Optimizing Unreal Engine 4 for older PCs

Development Rendering
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1

Hi!

I ran into different kind of problems trying to optimize my game for older PCs. I would like to port the game to PCs like this:

  • integrated graphics controller (intel X4500 or intel HD graphics)
  • 2 GB RAM
  • intel Core 2 Duo CPUs or AMD Athlon II x2
  • Windows 10 32/64bit

In my scene there is a big complex building, imported as one mesh from the .FBX file. First of all, I would like to decrease the camera far plane distance from the default to lower the rendering complexity.
The second what I experience, that turning on shadows pulls back the FPS (from 74-75 to 60-57) How can I optimize shadow maps? They are rendered as sg.shadowQuality 1.
Which one can be the bottleneck? The shadows or the big building? It also can’t be ported to Android because the vertex index is bigger than 16bit.

My PC is a laptop with:

  • 8 GBs of RAM
  • intel Core i5 4200
  • nVidia GeForce GT 740 2 GB
  • Windows 10 64bit

This is the scene:

94874-scene01.jpg
94874-scene01.jpg1193×634 182 KB

And another picture (the player character is the little mouse in front of the camera):

94875-scene02.jpg
94875-scene02.jpg1193×634 141 KB

How can I reduce the size of the building actually rendered?

Thank you!

2

You will want to use a lower poly Level of Detail (LOD) mesh for when you’re farther away. You will also want to break the house up into lots of pieces and make any repeating pieces an instanced static mesh. Each piece will need multiple Level of Detail (LOD) layers. That way when the player is on one side of the house, the game doesn’t try to render the other side of the house. You don’t need as many details when further away from an object anyways.