Massive performance drop after updating to 4.14

Hello! I updated to UE 4.14 from 4.13.2 today and was playing through my current project testing if everything transferred correctly. As I was playing I noticed some serious framerate drops. Enough to make me stop and investigate. I did a comparison between versions and the discrepency is clear, in some areas I’m losing up to 50% performance.

I ran the particles demo in both versions as well. While the discrepency isn’t as drastic, it’s still certainly there.

There isn’t anything in the scene that should cost too much other than a planar reflection actor. The hit is the same with or without it. I’ve tried multiple other scenes from my library, there is always a performance drop. Bear in mind I changed nothing between versions, the scenes are exactly the same. I figure maybe I’m missing something that was added that I don’t need turned on.

The scenes are blueprint based, I get the loss in both the editor and standalone.

My specs are as follows:

Geforce GTX 970 AMD FX 8320 @ 3.7~ Ghz
16GB RAM
The project file is running off a SanDiskExtremePRO 480GB SSD
I have the latest drivers installed.

Is anybody else hitting performance issues with UE4.14? Any help on the matter will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Nathan

Are you using any Custom Nodes or Parallax Occlusion Mapping in your materials?

No custom nodes. All the materials are basic, just Base, Roughness, Metallic and Normal. Most of them are instanced.

I noticed myself that InstancedStaticMeshActors that are using a masked material seem to blend regardless of making and cause overdraw even in the opaque areas. I can’t say for sure this started with the new version but I am seeing it on 4.14, perhaps this could be part of the issue? You can visualize the overdraw in your scene with the Quad Overdraw view mode in Optimizations.

I am also experiencing a major performance drop :(. My level has landscape, foliage, etc, and uses an outline post process shader. However, when I am looking out into the distance at the edge of the world (looking at very little), the FPS barely increases, so I think the issue may be unrelated to rendering options / detail.

Hey. Thanks for the reply. I just checked, everything is blue. Not very much going on at all, this is really perplexing me. Because there isn’t much going on in this scene at all. There are 364 actors all of them static. 8 dynamic lights only 4 of them casting shadows. Light complexity shows this isn’t a (massive) issue. I also removed all the lights for testing, Which did fire the fps back up to 120 but this is surely to be expected with dynamic lights and doesn’t explain the discrepency between versions.

That’s odd, I would think it’s a different issue to the one that I am experiencing, if I look away from the bulk of the scene the framerate shoots back up to 120.

EDIT
Scratch that, I’m losing performance wherever I look. So it could well be the same issue.

I just created a blank FPS template project in both versions. Uncapped the framerate and switched off smoothing. 4.14 gives me about 130-140 fps. 3.13.2 gives me 180-190. So in an almost blank project, identical on both versions I’m losing between 40 and 50 frames.

There is a minor bug in 4.14 about material compiler failing to re-use duplicate material networks and calculate them several times. It is likely to be responsible for most of performance regression. It is due to be fixed in 14.1 and for those of you, who can compile the engine themselves, the fix is posted here.

we’ve also noticed the shader complexity of everything seems to go way up when using the forward renderer, even with only one light in the scene. I don’t know if you’re using the forward renderer or not but you might look into that as well.

I haven’t had a chance to mess with the forward renderer yet. I plan on testing it for some Vive stuff when I get the time. But it’s not the cause of this issue.

As others have stated, there is an ongoing bug when compiling materials causing the engine issues.

I personally have had to resort to previous versions until the Github community sorts it out.

Until then, I’d recommend 4.13 or even a version before that.

Thanks guys. I’m going to assume this is cause of the issue and mark this as resolved.

Hi guys, did you apply that fix? In my scene, it’s seems nothing difference.
My post: does-anyonemet-promance-issues-after-upgrage-to-4.14