How to Improve Performance in Unreal Engine 5 for Large Open World Games?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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Hello everyone,

I’m currently working on a large open-world project in Unreal Engine 5, and I’m experiencing significant performance drops, especially when rendering vast landscapes with lots of foliage and dynamic lighting.

Could anyone share best practices or optimization techniques to improve frame rates and reduce stuttering in such environments? I’m particularly interested in tips regarding level streaming, LOD management, and lighting optimizations.

Thank you in advance for your help!

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Hello there @qvr75749 !

Welcome to UE! Creating and managing an open world is a quite daunting task, with multiple elements to control, from how to stream your resources, control your draw calls, to handling lighting values, and proper setup of your levels.

Now, considering your inquiries, here are a few quick tips:

  • For level streaming in an open world, your best option will be World Partition. Streaming levels in chunks, instead of loading the entire world all the time. And remember to keep your cells size balanced to avoid streaming hangups

  • Regarding LOD management, nowadays you choose between Nanite, or working with HLODs. The former option will allow you to deal with complex static meshes using automatic triangulation, which means no need for manual LODs. On the other hand, if you want more control, the latter option can be used to merge distant groups of meshes into simplified clusters, reducing draw calls, across the map, and you can control each cluster’s level of detail easily

  • Finally, for lighting ptimization, the best approach is to work with a combination of static and dynamic lights, to achieve a certain balance. Use baked lights for any places in your world that are static most of the time, and reserver the dynamic ones for interactive areas and/or objects.

Now, to go deeper, I would recommend working with UE’s documentation, and there are several articles to cover. The links below cover a bit of everything, open world guides, performance optimization, level streaming, lights and material workflows, among other topics. Hope this helps, and good luck!