Severe ghosting in VR when using Lumen — baked lighting looks perfect, but Lumen causes heavy ghosting

[Kye1002]

Hey everyone,

I’m running into a really annoying ghosting issue in VR when using Lumen.
With baked lighting, everything looks perfectly stable, no ghosting at all.
But as soon as I switch to Lumen, I start getting heavy ghosting / trailing on almost every moving element, especially when turning my head in VR.

What I’m seeing:

• Ghosting appears as a persistent “afterimage” or smearing when moving the headset.

• It’s very noticeable on bright edges, emissive materials, and reflective surfaces.

• When switching back to baked lighting, the issue disappears.

What I’ve tried (no success so far):

• Adjusted every PostProcess setting (exposure, motion blur, AA, bloom, tone mapper, etc).

• Tested all anti-aliasing methods (TAA, TSR, FXAA, no AA).

• Disabled motion blur and temporal upscaling.

• Changed Lumen settings (r.Lumen.*, r.LumenReflections.*, etc) through console commands.

• Cleaned Derived Data Cache, restarted drivers, even recreated the project — still the same.

Setup:

• GPU: RTX 5090

• VR Headset: Meta Quest 3

• Unreal Engine Version: 5.6.1

I can provide any further information, just let me know.

[SupportiveEntity]

Hey there @Kye1002!

Lumen in VR is still a bit of a work in progress, and it seems you’ve pulled most of the levers that we can pull, but the screen space probing portion is what’s likely causing the ghosting, especially with stereo rendering if you aren’t using any other temporal effects.

Try playing with more of the ScreenProbeGather settings, one I’ve gotten use out of is the temporal probe history weight, it may mitigate the issue (but won’t resolve it fully):

r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.TemporalFilterProbes.HistoryWeight

Lumen with Hair Strands is ghostier than Hair Cards

It’s surface cache right now, intended for a game. I’m trying to keep it somewhat performant (by Lumen’s standards, at least) in hopes that it’ll work on less top-of-the-line machines. And there is indeed a skylight with some leaking in the lumen settings. The level also contains a distant light, but it is currently occluded by the room. Also an update: I’ve had good luck reducing ghosting with console vars in the region of r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.Temporal.BlahBlahBlah My notes were written…

[Kye1002]

Hi! Thanks you for your response.

Unfortunately, that didn’t really solve it for me.
I’ve already tried disabling all types of anti-aliasing and even using Spacewarp to see if it would reduce the issue.

I also tested all the r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.* console variables but didn’t quite help.

To describe it a bit better: when I hit play, everything looks perfectly fine at first, but after around 5–6 seconds, I start noticing ghosting appearing in some areas of my simple test scene on VR (Meta quest 3). It becomes very visible when I move my head side to side, like a smearing or afterimage effect that trails behind bright or reflective surfaces.

Any other ideas I could try?

[SupportiveEntity]

Unfortunately those are most of the tricks in my bag. Lumen is a game of mitigating the temporal and screen space artifacts even outside of VR, but when it comes to rendering multiple views the issues become even more pronounced.

[Kye1002]

For anyone else wondering, I’ve found the root cause of the issue: Unreal Engine 5.6 has major problems with Lumen in VR. Downgrading to a more stable version resolves the problem.

The 5.7 Preview version does fix the Lumen issue, but it introduces another one, red dots appear on the screen when turning your head to the left while using High scalability settings. Because of that, I don’t recommend upgrading just yet. Hopefully, this will be fixed in the official release.

[Cryforter]

Same here. Quest 3 via Virtual Desktop. Sometimes I can walk around for a bit longer until the ghosting artifacts kick in, but it’s just a matter of time. Hopefully 5.7 solves the biggest issues with that. Meanwhile I’ll try a bunch of ini settings.