UE5 Foliage Issues

I really need help, you guys,

I’ve been using Unreal for about a year, and I’ve attempted to make games that take place in a tiny forest a few times. Every time, my fps will be 120, and the second I place a tree, it’ll drop to 30. Over the last year, I’ve learned lots of tricks, so I thought this time would be different. I reduced all the textures to the minimum requirement, which was usually 512 or 1024 depending on the texture. I used LODs. I used overly aggressive culling, to the point where it actually looked really bad. I’m even using baked lighting. After all of this, I am at 30 fps, and I haven’t even added the grass and shrubs yet, just the trees. On top of that, the foliage is causing the light build to fail for some reason. Please help!

Hi dudebat923,

It is always the same tree or do all trees tank the FPS? What type of hardware specs are you using? Are you using 5.03 or 5.1? Have you turned off all Lumen related GI and processing? are you using Virtual Shadow Maps?

RTX 3080, 32 RAM, and Ryzen 5900.

all lumen has been disabled. Im using 4 tree meshes, whoch ive optimized as much as I believe is possible, but over the last year, ive had this problem with any foliage I’ve ever tried to use. I’ve also disabled all dynamic shaddow settings from the foliage. This has happened on 5.0EA, Preview, 5.0.1-3, and now on 5.1

Oh, that’s a nice setup! You should be able to get quite a few trees on a system like that, I’ve got a 3070ti and my games getting about 60-100fps with hardware Lumen GI etc turned on - and 150K trees and grass/foliage etc. The trees are Nanite too.

I’d try doing tests in a small level with just the trees - it sounds like a setting somewhere. (also, try with hardware raytracing turned on, and Nanite trees - it seems fighting the new tech ends up with slower results).

In previous attempts I tried nanite and lumen. That was even worse. And the map is really small, and for the most part the trees are all there is (it’s a remake of Slender: The Eight Pages).

I’d still test with a blank level - there has to be bad settings to see performance tank like that…

What should I look for? Everything was perfect before the foliage. Mip maps and texture sizes are good. LODs are working. Culling is working. The lightmass stuff has been set up correctly. I can’t even begin to think of what else I should look at.

I’d jump in with the profiling tools - they should show you where the bottleneck is…