Timing Insights

The Timing Insights window is where you can find per-frame performance data for different tracks, including the CPU and GPU tracks. The Timing view has a new toolbar, splitting the Tracks drop-down menu into multiple menus where you can look at different visualizations of the time your project spends on various tasks.

The Timing Insights window features the Frames panel (1), the Timing panel (2), the Log panel (3), the Timers and Counters tabs (4), and the Callers and Callees panels (5).

Timing Insights Main Toolbar

The toolbar provides the capability to select blocks of time to view in groups, sort, or categorize data, and review log output.

You can toggle the visibility to display data for that frame in the Timing, Timers, Callers, Callees, Counters, and Log tracks by clicking on each respective track.

You can select blocks of time to view in aggregate, show or hide the respective panels. sort or categorize data, and review log output. To do this, click on a single frame in the Frames panel, or click and drag a section of the scrub bar at the top of the Timing panel, known as the Time Ruler.

Frames

The Frames panel displays the total time taken by each frame using a bar graph format. This is useful for identifying general trends, such as low performance or framerate drops when a level is loaded, an unoptimized scene is visible, or spawning a large number of Actors simultaneously.

The frames panel displays the Frames, Timing, Timers, Callers, Callees, Counters, and Log tracks.

Hovering the cursor over a bar causes that frame's index and running time to appear.

If you right-click on on the bar, the following Zoom context menu options will appear:

These options are also available to edit in the UnrealInsightsSettings.ini file.

Timing

You can show or hide each track individually by clicking the arrow next to it.

All Tracks

Clicking the All Tracks dropdown arrow displays a list of all available tracks.

CPU/GPU

Clicking the CPU/GPU dropdown arrow displays the CPU and GPU tracks and thread group options.

Other

Clicking the Other dropdown arrow displays options for visibility of the Main Graph, File Activity, Asset Loading, and Frames Tracks.

Plugins

Clicking the Plugins dropdown arrow displays Tracks and options that are exposed by plugins, including information about Slate, Gameplay, Animation, and RDG Tracks.

View Mode

The View Mode dropdown arrow displays controls for various options for the Timing View.

Quick Find Widget

The Quick Find widget is used to search and filter events displayed in the Timing view. The widget can be opened from the Timing view context menu by right-clicking on a Timing event or by using the CTRL + F shortcut when the Timing view has focus.

The Quick Find widget search logic is defined using Groups and Filters. Group nodes contain child Filter nodes and define the logic applied to the children's result. Filter nodes are leaf nodes and contain a filter each.

Each filter contains:

• The filter type, that can be selected from a drop down menu.

• The filter operator, also selectable using a drop down menu.

• The filter value, that can be entered using a text box.

Once the filter logic is created, it can be used to search for events or filter the tracks from the Timing View.

If you make changes to the filter's logic, you must click Apply Filter again to highlight events based on the new logic.

How to Use Metadata Filters

When you add a Metadata filter, it provides multiple fields you can fill in with metadata you want to filter for. These fields are as follows:

As an example, you can create a metadata filter with the key "AssetPath" with String as youir type and a value containing the string "Pawn."

The second example below shows a combination of a metadata filter with other types of filters. It searches for all timer name events with the name "FRDGBufferPool_CreateBuffer" that have a metadata field with the key "SizeInBytes" of a type Int, and a value greater than 6500.

You can use the special string * to display all events that have attached metadata, regardless of key, type, or value.

Timers

The Timers panel lists all timer events that run within the time range designated in the Timing panel. In addition to grouped data based on time range, the list can be sorted in ascending or descending order by the values in any active column.

To change sort order, or to activate or deactivate columns, right-click on the column. The following options are available:

Asset Load Time

When starting Timing Insights from the command line the Asset Load Time channel can be used to enable named CPU timers for UObject::Serialize and toggle tracing Blueprint names.

In the past, tracking Blueprint names was enabled by default, but this would add a lot of cost to the trace runtime event. Now, if you want to enable Blueprint name tracing, you must turn on this argument in the command line.

To enable asset load time tracking from the command line, you can use the argument

	`-trace=default,AssetLoadTime`

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`-trace=default,AssetLoadTime`

Because there are many timers added when Blueprint names are toggled on, they are hidden in Trace Insights by default.

Enabling Blueprint Names

After enabling Asset Load Time tracking, you can display Blueprint names by adding the argument:

	`-statnamedevents`.
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`-statnamedevents`.

Executing Commands Without Opening the UI

Timing Insights can be run directly from the command line without opening the UI. You can either specify a single command directly in the command line, or you can execute a series of commands by using a response file. In each case, a set of data is exported to a .csv or .tsv file.

These commands can be useful for running automated tests.

Export Functionality

The Timers panel includes the capability to export your timing event data by selecting one or more timers and right-clicking on the context menu.

Timer Options Include:

Other Miscellaneous export options include the following:

Source File For CPU Timers

In the Timers panel, the source file and line number is visible in the tooltip of each timer.

Callers and Callees

The Callers and the Callees panels display a hierarchical list of task events. When you select an event from the Timing view, hovering over the information icon of an individual task will display the following information:

• Id
• Name
• Type
• Source
• Number of instances (Num Instances)
  • Detailed information on the Instance count, and total Inclusive and Exclusive time.
• Average Inclusive / Exclusive Time
  • Total amount of inclusive/exclusive time divided by the instance count.
• Child Instance Count
  • Total number of timing event instances of the child timers (callers or callees).

Counters

The Counters panel lists all stats incremented during the same time period as the Timers panel. You can rearrange the panel by updating the sort order and column organization.

The following Groups are available:

Windows Performance Counters

Windows performance counters appear in the Counters list when you satisfy the following prerequisites:

• -perfcounters is present on the command-line.
• The counters trace channel is enabled.

These counters display with the prefix PC /.

Log

The Log view displays all logs generated by calls to the macro UE_LOG from the Trace session. The logs can be filtered by verbosity and category, similar to the Output Log window in the Editor.

Selecting a time period in the Timing panel highlights all log entries that fall within that time. If you select multiple log entries, the Timing panel highlights the time range between those entries. The log panel features a search box that filters out all log messages that don't match the text you enter. In addition to filtering, clicking any row will pan the Timing panel to the time when that row's text was logged. You can save logs by selecting one or more messages and right-clicking on the context menu and selecting one of the following options from the drop down menu: