I wouldn’t even worry about their performance until UE5 1.0 or later.
i agree with this sentiment. i’ve driven myself crazy trying to diagnose issues with performance on the ever-changing ue5-main from github and the developers are breaking and changing things every single day. there are things changing in how the engine treats VSM and many dynamic lights. its a known thing and it is getting better
However, as the shadow quality without VSM is pretty much unusable (no soft shadows for point lights, low accuracy etc.) turning off VSM on Lumen really isn’t an option.
you can turn off VSM and use ray traced shadows just fine. sometimes the ray traced shadows are faster. sometimes messing with the console commands for r.LumenScene.DirectLighting.HardwareRayTracing 0 can help.