Perfectly Optimized is a streamlined Unreal Engine 5 starter template specifically engineered to deliver substantial performance gains on lower-end hardware. While UE5’s default configuration heavily emphasizes ray-traced global illumination and use of nanite, these systems can overwhelm older GPUs and integrated graphics solutions. Nanite and Lumen offer impressive scalability, however, their overhead can still be prohibitive for legacy devices.
This template re-configures the Unreal Engine 5 rendering pipeline around stability, predictability, and low GPU cost. By disabling non-essential high-end systems and prioritizing lightweight rendering paths, Perfectly Optimized enables performance characteristics closer to that of Unity-style forward renderers while retaining UE5’s robust toolset and workflow.
Key Modifications
Rendering Backend
Switched from DirectX 12 to Vulkan, improving driver compatibility and performance on older GPUs and lower-tier systems.
Reduces shader overhead and avoids DX12-specific runtime costs.
Anti-Aliasing
Anti-Aliasing forced to FXAA.
MSAA samples set to 0 to eliminate costly multi-sample overhead.
Lighting Pipeline
Lumen fully disabled, removing real-time global illumination and reflection calculations.
Project configured for baked lighting workflows, ensuring high performance with predictable frame times.
Geometry and Virtualization
Nanite disabled by default to avoid virtualized geometry processing overhead on hardware lacking the necessary compute throughput.
Additional Performance-Focused Changes
Intended Use Cases
Developers targeting older PCs, budget laptops, and integrated GPUs
Prototypes where consistent performance is a priority
Indie projects needing a lightweight baseline before layering complexity
Teams aiming to ship small 3D hybrid titles, stylized games, or low-poly projects using UE5
Note: I’m going to update the template in order to provide even more optimizations (I’m kinda obsessed with efficiency XD)
Hi there, thanks for getting the template. Yes there is a way for a project to be changed to the optimized version. In Unreal Engine, you can migrate all assets from a project to another one. I’m not sure if this is the best way to go about this and I recommend you do more research but here it goes.
MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR ORIGINAL PROJECT!
Create another project with the Perfectly Optimized Template
Go back to the old project, and select all files you’d like to migrate
Right Click and select Migrate. (note: you must locate them into the content folder of your new project)
Select your location and you should be done
Again, I’m not sure if it’s the best way to go about this, and it might not work for any of your project config. But it should do the trick if all you want to migrate are assets.
Another way I think might work, would probably be you just copying the config folder from my template into your project, but I haven’t tested it so……yeah
Hey mate! is there any documentation or info on the settings changed? Id love to commit these settings to my UE5 project but I am quite far into development. Id like to apply alot of these settings to that project though
Hi there! There isn’t any official documentation, but there is a github page with a readme file with all the key changes made. You can also go into the releases tab in order to see every single change made.
Unfortunately, I didn’t write a step by step way to actually enable the settings and where to find them, I wrote stuff like “Changed Rendering Engine to vulkan”. I’m working on a proper documentation, but it’s gonna take some time
If you need help finding how to make the changes listed, Google and ChatGPT exist, you can also just download the template and copy all the project settings over.
Just know if you ever need help, feel free to hit me up!
