I often have students that say the default engine settings don’t run well on their machines. I wanted to make this blog post to go through some tips on getting better performance from the engine if this is the case for you. The first thing I do to demonstrate the performance increase is to enable Show Frame Rate and Memory in Edit -> Editor Preferences -> General -> Performance.

This Information will now be visible in top right of the Editor.

Here I’m running the Editor with the Engine Scalability settings set to Epic on a lower end machine. One way and the first I recommend is to change these settings something lower.

Changing these to Low on my machine drastically increases my frame rate. * Note that some rendering features may not work in lower settings.

Another way to increase the performance of your project is change the Target Hardware in the Project Settings. Switching them to Mobile / Tablet and Scalable 3D or 2D will turn off some of Unreal’s default enabled features. You can see those in Pending Changes.

In some cases the engines default motion blur has caused students to experience headaches. If they aren’t overriding this in a Post-Process volume they can disable these project wide settings as well.

After making these changes to the editor and project, letting the shaders compile and restarting my editor, my frames per second are doubled if not more.

Not necessarily for editor performance but it’s known that running in PIE (Play in Editor) will run your game and the editor and will not reflect accurately the performance of your project. To get a better idea of your game’s performance, play your game in as a Standalone Game.