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Trash Compactor

Trash Compactor

We recently found a huge leak in the UE4 garbage collector, particularly rearing its head on dedicated servers for large open-world games. Servers for arena type games with short play times (<1 hour) seem to be little affected, and clients don’t see the problem much either. “Huge” is not hyperbole here – we’re talking the garbage collector alone using up to 10 GB of ram in under 24 hours of server operation!
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Placating The Natives

Placating The Natives

In this article we delve into Blueprint Nativization, a relatively new feature of UE4 that offers significant performance improvements for many projects. Sadly, it often doesn't work out of the box - we've spent some time fixing and improving it for a particular project that we were working on. We have a LOT of changes to present here - some of which have already been implemented into UE4.
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PhysX: The Case Of The Leaky Cloth

PhysX: The Case Of The Leaky Cloth

We found quite a large leak within Apex 3.4 (currently used in Unreal Engine 4, amongst others) - in a relatively short run of the title that we were working on, we saw over 150mb of leaked memory. Here, we present some changes that will fix this
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It’s A Size, Jim, But Not As We Know It, Not As We Know It…

It’s A Size, Jim, But Not As We Know It, Not As We Know It…

A really small bug fix is presented here - with a lot of Trekkie banter to fluff the piece out... and why not?
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Sign Of The Times

Sign Of The Times

PVS-Studio pointed us toward some code with suspiciously mixed signed/unsigned math. This was actually causing some issues - and here we tell you how to fix them
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Clear And Reset Danger

Clear And Reset Danger

A common programming mistake is fixed here, this time in the FBX importer
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The Sadness of the Ignored Null Pointer

The Sadness of the Ignored Null Pointer

In this post we present an optimization coming from removing some pointless null pointer checks. The way that we found this was quite interesting
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The Battle of the Lean and the Inlined Bone Functions

The Battle of the Lean and the Inlined Bone Functions

We took a look at the inlining of a certain part of the codebase and were shocked with what we found... we then went about improving it
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ToString() Or Not ToString()… Wait, What’s The Question?

ToString() Or Not ToString()… Wait, What’s The Question?

ToString() is one of the most commonly called functions in UE4 - certainly across the editor, the content cooker and such. Here we take a look at it and make it over twice as fast
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Tiny Code Fixes – Part 1

Tiny Code Fixes – Part 1

Here we present several small code fixes and improvements in a nice little package
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Package Versioning… How It Works… And An Optimization

Package Versioning… How It Works… And An Optimization

UE4's Package Versioning is a bit of a dark art for most.. here we try to remove some of the confusion around it - while, again, offering some improvements through optimization
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Portrait Of A Serialize Perf Killer

Portrait Of A Serialize Perf Killer

With performance critical editor and cooker code, it's well advised to consider performance when adding tests for rare errors. Here we take a look at this and show by, by considering the CPU pipeline and code cache, a simple change can yield a significant performance improvement without reducing stability
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Sweeping Up And Disassembling A Physics Macro

Sweeping Up And Disassembling A Physics Macro

Macros can often be useful to make certain programming tasks simpler - but they can also cause hidden performance headaches that might otherwise be avoided. Here we look at one of those - and how to improve it
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When Are Shopping Lists A Waste of Time?

When Are Shopping Lists A Waste of Time?

We take a look at some list generating code with UE4 - and why it was completely pointless
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Using The Disassembler To Highlight Optimization Targets

Using The Disassembler To Highlight Optimization Targets

We use the debugger's disassembly view to look at FPaths::IsRelative() after it shows up in our profiling tests. Then we optimize it
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Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 3)

Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 3)

The third part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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The Cook, The Resave, His Garbage And Her Optimization

The Cook, The Resave, His Garbage And Her Optimization

We present here a way to improve cook times by reducing the frequency of garbage collection
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The Case Of The ExportHash String Monster

The Case Of The ExportHash String Monster

We found CreateExportHash() was showing up in profiling the cooker - so we optimized it. Our findings and changes are presented here
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Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 2)

Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 2)

The second part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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Patch Content Early – NOT At Runtime

Patch Content Early – NOT At Runtime

We present an optimization that removes a significant amount of memory churn from the animation code
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Static Code Analysis With PVS-Studio (Part 1)

The first part in our series looking at coding errors found by using the static code analysis tool PVS-Studio
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A Huge PhysX Memory Churn Reduction

A Huge PhysX Memory Churn Reduction

Here we implement a scratch buffer to reduce temporary memory churn passing through PhysX
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The Smallest, Coolest Optimization

The Smallest, Coolest Optimization

While profiling a game's runtime, we found that 40% of memory allocations were coming from a single function. The fix/optimization involves adding a single character
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The Clue In The Code Comments

The Clue In The Code Comments

We present a tiny little fix for a simple - but serious - coding error in the UE4 codebase
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