Lagging lamps

the game runs fine for me but when i turn on 2 more lamps it becomes laggy, i wonder why (also the more lamps you turn on the less fps you get :stuck_out_tongue:)

I noticed that too. I figure a future trolling method is to make a Condo full of lamps, turn them all on, then start a Party. Everyone that shows up will then suffer a massive FPS drop.

i just hope they fix it because its very dark in some places in the condo and the lamps are a nice effect

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I can confirm this on my computer, steam profile for specs, with 4 bedside lamps off, average frame rate is around 109 FPS, turning on all four lamps, FPS dips down to around 65 ~ 70. Optimization is still needed in that department, but is expected…

I feel this is just an issue with the Alpha. Lamps shouldn’t cause that much of an FPS drop since, in reality, it should just be lighting.

It’s more of an issue with the type of lighting rather than just optimization issues. Most of the lights used in the map are most likely static lights, which are baked before gameplay, so after they’re loaded in they don’t impact performance that much. However, since the lamps are movable lights, everything has to be calculated while it’s on. From the UE4 Documentation page:

Movable lights setup to cast shadows use whole scene dynamic shadows, which have a significant performance cost. The performance cost comes primarily from the number of meshes affected by the light, and the triangle count of those meshes. This means that a shadow casting movable light with a large radius will cost many times more than a movable light with a small radius.

TL;DR: Toggle-able lights are different from other lights because they’re laggier, and they get even laggier if they’re placed next to more stuff.

Never really had an issue with toggable lights in any other game, but I don’t really do much with UE4.

Are you saying that this is not an Alpha issue, then? I don’t see why such a sharp FPS issue can’t be ironed out or at least significantly lessened.

I’m not saying that they can’t do anything about it (after all, they did add Vista support when it wasn’t built-in), just that the type of light has a bigger performance hit than the rest. There are a lot of minor tweaks that they could do to the lamps to make it less laggy (reduce the radius, reduce brightness), but either way, it’s still going to be fairly expensive (performance-wise).

Also, “toggle-able lights” in my previous post should just be “condo lamps” since there are toggle-able lights (stationary lights) that aren’t as laggy as the lamps.

To be fair to Unreal Engine, you just need to compile the engine yourself to get Vista Support. Downloading the pre-compiled Unreal Engine 4 editor from the Epic Games Launcher does not include Vista Support.

I’ll be looking into improving their preformance.

I believe it’s the dynamic shadows. They look really pretty though, so it might be end up being an advanced graphical setting.

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Thanks for your report! This has been forwarded straight to our Trello board. You can track its status there.

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