Optimise your app

What to change in your Unreal project to make it stream well: fewer dropped frames, less input lag, and a shorter wait before anyone can use it.

The three with the largest effect

Change these first. Together they cost almost nothing and are worth more than everything below.

Stream at 1280 × 720, 30 fps

Every frame is encoded, sent and decoded. Halving the pixels halves that work at every stage — on the streaming GPU, on the network, and on your user's phone. This single setting moves more than any graphics option.

Set the size in the Control Panel: Common › Browser Resolution, choose Custom, then width 1280 and height 720 — see resolution. There is no frame-rate field in the Control Panel; cap the frame rate in your Unreal project, for example with the console variable t.MaxFPS 30.
Turn off motion blur

It is expensive exactly when you can least afford it: during fast motion, when the encoder is already working hardest. Removing it steadies the frame rate at the moments users notice most.
Do not enable ray tracing

It adds real-time lighting work to every frame and raises latency directly. It also has its own memory pool, separate from textures, which is a common cause of running out of GPU memory mid-session.

Lighting and graphics

Prefer baked lighting. It is computed once, ahead of time. Dynamic lights are recomputed every frame, on both CPU and GPU. Keep the number of dynamic sources as low as the scene allows.
If your app plays video files, enable the hardware video decoder in Project Settings. It moves the decoding of those files off the CPU and onto dedicated GPU hardware, so it stops competing with your application. It has no effect on the stream itself.
Trim post-processing. Screen-space reflections, ambient occlusion, bloom and depth of field are applied to every frame, and their cost grows with resolution. Reducing their quality is usually invisible in a stream and measurably cheaper.

The cursor

Two cursors are visible at once unless you prevent it — the browser's and your app's — and the effect is disorienting in a way users report as "laggy" even when the frame rate is fine.

Set a custom mouse cursor image with zero alpha, so the in-game cursor is invisible and only the browser's remains.
In Project Settings, set the Cursor HUD to software cursors and configure the Pixel Streamer default cursor class.

Load time

The wait before anyone can interact is the part users judge hardest, because it happens before they have seen anything worth waiting for.

Stream your levels. Load parts of the map as they are needed rather than all of it at once. The first thing a user sees arrives sooner, and memory stays lower throughout.
Show a loading screen. A blank frame reads as a broken stream. You can set one, including a short video, from the Control Panel.

Everything else, in order of what it buys you

Area	What to do	Why it helps
Network	Wired where possible. In Developer › Select Region the choices are Global and United States; for other regions see capacity and regions.	Streaming is far more sensitive to jitter and round-trip time than to raw bandwidth.
Video quality	Choose a Developer › Video Quality preset — Ultra, High, Medium (the default) or Low — lower for mobile and cellular audiences. There is no separate video bitrate field.	Trades image quality against buffering, packet loss and dropped frames.
Texture pool	Size the texture streaming pool deliberately and use compressed formats.	The main lever on GPU memory, and what prevents textures popping in.
Level of detail	Configure LODs and distance culling for meshes and foliage.	Fewer polygons per frame, directly.
Occlusion culling	Enable it, so hidden objects are not drawn.	Removes draw calls that could never have been seen.
Scalability	Use Unreal's scalability settings for shadows, effects and view distance.	One dial for the quality-versus-performance trade, rather than dozens.
Idle timeout	Set session and idle timeouts in the Control Panel.	Releases machines nobody is using — availability for others, and cost for you.
Browser	Recommend an up-to-date Chromium browser: Chrome or Edge.	The most consistent WebRTC behaviour, which is what the stream runs on.

On phones

A phone is not a small desktop. It has less bandwidth, a smaller screen, and a thermal budget that a sustained stream will find.

Lower the resolution and bitrate for mobile sessions. The screen cannot show the difference, and the connection often cannot carry it.
Simplify the interface. Controls sized for a mouse are hard to hit with a thumb, and a stream cannot make a small target easier.

Enable Nanite in UE5 to boost FPSWatch on YouTube

The hardware your app runs on →

The memory and GPU budget these changes are keeping you inside.

Last updated 1 Oct 2026