UE5 - MetaSound Performance + Latency Tips
If you've started to dive into making systems for your game using MetaSounds, you may have found yourself with some minor hitches or latency when playing the sounds.
These tips might help!
Try toggling the Async MetaSound Generator.
When this is on, it reduces the CPU cost during play, however, it can lead to latency with larger MetaSounds. It might be worth turning it off (Mix Universe has it off to ensure that a sound will always play at the right time)
au.MetaSound.EnableAsyncGeneratorBuilder 0
Set the MetaSound BlockRate to a lower value
I've found 28 is a sweet spot for latency and performance for lower end machines. Lower numbers will increase latency, but decrease CPU usage. Higher numbers will decrease latency, but increase CPU usage. Default is 100, and this is described in code as "blocks per second" when processing the audio for a MetaSound.
au.MetaSound.BlockRate 28
Make sure to enable stream caching and force streaming on your audio files.
In project settings, enabling stream caching will ensure that audio files can be processed as fast as possible during runtime.
On your wav files you can force streaming and make them seekable to take full advantage of wave samplers in MetaSounds
Try choosing ADPCM or PCM for your audio compression.
PCM is uncompressed and has a high memory footprint, but will result in the fastest audio playback possible.
ADPCM is 4x compression which may cause artifacts, but typically is ok for sounds that don't have a ton of high frequency detail.
What these formats avoid is any types of decoders which will cause CPU performance overhead and latency. (Especially on something like the Quest)
You can monitor this using stat audio
Consolidate or reduce inputs
Here is a pretty complex MetaSound I am using for example. I have found around 30 is the sweet spot right before it starts to cause real issues. It may vary depending on the input type, but this was my findings with ints and floats.
Right now, the only real way to improve this is to just simply reduce the number of inputs you are sending to a MetaSound. It doesn't really matter which ones are sent during play.
Reduce usage of Compression or Delay Nodes
Similarly, any nodes that use a large buffer size or a copy of a previous audio buffer can add up really quickly. Reducing lookahead time helps for compressors and also just in general, not using too many of these in your graph. I've found 1 of each is fine, but if you start pushing it too far it will start to show when playing your sound!
Reducing Lookahead time will decrease latency and also help with performance.
If you see constructor pins, they can save you!
As MetaSound evolves, you will notice diamond shape connection points. These are constructor pins and are very important for performance. They are only ever evaluated once and cannot change with inputs, so that means they can be optimized to be super cheap. In the case of a delay, this allows you to set the max allowed delay time to limit the audio buffer allocated for the delay form ever going over a certain length. Smaller numbers in this make the node much cheaper.
Diamonds are constructor pins.
What if none of this works?
Then it is time to dive in deeper. There are many ways to do this, but I personally get the most info initially from doing a simple CPU profile using stat startfile and stat stopfile
stat startfilestat stopfile
Then using the unreal frontend to see what is happening when a hitch occurs!
If you are new to performance profiling, I would highly recommend this talk as it goes over the basics on the thought process when it comes to solving a performance problem!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuIav71867E&t=1206s
Then finally, if that isn't enough, you can look into Unreal Insights a bit more in-depth which will give you the most detail about what is happening to your frames!
I hope this helps and you can continue making awesome MetaSounds in UE5!