Need Help Optimizing Lighting Performance in My UE5 Project

Development Programming & Scripting
1

Hi all,

I’m in the middle of a small project in Unreal Engine 5 and had been having issues with lighting performance. I’ve been using Lumen for global illumination and while it looks amazing, I’m clearly having a severe impact on my frame rate, particularly in indoor scenes, with dynamic lights. In terms of troubleshooting, I tried to play with the Lumen settings and also turned on virtual shadows, but even so, the performance hit is still significant on mid-tier setups.

I’m hoping to crowd-source any tips and best practices for maintaining good lighting performance in UE5 without sacrificing too much visual fidelity. What settings, light types and/or workflows are you using that help you balance quality and performance? Is it worth exploring baking a few lights instead of leveraging dynamic lights from the get-go?

If you’ve got any tips, real-world examples or links to helpful resources, I’d appreciate it greatly. Since I’m still learning, I want to ensure that I am building the project with good behaviours at the start.

Thanks for your help in advance!
martinanderson

2
  • How many lights are we talking about? Ten? Hundred?
  • Making some of them stationary/static saves the most.
  • You can reduce the effect range/angle on some of them. Usually the space is lit by just a few main sources.
  • You should replace some tightly packed lights with a single light.
  • Stop as many of them from casting shadows as you can. Tiny or dim lights can go away with no shadows as soon as they are not the only light source.
  • Reduce the occlusion distance for some unimportant lights.
  • Lastly, if none of that helps - reduce shadow and lighting quality. Usually you can get away with quite lower quality if your game is faster paced.

Hope any of those helps in your case. Sometimes it’s just a matter of designing the space smaller or with fewer points of interest that need special lighting.