UE4 Texture Optimization Tutorial – How to use Mipmaps and Texture Streaming in Unreal Engine 4

Hey everyone! I posted this video on Reddit, and got a reply from someone much smarter than myself in this avenue, and I got their permission to share their input with you all here.

"This is honestly a solid video for people who're very new to unreal and performance in general, but there are a few things that you've explained incorrectly or misunderstood yourself.

Not attacking you, and I'm sorry if my explanation isn't great, I can elaborate if it'll help a little more.

A large part of what fixed your performance appears to just be that you've imported a texture that isn't a power of 2, so unreal is unable to mipmap it, and unreal can't even compress it.

Textures that aren't powers of 2 can't be compressed, and thats why they're so expensive memory wise.

If you bring in correctly created textures form the get-go, all of those settings will be automatically created for you. Though sometimes you may want to tweak them of course.

Mip Map Settings and texture group are connected, it is PARTLY about organising, but its also to do with what the groups are setup as.

ie: If you have your normal maps set up to decrease to half res at a certain distance, that'll impact ALL normal maps across the board that're under the texture group 'world normal map'.

Power of Two Mode is only intended to be used for when a texture ISNT a power of 2, so if you have a texture that is lets say 1012×996 and say 'pad to square' it'll turn it to the nearest power of 2, which is 1024×1024 by padding out the space. Think of it like increasing the canvas size in photoshop, your image itself hasn't changed, but the canvas has, unreal is basically 'filling' that canvas. It does this so its a power of 2, and then it can compress it.

Conversely, if your texture its lets say 1020×500, and you don't select 'pad to square' then it'll pad it out to the nearest power of 2 ie: 1024×512 in that particular textures case.

Doing this on a texture thats already a power of 2, won't do anything at all, it won't change memory or the resource size, because it see's what it is and doesn't bother to do anything with it.

Streaming and never Stream are useful options, but its worth being careful, as that can create texture pop in, its super useful when you're doing online games for example.

Streaming Pool size itself, is similar to many other settings in unreal, its a default, you should change it on a per-project basis according to the memory of the device you're building for.

Its also worth pointing out, that using the various stats to check performance, should be done in a packaged release, otherwise it takes the editor textures and windows into account and is not an accurate.

Required texture resolution should also be changed on a per project basis, as unreal doesn't know what your desired texel density is, or your desired memory bandwith, so it just uses its default. Many of the viewmodes work this way and should be adjusted in the ini files on a per project basis.

If you're building lightmaps, unreals default for what it thinks is an ok lightmap size for PC isn't applicable for lets say mobile or nintendo switch."

So there you have it! Some very useful info to help you all optimize your games. Huge thanks to Thatguyintokyo over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/Thatguyintokyo/
And you can see his original comment on my post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/g3lzum/heres_a_basic_overview_of_how_to_optimize_the/

Dude thank you so much <3

When i hit tilde or any edited key to access cmd is not working for me..but when i hit play i can open the cmd, but only then..any ideas? Thanks for this video!!

Nice video. But Mic sounds broken a bit.

Dont forget to uncheck sRGB from your grey mask maps, like RMO (roughness,metallic,occlusion) and set compression to Masks.

Anyone who feels they have gaps in knowledge about UE4 please visit Official Learning page with only video tutorials – There is Everything. – learn.unrealengine.com
You need to log in. I can not stress this enough. It is sooo good. Especially Real time Rendering tutorial.

This is helpful.

Great tips. One thing to note, you can 'bulk edit' texture settings. Just shift click a lot of your textures and then select bulk edit and do the settings as per the video to simultaneously optimize all of them, will save a lot of time 😀