Hi Congaz2,
This is expected behavior. You can read Daniel’s response here on the forums: Test the Forward Renderer in your PC VR projects with the 4.14 Preview - XR Development - Epic Developer Community Forums
Shader complexity is expected to
increase because more of the lighting
operations are done in the base pass
shader. Lights didn’t contribute to
shader complexity in the deferred
renderer, now those are in the base
pass shader.
.
Shader complexity is useful for
comparing between materials within
forward, but not useful for comparing
deferred vs forward. Use ProfileGPU
for that.