Why am I getting extremely low FPS in editor?

Hello, thanks for reading. I just purchased UE4 last night and have had trouble using it. Whenever I open the editor I cannot get more than 20 fps no matter what I do. I’ve been looking for answers and despite several attempts nothing is working. The only place left for a solution is here.

So far I’ve tried the following:

-Closing all other programs

-Reinstalling

-Lowering graphics options in quick settings

-Running this quick fix for the problem I described Current Available Quick-Fix Solutions - Announcements - Epic Developer Community Forums

So far none of these things have done anything. Lowering the quick settings did improve the fps but not by much. The biggest issue I have is that my laptop is school issued and everyone in my program has the exact same one. Despite this, several of my friends are able to run the editor very smoothly with no issues like mine. This is very confusing and frustrating and after trying all day and yesterday I still have no clue what the issue could be.

Specs:

Windows 7 64 bit

Processor: intel Core i7 3630QM @ 2.40GHz

RAM: 12 GB

Graphics: ATI AMD FirePro M4000

If there’s anything else you need to know just tell me.

If the same hardware has no issues for other people you might want to check:

  • Are your power settings correct? I had some laptops with AMD gpu’s that defaulted to their “maximize battery life” setting even when the power cord was connected, which had a large impact on 3d performance.
  • Are you running the same (recent) drivers?
  • How do other programs/games compare? It would make finding the cause easier to know if this is limited to unreal or a general issue.

Additionally, you are running a firepro card which tends to be more OpenGL focused compared to their radeon counterparts. So it might be worth a shot to try starting the editor in OpenGL mode just to see how it performs then. You can do so with a command line argument. I believe it’s simply “-opengl”, though you might want to check the documentation to be sure.