Does Unreal Engine Cause Internet Lag?

Mason1998 on 19/02/2025 - 18:10

So I have a desktop that is designed for gaming and recently I wanted to make a gaming project based on Unreal Engine and downloaded Epic Launcher with Unreal Engine in it. After that, my whole Wifi internet lags including my phone, tablet, and TV. I tried restarting the router, wifi and uninstalling the Epic launcher however still lags whenever I use my desktop. The only solution that I can think of is to factory reset my pc which thankfully worked afterwards.

My suspicion is either Steam, Riot Client, or highest possibility Unreal Engine. I haven't downloaded any other apps other than a few other games and apps like Chrome, discord, and Google Photos which don't lag. I think the highest possibility is either Steam or Unreal Engine because whenever I play games on Steam it always lags and maybe Unreal Engine because ever since I downloaded my whole internet just started lagging whenever I use my PC. Lastly, Riot Client as it is likely because I was downloading League at that time, but not as high as the other two software that I mentioned as I have downloaded multiple League clients before and it never lags after finished downloading.

Computing

Comments

  • 7ekn00 on 19/02/2025 - 18:16
    +4

    Crappy internet is crappy internet :/
    (UE has lots of assets it downloads in the background)

    • Mason1998 on 19/02/2025 - 18:40

      Yeah, that's probably the reason why my net is so crap.

  • voltafunk on 19/02/2025 - 19:03
    +3

    Yes, downloading game files can use a large amount of resources - including background autoupdate for whatever your game dev tools are.

    The first step is trying to identify plausible culprits.

    You can try checking the resource usage in Task Manager or Resource Monitor.

    Here are some basic guides:
    - https://www.ghacks.net/2017/12/28/a-detailed-windows-resourc…
    - https://www.pctips.com/resource-monitor/
    - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/askperf/using-resou…

    The basic principle is identify the programs that use the most resources and stop those from running in the background.
    Disk IO, RAM usage, CPU usage, network usage, number of open handles (resources such as files that the program is holding open) all deserve a glance; if a program is using lots of resources when you don't expect that, try killing the process to see if you start getting better performance.
    You'd probably start investigating by taking a quick glance at percent utilization over timea graphs for all of those and starting whichever there's lowest percentage free.

    Obviously if you go killing off parts of Windows itself you may cause system instability until you restart the machine (or it'll just crash and thus restart itself) and Windows loads everything fresh from disk again, but off the top of my head that would tend to be the extent of possible damage.

    Web browsers are often massive resource hogs, and many programs such as Discord are essentially just a web browser (typically chromium) stripped down and set to only show one website.

    You also want to have plenty of free space on your system drive (C:\) which is hopefully an SSD.

    Some applications even "thoughtfully" preload themselves in the background before you even (Microsoft Office, for example, has done this).
    Some software, even paid commercial software, likes to run update and notification services in the background to autoupdate or display advertisments (e.g. Acronis).

    Programs can be started automatically in quite a few ways in Windows, of which I feel the most likely candidates for your problem will be started either at startup or by running as a "Service" in the background.
    This gets complicated quickly and you likely don't really care about more than smacking whatever culprit program is with the uninstall stick; so I'll save us both wasted time by just leaving it at that.

    TL;DR: Use the builtin Windows Resource Manager to see if anything is obviously being a greedy little shit, kill a suspect process, repeat if things don't speed up.

Login or Join to leave a comment
Login Join