The "Graphics" learning track is for all Artists on the team that work in Unreal Engine and handle content. This includes Content Optimizations, World Optimizations and overall Rendering performance.

This is a broad learning track from which you can filter down further if you feel the need. I do recommend watching as many as possible as you might be surprised what you learn!

Below I've compiled a list of Sections and Lessons that are of interest to anyone under the "Graphics" umbrella.

Sections that are not listed below may be outside your core interest in the "graphics" role, feel free to watch everything especially as someone with a broad responsibility or indie developer!

2.2 Fundamentals

Primer lessons for everyone involved in performance.

2.2 Profiling Preparation

Short section to help you get good numbers during profiling and things to consider when preparing builds.

3. Profiling Tools

Unreal Insights is such a broad and detailed profiling tool now that it is slowly replacing older specialized tools. Insights is good for everyone dealing with performance and it isn't as complex as first impressions may let you believe.

The section also handles many of the other built-in specialized tools for profiling and metrics. Things like Size Map and Reference Viewer can be invaluable for checking accidental references to other (art) assets that bloat memory or whether certain assets stick out in size compared to the others.

Some useful lessons:

• Statistics Panel

4. The Unreal Architecture

Primer for how Unreal Engine works under the hood without going too technical. Some may be for the gameplay role but I recommend watching everything as it may help you understand why things are the way that they are.

8. Content - Skeletal Animation

A costly feature for most games. You'll know whether this is relevant for you!

10.2 Rendering - Nanite

Nanite is essential for everyone if the project uses this feature. The performance best practices are different from "traditional" mesh rendering. You may be operating on false assumptions that don't translate well to Nanite. [Nanite is a work in progress!]

10.3 Rendering - Virtual Shadow Mapping

Caching and Invalidation are the essential concepts here for most. Some may need to go deeper to properly understand how VSMs should be handled.

10.4 Rendering - Lighting

Lighting and light culling are important if you are part of world building.

10.5 Rendering - Niagara Effects

[Work in Progress] Niagara is incredibly powerful out of the box, and have a few settings that you really should consider for every System/Emitter. It has great Scalability and Pre-Culling built-in that you should understand and apply or you'll be paying huge costs for off-screen VFX.

10.6 Rendering - Materials

Often manual optimizations of Materials in Unreal is futile given conversion-level compiler-level automatic optimizations. There are still gains to be made by understanding how the materials are optimized, what to take into consideration when writing your Materials from the start and common issues such as bloated shader permutations slowing you down.

10.7 Rendering - PSO Caching

Depending on your role you can skip the set up lessons and focus on the first two which explain the concept and problem you and your team is facing with PSOs.

All lessons concerning shader permutations (and reducing them) are critical.

10.8 Rendering - Visibility & Occlusion

Discussing everything related to Visibility and Culling checks for Non-nanite scene primitives. Has close ties with World Optimizations as individual assets placed in the levels can help the culling systems by being configured properly.

10.9 Rendering - Variable Rate Shading

VRS is an excellent trick to reduce the pressure on pixel shaders (and Compute with some recent additions to Software VRS). It affects many of Unreal Render passes including (Nanite)BasePass, Translucency, Decals, etc.

While it will be likely a single persons job to configure and finetune Tier 2 VRS for the project, having the team understand its implications will help get the most of out this system. Tier 1 is still viable for per-material VRS and can be applies for Niagara VFX among other things on top of Tier 2.

10.10 Rendering - Resources & Self Study

A variety of interesting topics everyone should look through. These will both help you broaden your understanding of Graphics Rendering, Unreal Rendering Features and day-to-day workflow tricks.

11. Platform Scalability

Essential for everyone on the team to understand how the (Graphics) Settings of the project can scale for different hardware. These are the Low to Epic sliders or Device Profile settings on fixed platforms such as PlayStation or Xbox.