Hi, I’m working on a realistic 3D environment project and I’ve encountered a strange issue with how my textures look in UE5.4.4.
When I view my mesh with Path Tracing enabled, the metal texture looks great and very close to how it looks in Substance Painter. However, when I switch to regular dynamic lighting (Lumen or Lit mode), the texture looks completely different — less detail, much flatter, and less realistic.
Here’s what I’ve checked so far:
- Using 4K textures exported directly from Substance Painter (PBR Metallic-Roughness workflow)
- Texture maps imported correctly (BaseColor, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, AO)
- No texture streaming issue reported
- Tried both Virtual Texturing ON and OFF
- Lighting is set to Lumen with default post process
Also, I noticed this message during runtime:
Video memory has been exhausted (633.047 MB over budget). Expect extremely poor performance.
Could this be affecting my material quality?
Any advice would be appreciated. Is this a rendering limitation or texture streaming issue? What’s the correct way to get the same texture look from Path Tracing in Lit Mode?
Thanks in advance!
The first image was captured in Substance Painter, the second is from the regular viewport in Unreal Engine (Lit mode), and the third one was captured with Path Tracing enabled. All three show the same prop.