Pretty much the whole question. I find Nanite and Lumen in their current state highly impractical for my purposes, and I’d rather stick to old methods of rendering and optimization pipelines. The question is, does UE5 differ in its optimization towards these pipelines (as I heard some say they differ a lot), and would I get better performance and overall results in older versions of the engine?
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If you want better performance, use 4, no question.
Although 5 has a lot going on, you pay for all of it in lost frames, and don’t use it if you don’t need it.
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What I’m about to write is unlikely to answer your question, but the first thing I do after creating a new project in Unreal Engine 5 is to remove the configuration files from the project folder.
This resets all the project settings, so the default enabled Lumen or Nanite, is now disabled, including any other options that Lumen or Nanite needs (Virtual Shadow Maps etc.).
I was working on a project and at one point, on my poor laptop, the game I was creating had about 40 FPS in the editor (in a dense forest). I wanted to manually disable Lumen and Nanite, but it made the project not want to load anymore. So I removed configuration files and after few tweaks, the game had 70-80 FPS in the same spot. And honestly - it did not lose much in terms of appearance, but it certainly differed - which is obvious.
If u have time and fast internet - check what is better for you.
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You can still use lighmaps.
With all due respect, that would be a bad idea. All of Unreal 4’s technology is preserved in Unreal 5, including the original lightmap system (which I still use).
I migrated my game from 4.27 to 5.1, and it felt like a normal version upgrade (my entire game is in Blueprints).
I only see disadvantages in sticking to Unreal 4 because you’d miss out on new features, bug fixes, and, most importantly, the new dark theme 
.
The claim that older versions are faster than newer ones is something I’ve been hearing since at least version 4.14.
Thanks, nice to hear an alternative opinion. I already bake light and use all the UE4 pipelines in UE5, so I am aware it remained practically the same. However, as demonstrated by the ambivalency in the thread, it remains unclear whether you will get the same output performance-wise, if you do exactly the same steps both in UE4 and UE5. There are certain reasons to believe UE5 still utilizes more resources than needed, because one is generally tweaked towards working with Nanite/Lumen and considers lightmaps “legacy feature”, thus, it might have some changes that are hard to trace.
Sadly, I haven’t seen any comparison tests so far, regarding the topic.
I don’t know why the lumen would be active if you don’t use it, but I had 60 frames before (4.27) and I still have 60 frames now (5.4).
But it wouldn’t be too difficult to try it, just download any epic project from FAB and open it in 4.27, and in 5.5.