Thinking of downgrading to UE3, but I have some questions

UE4 is definitely scales better to lower end hardware than UE3 ever did. Here’s a UE4 game running on a Intel GPU at 60 FPS.

It’s a bit dated as a guide since it was back when UE4 only had a deferred render for the desktop. There’s still a lot of mobile and very performant example content like Zen Garden if you want to test out UE4 more.