UNREAL ENGINE 5.4 EXTREMELY BAD PERFORMANCE

Hi everyone,

I have upgraded my UE 5.3.1 to 5.4. And performance is extremely bad.

In Version 5.3, I was getting an average of 120FPS at Normal settings and 60-70FPS at High and EPIC settings.

In Version 5.4, I get 15-20FPS even at low settings.

And I cannot downgrade my project to a lower version. Please help me. I have been working on this project for 6 months.

Thanks everyone for help.

My PC:

Processor Ryzen 5 5600X
Graphics Card AMD Radeon RX 6700XT
RAM 16GB

3 Likes

5.4 performance upgrade my black ā– ā– ā– , they have no shame in advertising such fallacies.
I lost like 25-30% FPS by just upgrading from 5.3.2 to 5.4.
But somehow itā€™s not a surprise, the engine has been consistently performing worse and worse since 5.0 release. At this point and after 7 years Iā€™m considering to ditch UE.

@kilichamza77 you could try to disable Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps, those are usually the main offenders.

5 Likes

put it to the console:
r.RHISetGPUCaptureOptions 1

And then:
profilegpu

But its different situation in editor or game. If itā€™s the first run on 5.4, be patient. It has to rebuild some thinks again due to changes.

3 Likes

I have a similar problem.
After starting the 5.4 engine, everything works fine, but after 10-15 minutes it starts to freeze a lot. FPS jumps from 120 to 10. It is impossible to work. Help please.

3 Likes

Iā€™ve the same issue, although for me starts from the minute I load a project and is not FPS drop, but freeze, it runs smoothly for 1 second and then it freezes for 1 second and this goes on an on even if I create a new basic project from UE5.4 templates or I load and convert a project from UE5.3.2.
This freeze lag is everywhere no only in the render window, but even while scrolling ā€˜project settingā€™, plugins, outliner, details, etcā€¦
In UE 5.3.2 my project run smoothly, but in UE5.4 is literally impossible to work.

5 Likes

ya but lumen in 5.3 doesnā€™t bug system down, so why in new 5.4 release?

2 Likes

In my experience Lumen was never production ready, at least not without some extreme fine tuning and optimization. In 5.3 was already bad, now itā€™s just worse.

3 Likes

Iā€™ve found out that there is a huge difference now at all point lights. Itā€™s even affecting the scene at places where it should not affect it. If I turn off all lights I get the same FPS like I got with UE5.3. I can increase performance in 5.4 a bit if I tinker with the ā€œMax Draw Distanceā€ but this changes the behaviour of the rendering of course. Iā€™m not sure if there is again some weird default setting thatā€™s complete different now or if itā€™s bugged.

2 Likes

Same problem with 5.4 taking ages to load empty scene, had to ramp up Lumen settings to fix shadow issues for rendering sequence (rendering does seem faster).

2 Likes

Iā€™ve fixed my performance issues with Virtual Shadow Maps. Iā€™m using Lumen. Switching from UE 5.3.2 to 5.4 caused all my movable lights (and dynamic shadows: enabled) to dramatically reduce the performance.

Critical spot in my map with movable lights and enabled dynamic shadows:
Shadow Map Method: Shadow Maps ā†’ UE 5.4 30FPS / UE 5.3 70FPS
Shadow Map Method: Virtual Shadow Maps ā†’ UE 5.4 70FPS / UE 5.3 70FPS

2 Likes

Hi kilichamza77,

Iā€™m sorry to hear about the performance issues youā€™re experiencing after upgrading to Unreal Engine 5.4. It sounds frustrating, especially given the effort youā€™ve put into your project. Letā€™s see if we can help you get those frame rates back up.

Firstly, itā€™s essential to have version control in place to safeguard your work and make transitions between engine versions smoother. I recommend setting up Git, even if itā€™s just locally on your machine. This can help you track changes and easily revert to a previous state if needed. Hereā€™s a quick guide to get you started:

  1. Install Git and Git LFS.
  2. Use the .gitignore tailored for Unreal projects, which you can find here: gitignore/UnrealEngine.gitignore at main Ā· github/gitignore Ā· GitHub
  3. Initialize your repository and commit changes regularly, especially before upgrading the engine.

