How do you get a blank scene with 1 light and small square floor to run as fast as the Couch Knights demo?

When I make a blank scene with a small square floor, I get 120fps. When I add one light my fps goes to 30fps. And this is not in virtual reality.

The Couch Knights demo runs at a consistent 83fps and has more than one light.

Epic is doing something special with their demo. What is it?

I am working on this for virtual reality, and I really need to keep the fps high.

What is going on here?

dynamic (movable lights) should be avoided if possible. Baking will give you much better performance. But there are a number of other optimizations you should make to the game and engine for VR. Currently, the defaults are set to look nice, but not be optimal.

  1. Turn off frame smoothing in project settings>rendering
  2. Set your global or local postProcess to override and turn off (zero) all features, and set the AA to FXAA (in the misc section)
  3. Bake as much lighting as you can
  4. set your screen percentage to be lower. Use this command in the rift “hmd sp 100” you can go lower, as far as 30, but obviously things will look worse.
  5. From here, you should have decent performance, but you can tune more by using the scalabilityGroup commands. You can set them in blueprints once you find what works for you, but to experiment, in a standalone game, use the console and type “sg.” and you’ll see all the editable groups. Pick any of them and type a number from 0 to 3 (you can use 4 for ultra, but don’t do that). Make all of them 0 and you should have low-quality, super-fast performance. Put each one back up until you lose performance, and find the balance between visual quality and speed.

This is the newbie method. There are much more advanced ways to target exactly what is killing performance and target that, but this will get you going.

Hey,

I’m aware this is an old post but this might help someone in the future having performance issues with a new project. I created this video specifically for the VR template but everything in it will work for any other project someone might want to create.