Morph targets have very poor performance in game vs editor

Originally posted as a question (Why am I seeing a difference in performance from using the Editor vs Standalone build? - Character & Animation - Epic Developer Community Forums) but now I’m pretty sure this is a bug.

Morph targets run really well in the editor, but suffer from massive slowdown in standalone Windows builds (tested).

Very basic geo used for testing: a basic cylinder stretching (exported from Maya via the 2013 FBX exporter).

Scene looks like this:

Profiled in editor and then profiled in the game. (Editor is the lower one - the one with the slate draw calls drawing the editor GUI).

On these very basic shapes the editor shows it taking 0.04msec - the game shows 0.2 msec. Quite a large difference. I can send the reference fbx - can’t attach fbx it seems.

I’ve also tested this with two other face rigs detailed in the original post. The first showed a 0.5 msec editor performance going to 13 msec in game. The second showed a 6 msec editor performance going to a 43 msec performance in game.

link text

Reference fbx - as a zip to hide the fbx nature from the uploader

Thanks for sharing your research Michael!

I hope this gets checked out!

:heart:

Rama

Hey MichaelCable -

Quick question. What material do you have assigned to the blend shapes and have you checked under the material properties and usage for Used for Morph Targets? This could have some optimization effects on how the objects are rendered.

I checked the flag in the material editor and performed the tests again. No difference. It was using the default world grid, but I created a new material and checked the correct flag - saving the material prior to play mode/run.

Hey MicahelCable -

I appreciate your patience while we tracked down this issue. It does appear that this issue has been fixed internally and will be pushed out with the next update to the public launcher. If after the update, the problem persists for you or returns please let us know

Thank You

Eric Ketchum

Thanks for getting back to me on this. Glad it’s fixed/ I’ll check it again on the 4.2 release when it’s out.

Checked and it’s a lot better now. Awesome work guys.

The editor runs this scene at 0.04msec and the build runs at 0.06msec average. Still strange that it’s slower, but it’s not as big a difference anymore. But close enough that PIE can give a fair idea of the build performance.