Adding Materials freezes Mac for 3-5 minutes

Development Rendering
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1

I’ve seen this question asked a couple of times, and while it was often considered “resolved” I am still wondering whether this is normal, or if there are any steps I can take to improve performance.

I’m running UnrealEngine 4 on a with 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 4GB Graphics Card under the latest version of Yosemite. I’m running Editor version 4.7.3, installed from the Epic Games Launcher, which is stored in my applications folder.

Basically, every time I add new content to a project, usually that involves materials, the app freezes up and I get a spinning beach ball for 3-5 minutes, after which I can add and manipulate that element normally, but it always happens with new assets and slows down the workflow IMMENSELY.

I checked my Activity Monitor during the freeze and it reports that Unreal Editor is using 300% of the CPU (didn’t know that was possible). I took a sample process which I can share but do not know how to parse myself.link text

I’ve seen a couple other posters ask about this problem (seems to be Mac specific) but I haven’t seen a response that gets me any closer to a viable workflow. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

2

The editor is busy compiling textures - this is not Mac specific. Compressing textures using DXT is processor intensive & newer PCs will have significantly faster CPUs than your , ergo they will take less time to compress textures. On OS X the compression process is also fighting for CPU time with our shader compiler that translates HLSL to GLSL as required on OS X. Windows doesn’t have that extra overhead when using D3D as the HLSL can be used directly so there’s more processor time available for texture compression.

3

I’m investigating what might be done to improve this.

4

There will be an update in 4.7.4 which should dramatically improve texture compression performance on OS X, which should hopefully make a huge difference to you in these situations.

5

That’s great news! Thanks so much!