How to optimize game to slower phones?

Hi! I want to optimize my game on Android, but I don’t know how. I want to do this game playable on slower phones.

Generally speaking, what you’re going to want to do is create device profiles. In the profiles for slower and less powerful phones, there’s a few things you can set to help performance. You can change it in Window->Developer Tools->Device Profiles, or by manually editing DefaultDeviceProfiles.cfg in your config folder. Stealing the DefaultDeviceProfiles.cfg file from Tappy Chicken will give you a good starting point.

Setting r.MipMapLODBias will cause Unreal Engine to load lower-resolution versions of textures. So, if you have a 2048x2048 texture and your device has a r.MipMapLODBias value of 1, it will use the 1024x1024 generated mip instead of the full resolution texture. If you set it to 2, it will use the 512x512 generated mip. Of course, your mips settings for that texture group must be set up to use a certain size mipmap for it to be available. This is probably the single most important setting in most mobile games in terms of getting good performance on slower and older devices.

Setting r.SkeletalMeshLODBias will cause it to load versions of models with less vertices (LODs) if you’ve created LODs for your models. LODs are designed so that models that are further away from the viewer can swap to a lower detail version. The bias will cause it to use a lower LOD model even when the model is very close to the viewer. This is a straight addition. If you set it to 1, it will use LOD1 instead of LOD1 (which is the first step down), setting it to 2 will cause it to use LOD2 instead of LOD0. Again, if you haven’t created LODs for your models, this won’t do anything.

Setting r.MobileHDR to false will turn off mobile HDR for the device, assuming you’re using it.

One of the challenges with Android is that there are just a lot of very low-end devices out there and, unfortunately, you’ll never be able to fully support all the old devices while taking advantage of all the fancy features available on newer ones. Hopefully the information above will help, though.