Why is the performance so terrible in full screen?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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1

Hi. Im trying to figure out why the editor lags and suffers so much when in full screen.

If i play my project in the viewport window everything runs fine, stable 55-60 fps all the time. If i switch to fullscreen, it switches from 10fps to 25fps. Making basically impossible to play anything or test anything at all.

So, my question is simple , why is this happening? is there any bugs with full screen play?

I mean, i know my computer is rather old, but its not like the project im working on is big, or saturated of textures or whatever. Im using a small landscape , about 150-200 textures, i lowered all the scalability settings to minimum, nothing changes.

In fact, it is just like if when in full screen, nothing you change in the scalability settings affects the world.

I tried using scalability settings to LOW, all of em lol, nothing changes… so whats the deal with fullscreen???
I also tried to basicall disabling all shadows, just for the sake of it… nothing changes… and at that point i just did stop trying things, for obvious reasons.

Or maybe its something about the Hz of the screen??

My computer specs - nvidia gtx650 2gb, CPU- Intel 3570 4 cores with 16gb ram. Windows 7 64 bits.
But as i said, nothing i change seems to affect anything.

I checked so many things… but nothing seems to affect when playing in fullscreen, so at this point im wondering if there is a bug or something with UE about this.

2

Degrading performance with increased resolution commonly points to a bottleneck in a GPU pixel shader. You can read more about profiling here.
On a side note, GPU, that you listed, is pretty aged and weak. It is not a surprise that it is struggling.

3

Well, the 650gtx must be old, but i dont have any problems at all playing most of the actual last generation games at mid-high settings at full screen. Even using AA at decent amounts. Thats why im surprised UE requires so much cpu and gpu power to even run small landscapes. And its not like i donthave experience playing videogames and knowing when something is strugglign more than it should.

As i said, its not like if i switch to minimum settings things change. They dont. Even if my graphics card is old, i should be able to at least play at minimum quality without issues.

Also, other users have worst specs and they dont have so many problems.

Unfortunately i dont have enough knowledge to understand the profiler documentation, also even if i read it i still dont have a clue what i exactly need to change to optimize it… so…

4

Note that performance loss might be also caused by code like using too much Tick, heavy nodes, expensive materials…

5

Well, the 650gtx must be old, but i
dont have any problems at all playing
most of the actual last generation
games at mid-high settings at full
screen. Even using AA at decent
amounts.

I sincerely doubt that.

Thats why im surprised UE requires so
much cpu and gpu power to even run
small landscapes.

Nope, UE4 does not use more CPU or GPU power than needed elsewhere, landscapes included. Most likely your landscape material is just too complex/unoptimized for targeted hardware.

As i said, its not like if i switch to
minimum settings things change. They
dont. Even if my graphics card is old,
i should be able to at least play at
minimum quality without issues.

Optimize your materials, namely landscape material. Even at lowest possible settings, there is a pretty solid load on the GPU from the shading model itself.

Also, other users have worst specs and
they dont have so many problems.

I would not expected anything above 40-45 fps in an empty scene in 1080p from 650

Unfortunately i dont have enough
knowledge to understand the profiler
documentation, also even if i read it
i still dont have a clue what i
exactly need to change to optimize
it… so…

Profiler documentation is written to be understandable by anyone, without prior knowledge. Perhaps you did not read it thoroughly, for it clearly states how to locate the bottleneck and what actions should be taken to optimize. In your case, it is reducing mathematical operations and/or number and resolution of texture look-ups in materials in your scene.

6

How you start with full screen?

When you have a complex blueprint open and start your game from there it tries to simulate that blueprint which cost much performance depending on the coplexity of that blueprint.

7

Ok, so after severals hours spending time tweaking shadows, settings and other herbs i figured it out.

For some reason having temporalAA activated was causing a lost of performance. Big time. I gained about 50% performance switching to FXAA. The other tweaks came from tweaking the shadow render distance, the mesh culling distance, removing the tessellation from the landscape (even if it is pretty small, i dont get it… but still), lowering the foliage quality to mid, and other things.

But the big problem was the TemporalAA, its pretty bad…

Nope, blueprints have nothing to do with the problem, since as i said, it only happens when in fullscreen. Anyways i always avoid event ticks and things like that.

8

Deathrey, you are clueless. The 650gtx is a great videocard (keepingin mind how old is it). I dont have any problems with today’s last generation games and the only problem i was having is the Temporal AA that was eating basically 40fps for no reason. If you dont expect more than 40-45 fps in fullscreen with a 650gtx… you dont know what you talking about lol.

And no. The profiler is not made for beginners. Sure, it tells you what is what, not that you will understand with so many technical words, but whatever. But it doesnt tell you how to actually improve the actual performance. Not because you understand something that means that you actually can put it in practice, because you dont know how.