I realized that when comparing UE 4.27 Chaos to UE5, UE5 has the PhysicsFieldComponent tick always enabled. I also found that the Camera component ticks even when it’s set to off in the Blueprint, which wasn’t the case in UE4.
Unfortunately, I currently don’t have a working source version of the engine, so I can’t modify the code to see how it runs without these two ticks. The tick list difference between the same project in UE4 and UE5 are these two ticks.
Another thing I noticed is that UE5’s baked lighting has overall better fidelity. On the same level, it generated 32 light maps in areas where UE4 only generated 24.
It’s important to note that the GPU stat is significantly lower in UE5, suggesting that the overhead is likely on the CPU.
I will provide an update after forcibly disabling these ticks in UE 5.5.