Seems like there’s a lot of confusion and frustration regarding the current state of UE5 performance. I’ve been doing weekly builds of the experimental and somewhat unstable ue5-main repository on github and have noticed a slow but steady performance increase week after week, month after month. Bottom line is that yes, UE5 is getting better, but doesn’t currently match the performance of UE4.
That being said, there’s an almost countless number of things that can be changed to squeeze out more performance without having to completely remove Lumen or Nanite from your project. It partially depends on the design of your game/scene and how you choose to use these new systems and tools Epic has created for us.