Learn essential techniques to boost your game's performance in Unreal Engine, ensuring a smooth and responsive experience for players by identifying and fixing common bottlenecks.
The first step is to identify what's slowing down your game. Use Unreal Engine's built-in profiling tools. Press Ctrl + Shift + , to open the Profiler or use console commands like stat unit and stat gpu to see real-time performance data.
High-polygon meshes can heavily impact performance. Reduce the polygon count of your models where possible. Set up Levels of Detail (LODs) for your static meshes, which automatically switch to lower-poly versions as the object gets further from the camera.
Large textures consume significant video memory (VRAM). Ensure your textures are sized appropriately for their use—not every object needs a 4K texture. Use texture compression and Mipmaps, which Unreal Engine generates by default.
Dynamic lighting and shadows are very expensive. Whenever possible, use Static or Stationary lighting and bake it into lightmaps. For dynamic shadows, reduce the shadow casting distance and limit the number of dynamic shadow-casting lights.
A high number of draw calls can create a CPU bottleneck. Reduce them by merging multiple small meshes into a single larger one, and use Instanced Static Meshes or Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes for repeating objects like trees or rocks.
Additional Tips for Peak Performance
Use the Shader Complexity view mode (Alt + 8) to visualize the cost of your materials. Bright red or white areas indicate very expensive materials that may need optimization.
Unreal Engine uses several culling methods to avoid rendering objects that aren't visible. You can adjust settings like Cull Distance Volumes and ensure Occlusion Culling is working properly to maximize its effectiveness.
Avoid running complex logic on the Event Tick node in Blueprints. For performance-critical systems, consider converting complex Blueprints to C++ for a significant speed boost.
Become familiar with console commands for debugging performance. stat fps shows your frame rate, while stat unit shows which thread (Game, Draw, GPU) is the bottleneck.
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