Unreal Insights traces

Capture Unreal Insights traces and turn them into timing tables you can read.

What it’s for

This area records Unreal Insights traces from the editor and turns the recorded .utrace file into plain tables you can analyze later. Ask your assistant to start a recording, let the editor or a play session run, stop it, and export the results to CSV. You never have to open the Insights window. Use it when a frame-time regression needs a real recording and a timing breakdown, beyond a quick look at live numbers.

Recording comes first. Your assistant can choose which trace channels to record, change them partway through, or save what is in memory to a file without stopping. Then it can turn a trace into timer statistics, per-frame thread timings and counters, so you can compare runs in a spreadsheet or pandas.

For live scalability tuning, console variables or a quick stat snapshot that does not need a recording, see Performance and scalability.

Things you can ask

Record a trace of a play session

You get a trace file covering the CPU, GPU and frame channels.

You: Record an Insights trace with cpu, gpu and frame channels while I fly the drone.

Recorded the trace to C:/UnrealTrace/Store/001/20260703_hover.utrace.

Turn a trace into per-frame CSV

The newest trace becomes a frame-timing table for the game and render threads.

You: Export the last trace to a per-frame CSV for GameThread and RenderThread.

Wrote frame_series.csv to .pinwright/insights/hover/01/ with GameThread and RenderThread timing columns.

Compare a moving window against an idle window

Timer costs from two time ranges of the same trace land in separate tables you can compare.

You: Compare per-timer cost between a moving window and an idle window in physics.utrace.

Wrote timer_stats__moving.csv (4 to 9 s) and timer_stats__idle.csv (12 to 17 s) with the top 30 timers.
Compare them by timer name on exclusive milliseconds per frame.