Disable Texture Streaming to improve performance and image quality

[NJ_>]

Unreal Engine 4 Texture Streaming is for low-end video cards or consoles.

It improves performance by loading textures into VRAM as necessary, but then you get texture pop-ins if the loading isn't done quickly enough.
Distant objects like enemies on your screen will have low-resolution textures until they get closer to you. Then their high-resolution textures get loaded in.
The loading of textures in the background might cause framedrops and stuttering.

Without Texture Streaming, all textures, regardless of the distance, will get fully loaded into your VRAM at their highest resolution forever.

When you disable it without enough VRAM (low-end user, 4GB card), textures need to be constantly loaded and unloaded, because your GPU hasn't enough memory to keep everything in it. As a result, you get (micro) stuttering and fps drops!

So if you have the available hardware resources (16GB RAM or more and 6GB VRAM or more, I recommend that you turn it off.

Change your Engine.ini located in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Boltgun\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor to include these lines:

[SystemSettings]
r.TextureStreaming=0

or

from your library page, right-click on Boltgun, select properties and add

-notexturestreaming

to your launch options.

With it disabled, I'm having less random texture pop-ins or stutters and on top of that I get better image quality (regardless of the distance)
ryzen 5600h
rx6600m 8gb
16gb ddr4 3200

[Phát Dong]

Nice, thanks for the tip

[beepis boy]

thanks now the game is a playable levels of lag

[ElectricCrowbar]

This dramatically helped! Thank you!

[Delta_Assault]

Why do devs use texture streaming if this happens?

[LemonRush7777]

This seems to have fixed the issues on my end. Thanks!

Originally posted by Delta_Assault:

Why do devs use texture streaming if this happens?

Probably because its necessary on most systems. But if your system can just hold all textures at once there's not much use for it.

[NJ_>]

Originally posted by ElectricCrowbar:

This dramatically helped! Thank you!

you are welcome

[iamalexk]

Worked for me thanks!

[Megapal]

should be stickied

[Celery Man]

Thanks for the post; really useful for all UE4 games!

I wish that Unreal Engine would by default just display increasingly low-resolution samples of textures (in the extreme case, just a single block colour) until the textures finished loading into VRAM. It's utterly insane how many games have been ruined by stuttering as a result of the engine's insistence on freezing rendering until textures are loaded. I doubt there's ever a single case where anyone would prefer to experience stuttering over texture pop-in. It's even worse when you have plenty of spare VRAM but the engine still constrains itself to some arbitrarily small VRAM budget, constantly doing unnecessary work shifting things in and out of memory.

[Arc]

Note that you probably do not have enough VRAM and RAM for more densely populated games.
Disabling texture streaming entirely causes the engine to never unload unused textures unless they are garbage collected nor to stream in lower quality MIP maps.

So in projects where the texture resolutions and material quality are high (basically any game that's imitating realistic graphics) even RTX4090 paired with 64GB RAM will run out of memory after a while.

This is not a "one fix for all" whatsoever.

[HATFPWDCATE]

64gb of ram god the human race really has become a parody of itself

[519B.]

Originally posted by Fenrir007:

This seems to have fixed the issues on my end. Thanks!

Originally posted by Delta_Assault:

Why do devs use texture streaming if this happens?

Probably because its necessary on most systems. But if your system can just hold all textures at once there's not much use for it.

that;s co9ol but devs need to add toggles for these thigns if they are going to implement them, was getting frame drops on my rig which i found rly strange since it's fairly new. giving this a shot.

[Solitarius "77" Lupus]

big thanks mate, works perfect now! no more Big FPS Drops...

[NJ_>]

Happy to help