- Don’t use dynamic or stationary lights: switch them all to static. This disables all GGX specular rendering, and it will significantly improve performance. You can use a static skylight and the lightmass environment color to provide a generic GI fill in the shadows.
- Under Screen Space Reflections in post process, set the max roughness and quality to 0. This should disable Screenspace Reflections entirely.
- Plug in an ambient cubemap to provide generic lighting. Reflections and lighting won’t be appropriate, but there are many games that do this and still get praised for their graphics.
- Set Lens Flare intensity and size to 0. Set Ambient Occlusion intensity and radius to 0. Set the anti-aliasing method to FXAA. This should eliminate some of the heavier post processing effects.
- Set Bloom intensity to 0. Set Auto-Exposure min brightness and max brightness to be the same value (1 is good for default). These effects are not very heavy, but you can disable them if you want.
- Use a lower game resolution. 1280x720 doesn’t look bad. For lowering the resolution while working in-engine, use the resolution scale in the engine scalability settings, located to the left of the blueprints icon. To lower the resolution in the middle of a particularly demanding portion of the game, use the screen percentage post process setting.
If you start a project with these settings, You would have disabled most of the default effects in UE4. If this doesn’t run well above 60 FPS on your computer, then you seriously need to get yourself a real graphics card! From here, you can slowly bring in some of the more advanced effects and start to use better lighting/reflection rendering while increasing the resolution until you find a balance that works well for your intended hardware.