DOCUMENTATION · UPDATED 21 OCTOBER 2026

Performance and shader preparation

Start small

Test a modest region before increasing resolution or adding many mapped features. Landscape vertices, imagery resolution, mask resolution, road geometry and building counts have separate costs. Choosing the largest value for all of them can exhaust memory.

Preparing shaders

New materials and shader permutations can trigger compilation. Initial pipeline-state and distance-field preparation can also cause stalls. Repeated parameter edits can reuse cached material parents, but new texture/sampler configurations or engine updates may require new work.

Let initial preparation finish, save, then compare a warm reopen with the first run. Do not clear the derived-data cache as a routine performance fix; doing so can force recompilation.

Practical reductions

• Lower unnecessary imagery or mask sizes before reducing geographic extent you actually need.
• Keep mapped feature counts appropriate to the area and use sensible mesh complexity.
• Start with displacement off and modest material quality.
• Load only the regions needed for the current operation, while satisfying editing requirements.
• Allow sufficient local disk space for project data, cook output and Unreal caches.

Measure honestly

Record CPU/GPU, RAM, engine build, area, resolution and enabled features. Measure cold startup, warm startup and interactive frame time separately. An automation pass or fixed-frame benchmark is not a measured gameplay FPS result.

Spline editor overlays

Generated landscape splines use bounded, distance-adaptive centerlines during normal editor navigation. Select the relevant road actor and enter Landscape editing to use its native spline handles. Road meshes and control-point data are retained. Game View hides editor overlays as usual.