I’m working on a top-down shooter in Unreal Engine 5 and have achieved impressive visuals using Lumen GI . Currently, I’m using components such as sky sphere, sky atmosphere, volumetric clouds, and skylight. These elements contribute to the visual fidelity, but the player never looks up to see them, which raises concerns about performance impact. I’m looking for ways to maintain the visual quality shadows/dynamic illumination and reflections on water/planes without these expensive components? Ideally, I want to optimize performance without compromising the game’s aesthetics, especially since the player doesn’t interact with these elements directly.
My Question:
Are there any alternative methods or components I can use to achieve similar visual quality without the performance hit? Any specific tips for balancing visual quality and performance in a top-down shooter?
Record footage of the sky stuff while looking up at it.
Export it as whatever makes sense compression/size wise.
Load it up in the project and use it as the base of reflections.
Use the same stream to affect the lights and generate the shadows…
Doesn’t need to be fully rendered in real time unless you can somehow affect it during gameplay…
And arguably, forward rendering is a better approch in general for top down games. Removes a lot of complexity and gets rid of temporal fluff where you dont need it… its significant work, but it can look better than what you have now and perform a ton better to boot…
Performance optimization for a UE5 Top-Down Shooter with Lumen involves several strategies. Start by reducing the number of dynamic lights and using static or stationary lighting wherever possible. Utilize Level of Detail (LOD) for models and textures to reduce rendering load at a distance. Enable Nanite for high-density assets, and consider using the “World Partition” system for large environments. Lastly, adjust Lumen settings to balance between visual quality and performance.
I’m not using lods because what’s is on the screen is all you see, and I’m not having sm’s visibly transition, in not using nanite because I’m sticking with sm5. Also no vsm.