Yeah the unfortunate truth is they expect developers to dig in and start turning off all these “film and virtual production” features individually it appears as they toss more in to appease the Disney’s and Weather Channels using the engine now. With every release I have to go back through each scalability setting with a fine tooth comb and do like you where I test between CMS and VSM, Lumen cvars, forward vs deferred for each project I work on vs the target I plan to hit and balance it with the performance I want.
I really dislike this focus the industry is in with temporal upscalers and post process samplers with methods to capture velocities of every material so it can be smoothed out in post. Its a blurry (TAA) or smeared artifact producing mess and the benefits of a PP AA solution (performance) is starting to be quickly outweighed when it’s approaching twice the cost of MSAA and other superior quality AA methods. I’d go so far as to say TSR isn’t even a “game feature” and is primarily focused on supporting “real-time” film rendering with lumen at something closer to 24 fps so they don’t have to wait on pathtrace renders. Its just being slammed into the engine as “default” to show it off.
Unfortunately the floor isn’t very low anymore and the engine defaults are approaching targeting a RTX 1080 for 75fps. I talked about this in the thread below where my 2080 was hitting 120fps in 5.1 vs 75/80 in 5.5. There is still forward rendering which is very fast and automatically turns off VSM, substrate, Lumen and gives you MSAA which is amazing for lower spec platform targets. But yeah if you want decent lighting AND to hit a steamdeck or switch on deferred… Well… Buckle up and whip out the cvar viewer plugin and profiler.
UNREAL ENGINE 5.4 EXTREMELY BAD PERFORMANCE - Development / Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums
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