I am struggling to run unreal engine and my PC should be fine..
It can start off running smoothly but once I open up a MI or asset, pretty much anything. The whole software starts lagging and becomes v slow to the point I can’t move around the viewport.
Your specs are fine for UE, there must be something going on between your system. Have you started with UE 5.6? Or have you worked before in other versions of the engine? If so, it’s always worth clearing up old installs, and sticking to the latest release (unless a particular project demands 5.5, for example).
Still, from what’s reported around the community, there are methods to test and resolve this scenario with. Let’s cover a few of them:
First of all, a cache clear always helps the engine. To do so, navigate to …\AppData\Local\UnrealEngine\Common, and delete the folder “DerivedDataCache”. This will force UE to rebuild its cache and shaders from scratch. This should also clear up bottlenecks in your memory
Next, the most usual one, your GPU drivers. I would suggest a clean install, use DDU to remove your current drivers, then go to nVidia and install the latest Studio drivers, instead of Game drivers. Since you are doing engine work, the developer drivers are the most stable choice
You can also adjust performance settings in the engine, at Edit > Editor Preferences > Performance. Enable “Use less CPU when in Background” and “Monitor Editor Performance”, which will check your current framerate and adjust scalability accordingly to keep everything smooth
Just for testing purpouses, swtich between DX11 and DX12, to check for any differences during engine run
After trying these steps, open a test project, go to Rendering settings, and disable Virtual Textures, Virtual Shadow Maps (change them to regular Shadow Maps), Lumen, and Nanite. This should result in a scene with minimal perfomance impact. If you are still getting stuttering here, then the problem might be deeper. At that point, I would suggest a full uninstall/reinstall of all Epic software:
Uninstall the engine, launcher, asset packs, etc
Open the registry directory HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Epic Games\Unreal Engine\Builds, and delete any build entries
Delete the folders %userprofile%\AppData\Local\UnrealEngine and %userprofile%\AppData\Local\UnrealHeaderTool
There should be no elements related to UE left in your system
Reinstall UE launcher from scratch, and only add the latest version of the engine
Once completed, test opening a blank project and check for performance drops