When upgrading to a new version of UE5 (5.4), I encountered the following problem: “shadow maps” reduces FPS very much, whereas when selecting “virtual shadow maps” I don’t observe any performance problems, but shadows are cast incorrectly and pass through objects. This is very strange, I have far from the weakest video card (4070 Ti Super).
I’ve tried different rendering settings, but at the “shadow maps” setting I always see a terrible performance drop…
The funny thing is that I watched some videos on youtube, and there is a completely opposite situation - it is “virtual shadow maps” that reduces performance, not the other way around.
Does anyone have any ideas how to make UE display shadows correctly without performance degradation?
Since it seems to be only occurring on one mesh in the scene, it likely has something to do with that mesh or its material specifically. For some reason it maybe has been omitted from the shadow depth pass. Whether traditional cascading shadow maps or VSM performs best will depend on specific factors in the scene.
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