Problem with flickering shadows in Unreal Engine 5 when using global illumination not in Lumen mode

Since this thread is quite popular, I thought I’d share a solution that worked for me. I had this issue for a while and found a way to reduce — and sometimes eliminate — flickering. However, keep in mind that this approach may not suit everyone, as it involves disabling certain features.

Most of the flickering I encountered was on foliage, especially dense assets like grass. Here’s what helped me:

  • Disable Screen Traces in your Post Process Volume. This had the biggest impact in my case.
  • Increase the “Final Gather Quality” under Lumen Global Illumination in the Post Process Volume. You can raise this depending on your target frame rate. It doesn’t completely eliminate the flickering, but it significantly reduces it.
  • Disable “Support Ray Tracing” in the mesh settings of the objects that are flickering the most. This isn’t for everyone. Disabling ray tracing will prevent you from using path tracing and will alter the appearance of shadows — but with a bit of tweaking of the lighting and the color grading, you can achieve a similar visual quality.

Hope this helps someone and stay strong, you got this :flexed_biceps:

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