Looking at these debug tools in UE5, they’ve really helped me isolate some performance issues I’ve been struggling with. The material complexity view (showing those red and green overlays in the screenshot) immediately highlighted where I needed to optimize. Some of my materials were way more complex than they needed to be, especially that bed texture I spent so much time on – it looked like all those extra texture samples and material instances were killing performance. I learned here that opacity uses a lot more processing power than masking actually.
I ran into this weird issue where my bed and door meshes would completely disappear whenever I tried to modify post-processing settings during runtime. After digging through the debug data, I realised the problem was that I’d set them up as StaticMeshActors. These aren’t meant to be modified during gameplay, which explains why they were vanishing when I tried to affect the post-process volume as a reference within the playercharacter blueprint. Had to convert them to regular mesh components to get them working properly with the runtime modifications I wanted to implement.
I methodically went through every single blueprint – the door mechanism, the bed movement script, even the drawing spawners I’d set up. Each time I’d disconnect a tick node, I’d run the game again, hoping to see that frame counter climb back up. But the profiler kept showing these massive performance hits. The whole time I’m thinking it’s got to be some blueprint somewhere just eating up resources.
But nope. After all that time hunting down tick events, turns out the real performance killer was the curtain I duplicated. Looking back at the profiler data now, it’s almost funny how clear it is. Those massive red spikes in the debug view weren’t from blueprint execution at all – they were from the physics engine trying to calculate three identical cloth simulations at once, two of which were scaled down (terrible idea).