Sorry for bumping this, but for anyone using blender, apparently there’s a bit of a workaround to get near real-time animation playback on even dense meshes. It’s by Pierrick Picaut. He essentially creates a proxy rig, breaks that rig apart and bind it directly to the deform bones. See it for yourself.
Do this to optimize your rigs’ performances in Blender
That said, the workflow I use is not intended to be rendered in real time in Unreal. My focus is to create cinematics. To hit a minimum 60fps, you’d want to make sure to optimize your models, reduce texture sizes and find a balance quality and performance.