Duplicates VS Prefabs in Unreal 4?

Amank679

Hi all,

I'm creating my first environment in UE4, but wanted to clarify the difference between Duplicating an Object vs Prefabing it then adding more prefabs of that object to fill the scene.

I know in Unity, duplicating models is like adding more geometry as the duplicate is translated as another object. I'm not sure if Unreal does something differently with duplicates or if it's the same concept.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks in advance!

TheGabmeister

My guess is that they're the same since both methods use instances of the meshes. Here's a thread I found where people discuss the performance cost of duplicated objects: Memory and GPU Optimization

Obscura

Since 4.22, unreal uses auto-instancing.

jkelly206

Obscura said:

Since 4.22, unreal uses auto-instancing.

It does but afaik it's still more efficient to manually instantiate most things.

Obscura

Actually I would be also curious to see some statistics about how well auto instancing works. Also some more details. Like. Does it do it only with static mesh actors, or any arbitrary class that contains static mesh components, and replaces them with instanced ones?