Thank for the effort @Arkiras !
I was also complaining about the performance in 5.4, but couldn’t be sire about the scenario. I think performance was worse only in minimal scenes and/or with classic “settings” (no lumen nor nanite, nor vsms, etc), because I also notices improvements in heavu scenes with newest techniques. So I wasn’t able to confirm a veredict.
Anyway I’m doing a benchmark software, so I will try to post here my comparison too (5.3 and 5.5 when final released)
Great analytic approach. Much appreciated!
It’s weird though, how different the outcome from different projects seems to be.
One aspect that gives me some hope is the fact that your RHIT went down almost 50% (!!) between 5.4 and 5.5. In my/our case, the RHIT is the main culprit of the observed performance decay. So, it’ll be very interesting to upgrade to 5.5.
This example only shows extreme bad and bad performance. 30fps on a 3070 in 1920x1080 with one character is broken (5.1). 50fps is still bad for this (stylised like?) map, one character and a 3070. The only thing that’s surprising is that it is equal bad with 5.3 and 5.4/5.5. But overall bad does not help. Depending on the map I get decreased FPS from 100 (5.3) to 70 (5.5), 120 (5.3) to 70 (5.5). 110 (5.3) to 90 (5.5). 60 (5.3) to 50 (5.5). Some maps are a complete desaster and urge for VSMs (and in that case all meshes switched to Nanite) but this only improves it from very bad to still worse.
Overall I’m pretty sure that it’s some shadow issue as VMSs at least improves it a bit (but still does not fix it).
As I said, the performance is low specifically because the content for this level was never designed to be used with Nanite. It’s a worst case scenario, as Nanite’s performance is hindered by masked materials.
Assuming things should run fast because they’re stylized is also a bad way to think about performance cost, especially in UE5. Most of the costs are not dependent on the geometry of the scene and will scale similarly regardless of the style. Lumen isn’t any cheaper in Fortnite just because it’s “stylized”
None of this was really the point either, I just wanted to see how GPU performance had changed in a controlled scene across versions using a large scene.
My last set of comparisons, this time an interior, same settings as last time (Hardware raytraced lumen, hit lighting for reflections, everything is Nanite, etc., VT is enabled in project, but not used on assets)
Well over a hundred lights in this scene, I set them all shadowcasting to really stress the performance because I wanted to test Megalights. I used VSM for all local lights except in the Megalights capture, in that one they are using raytraced shadows.
Base Scene, hopefully this is realistic enough…:
Measurements:
Final conclusions:
Only testing on my own hardware so this is a sample size of 1, and my focus was very much on GPU performance. There have been a lot of changes to physics and skeletal animation that could have big impacts on performance but I didn’t bother investigating that as I’m less familiar with that area of the engine.
Basically… your mileage may vary.
Anyway, thats it, time for me to say farewell to my 5.1/5.3 installs. As always, hope someone found this useful.
