How to Increase Performance in Ultra-High Resolution 360 Renders in Unreal Engine

How to Maximise your Performance to Get the Highest Possible Resolution Output from your GPU
Written by Off World Live
Updated 3 months ago
N.B. Remember to ensure that the 360 Camera in your level has 'Pause Rendering' ticked or no Render Target selected, otherwise it will be competing for GPU resources with your MRQ render.

Most machines should be able render up to 8K (8192x4096) using our 360 Degree Movie Render Queue integration.

If you want to go above that there are some useful things to bear in mind:

  1. The maximum resolution you can reach will be limited by:
    1. You GPU and computer (how powerful it is).
    2. You level (how complex it is).
    3. Your Movie Render Queue settings (resolution, AA samples etc.)
    4. Your level settings such as Lumen etc.
  2. Aside from level optimisation work, there are some "off-the-shelf" features you can try to increase your resolution:
    1. DLSS for Movie Render Queue. This will have a large impact and in many cases comes at no cost to your render quality.
    2. The "Disable Parallel Rendering" tick-box in OWL MRQ settings: This comes at no cost to your render quality but will have a more limited impact. 
    3. Run your render from the command line: This lets you render without having Unreal Editor open. This comes at no cost to your render quality and doesn't require much set-up time.
    4. Disable performance intensive Lumen settings (see below): It is possible to reduce certain memory-hungry Lumen settings if these are not required by your renders (you don't need highly complex lighting).
    5. The "Disable Multiple Scene View States" tick-box in OWL MRQ settings: This has a large impact but disables many inter-frame rendering effects and so comes at a high cost to your render quality.
  1. DLSS for Movie Render Queue (NVIDIA GPUs only) is an extremely powerful resource which uses AI to replace a percentage of the pixels in your scene. The higher the resolution, the larger the impact that DLSS will have.
    1. You can use it either to decrease your render times or to increase your resolution (or both).
    2. Just add the DLSS and DLSS for Movie Render Queue plugins to your project and then enable: 
    3. In Movie Render Queue Settings you will see a DLSS option, add this: 
    4. You can now choose your DLSS setting:
      1. DLAA: This only activates Anti-Aliasing, it doesn't replace any GPU rendered pixels with AI generated pixels so it will have low/ no performance impact.
      2. Ultra Performance: This replaces the highest number of GPU rendered pixels with AI generated pixels so you can start with it and then work your way up the DLSS options until you find a balance between visual quality and performance.
      3. Quality: This replaces the lowest number of GPU rendered pixels with AI generated pixels so you should use it if you see artefacts in your scene generated by lower performance levels.
    5. Now when you render, DLSS will automatically apply to your frames.
  2. "Disable Parallel Rendering" makes Movie Render Queue render each frame sequentially reducing the amount of data that needs to be held in memory.
    1. To select it just tick the option in the Advanced settings of the OWL 360 Rendering in MRQ:
    2. You will see your render time increase (because each frame is rendering in sequence rather than in parallel) but you should be able to increase your resolution.
  3. You can run your render from the command line without needing to have Unreal Editor open which can provide a good performance boost.
    1. Epic have a useful guide here on how to render from the command line.
    2. It's a simple way to increase performance without having to make any changed to your level.
  4. Disable performance intensive Lumen settings can be done using console variables in Movie Render Queue. Some options include:
    1. r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ImportanceSample.IncomingLighting: This setting determines if you importance sample incoming lighting to generate probe trace directions. When disabled it will increase performance but reduce lighting quality.
    2. r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ReferenceMode: This setting increases the sample count for diffuse lighting. When disabled it will increase performance but reduce lighting quality.
  5. "Disable Multiple View States" is a last call of resort if you need an exceptionally high resolution output and the options above aren't getting you there:
    1. To select it just tick the option in the Advanced settings of the OWL 360 Rendering in MRQ:
    2. You are like to notice an impact in the quality of your render because inter-frame sample (such as from Temporal Anti-Aliasing) will be turned off.
    3. This setting is therefore recommended to avoid unless necessary.
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