Profiling with Unreal Engine

There are some great resources around profiling and optimizations with Unreal Engine.

First, I strongly recommend going through these:

• Unreal Performance Optimization Learning Path
• Performance section in Ari’s UE Tips & Best Practices
• Unreal Engine Game Optimization on a Budget
• Intel’s UE Optimization Guide: Profiling Fundamentals

Tips

• Useful stat commands:
  • stat detailed: even before using Unreal Insights or another profiler, checking with this in-game overlay (which combines stat unitgraph, stat fps, stat unit) can give some useful information such as knowing if we’re CPU or GPU bound for instance
  • stat DumpHitches
  • stat Hitches
• Use the elegant Significance Manager and the Animation Budget Allocator
• Prefer Simple Physics when possible
• Unreal Insights
  • Can be easily launched from the editor or UGS
  • Trace.Send 127.0.0.1 Default / Trace.Stop to easily run short traces
  • Trace.File to save to a file
  • Run stat NamedEvent
  • I’ll do a separate post about Insights as there is a lot to write about :)
• Other profiling tools: PIX, Razor, Superluminal

Videos

The Great Hitch Hunt

Performance Lessons from a Real Unreal Project