Now, regarding optimization, since you havenā€™t specified the details of your project (e.g., game type, use of world partition, etc.), Iā€™ll provide some general advice that might help:

  • Check your project settings against those in the Lyra Starter Game, which is optimized for the latest Unreal Engine versions. You can find useful configuration files like DefaultEngine.ini, DefaultDeviceProfiles.ini, and DefaultScalability.ini there. https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/lyra This is a gold mine of knowledge and learning.
  • Enable features like Mesh Streaming, Texture Streaming, and Skeletal Mesh LOD Streaming.
  • If your project is texture-heavy, consider using Virtual Textures, but be cautious with skeletal meshes to avoid rendering artifacts.
  • Implement LODs for all assets and assign them to appropriate LOD Groups.
  • Optimize texture usage by ensuring they are all power of two and assigning them to the right TextureGroups.
  • Reduce the complexity of your scenes by segmenting characters and optimizing shadow casting settings for non-essential elements.
  • Use Unrealā€™s Hierarchical Instanced Static Mesh (HISM) to manage and optimize large numbers of similar objects efficiently.

Itā€™s also worth checking if any new features or default settings in UE 5.4 could be affecting performance, such as the PSO cache issue. Turning off unnecessary settings might alleviate some of the performance drops.

I hope these suggestions help you start diagnosing and improving your projectā€™s performance. If you can provide more details about your specific setup and content, I could give more targeted advice. Good luck, and donā€™t hesitate to reach out if you have more questions!

Example Images attached.



After porting the project, manually fixing bugs in the engine code ( UE 5.4 compile error Catch2 - #6 by mmssda )
Struggling to port all my pluginsā€¦
Going back to 5.3 unless something decent will come out from 5.4. Itā€™s unusable. Extreme performance drop. And this will be the future? if 5.4.1 wonā€™t be decent, Iā€™ll get stuck on 5.4 forever and start looking for an alternative.

The performance of Lyra 5.4 is very bad.

Default everything:
4060 Ti 16GB on 1920x1080: 30-63 FPS in a map that looks like you could easily play it 20 years ago on a GeForce 1.

Most of us thought 5.4 would give automatically improved performance. But you have to trial&error now to get at least the same performance than previously instead creating games. We all know that refacturing could cause issues. But I hope this gets recognized as a: No.

(post deleted by author)

I Agree

Virtual shadow maps still gives me worse performance at my scene.

Iā€™ve Nanite enabled. Iā€™m not rendering any nanite meshes at that spotā€¦ yet it ruins the performance. Using:
ShadowMaps
r.shadow.nanite 0

ā€¦significant improves performance (and the scene looks identical as there where no nanite visible). But Iā€™m pretty sure it would look worse if I choose to get some nanite meshes in place somewhere. It feels a bit like getting a mess combining default-meshes with nanite. Even if you are using it rare and leave it enabled for compatibilty reasons (e.g. if you buy some nanite stuff from market place), it has a huge impact in 5.4.1 to enable it.

Similar Sad songs here. Have a Basic Game Jam game weve been updating for 4 months and we transferred to 5.4 and the Skylight and Directional Light look Horrible and I can either have it super bright or non existant. My glass reflections are butchured and the level just kind of jitters and pops now. And Sadly I gotta agree performance is worse.*
Animation

Same problem here. I started a project in 5.3.2 and get about 70 fps on epic settings. After migrating to 5.4 I only get 15-20 fps.
If there are major changes on how the specific systems work (nanite, lumen, shadow maps, etc.) and we have to adapt our project settings, then we need an upgrade guide. How should anybody know whatā€™s going on otherwise? So for now 5.4 is unusable for me, and Iā€™ll stick to 5.3.2.

1 Like

Hello , been using all the lastest features , nanites , lumen , reflection. My project has improved performance with 5.4.0 a lot . Just using a simple rolling ball , lots of chaos destruction, run wells in editor , loading time are faster . Very happy . Itā€™s a very simple project . Ah tessellations crash but itā€™s experimental features so . Good luck to all
Ryzen 5600x
7900 XT
32ram

Yeah, itā€™s the same on my machine, I have never seen it lagging so bad. Just started a new 3d person project, itā€™s almost like thereā€™s a memory leak somewhere? Just gets worse overtime. Not switching my main project from 5.3 until the performance improves. No problems with previous versions (mostly, been using 5.1 and 5.3).

Stats are :
Intel(R) Coreā„¢ i7-8700
RAM 32.0 GB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060