly improve things

I’m running an rMBP here & I can agree it is less sharp than a Cocoa app, but it is far from unusable.

We will get there in a future release - it has been on the cards for a while. However there’s a considerable amount of work involved in making our GUI & rendering code satisfactorily able to contend with OS X OpenGL rendering requiring pixel integral coordinates, but the windowing system (Cocoa) using scaled display coordinates. Right now there are too many assumptions made throughout the codebase that these are the same & fixing them isn’t as simple as it sounds.

A naive implementation would also cause a huge performance decline as it would require rendering 4x the pixels. Everything in each UE4 window is rendered into a single OpenGL view, which on Macs will be automatically scaled up by the OS to maintain the same size without having to render more pixels. Rendering the text at resolution is currently all-or-nothing, we’d end up rendering the viewport at resolution as well & that would result in a ~2-4x performance drop since most Macs will be heavily GPU bound. If we do it, we want to make sure we’re scaling the viewport so that the switchover won’t bring the Editor to a crawl. All of this takes time & testing that so far have been needed on other parts of the engine, but we want to get this working when we can.

Hi!

I am disappointed to see the editor being so pixelated.

Isn’t it possible to render the UI separately from the game scene? And give an option to render the scene at a different resolution?

In the meantime the editor gives eye sores after some time, but it’s still usable (just like Unity). Still it would be a real improvement to have at least the UI rendering at a decent resolution.

This will become a problem for other platforms as well when HDPI screens end up making their way into the windows ecosystem.

How will the UI and the general responsiveness of UE4 be with Metal - which is heavy plugged by Apple & Epic?

Nearly one year later. Any update?

I don’t know, I deleted it because it was unusable on my machine because of lack of optimisation, never used it since. they still didn’t update it?

No. it’s three years later now. Every 6 months or so I give it a chance but then go back to Unity because of no HiDPI support for the viewports.

how about fonts in the UI widgets, can they be displayed at resolution? in my builds, then dont seem to get scaled.

there is:

and

its called screen percentage but its technically the same, twice the resolution of a normal 72dpi