Nanite has a upfront cost, but can improve performance in complex scenes due to how it handles lowering detail and draw calls.
Also for the people talking about performance with Virtual Shadow Maps, make sure you’re using DX12, DX11 has twice the performance impact from VSM.
But… just starting UE5 has a cost now, UE4 (4.26) starts with 120-125FPS and 10 ms, and UE5 is 30-50FPS and 22 to 28ms… then the cost of improving 1 single costly asset with nanite or use lumen is affecting the entire scene FPS, even if the scene is empty…
The only way, UE5 FPS improves, in a default scene is to turn off Light source… which is not a great help for the look of the scene:
This solution is more a problem than a FIX, UE5 requires a lot of work, from my perspective.
PD:. Valley off the Ancient is 13FPS:
Trying to figure out a solution, I found too many people facing the same problems, at least you can improve UE5 from 30FPS to 45FPS, but the price is to disable all new features and even by doing this, it won’t match UE4 FPS, so I believe this issues are really out of our hands:
I turned on forward shading for time being, fps is back and gonna have smaller electricity bill 
Hi all, just wanted to chime in here with something that might prove helpful to someone. While I haven’t used UE5 yet, something was totally killing my FPS in UE4. Using nothing but a floor plane, a sun lamp, and the basic mannequin character, I was getting between 36 - 50 fps on a GTX 970 with project settings set to Epic. But when I toggled “Effects” to low (in Engine Scalability Settings), I would get 120 fps. In previous versions of Unreal, I never had to do this, and I would always get 120 fps with everything on Epic. So I checked if any of the Project Settings I had recently enabled was killing the frames per second. The CULPRIT was SSGI (Screen Space Global Illumination). I disabled SSGI in Project Settings, and I instantly got 120 fps at full Epic settings (around 130 fps with console command t.MaxFPS 1000, setting t.MaxFPS to 0 or -1 clamps it to 120 fps). I seriously thought either 4.27.1 had a bug or my GPU was broken, so I praise the Lord Jesus for showing me what the problem was! NOTE: The equivalent setting in UE5 is called “Screen Space (Beta)” and is found under Project Settings > Global Illumination > Dynamic Global Illumination Method.
I am not an artist, so I often cannot tell the difference however at 6:08 is a good show of how much extra detail there is in UE5 compared to UE4, look at the back of the roof. You have to press comma and period/full stop to jump and forward and back to see the difference, using Lumen
at UNREAL ENGINE 5 vs UNREAL ENGINE 4 - YouTube
you all now need at min 20 series cards and preferably 30 series cards that are only being sold or top end amd cards…that are going for anywhere from 1600-5000 dollars
in other words thanks for all the hobbyist money from unreal 4 F YOU we are pandering to even richer whales as the gaming industry calls them. Like Sony and Microsoft and AAA and such.
its funny as beans my 1660 super with its bare bones ability to do rtx can with tons a tweaking barely get 15 fps on the 100gb demo and thats the future
whom is epic gonna sell video games too and WHAT will be the price 5000 a video game? to make up for the 500 others that cant afford or get a 20 or 30 series graphic card?
ya TERRIBLE decisions in last few months on many fronts from the UI to this …
and 427 i cant even run right its so buggy…
developing two engines at same time wastes resources…
there was some benching done and literally it was 330% slower then physx this is why going form an engine that could use a gtx 620 with 1 gb non ray tracing to needing a 3080 with 12-24 gb vram and 64 gb ddr 4 or 5 , is such a leap you just lost me and many cause there is no way anyhting i do gamign wise or cinematics wise is now worth the fun and effort especially when the cheapest 3060 which is a bit better then my 1660 super is 1600 DOLLARS CANADIAN and thats the low ball and it goes right up to stupid for more and then availability and time wasted sitting around waiting
better off to just ignore unreal 427 and 5 for this year.
funny how the freebies are coming in 427 only and im not adverting uses of them anymore like i used too…in fact ill be checking out other engines now cause i dont see this as a future , except for rich hollywood types
thats the bare min to use unreal 5 and it benches above my 1660 super a lil bit and has rtx tech more modernized in it…
now imagine all your games barely getting 20-30 sec you add stuff moving about and forget multiplayer
you need a 3070/80 to PLAY
Hi @ AJ_Graphix
I just tried the Epic Marketplace example Sun Temple I have used this since version 4.16 when struggling to put his on Hololens and created a Red/Blue glasses version 3D picture frames.
Fast forward to now UE5EA and VS2022 17.1 P2.1 when using the command above I get 158 FPS whilst moving around the Temple on an Nvidia GTX 1050 graphics card. It’s not even struggling at 90%.
I have to use my Xbox controller to move about to make the drop to 140 FPS whilst moving about
The CULPRIT was SSGI (Screen Space Global Illumination). I disabled SSGI in Project Settings
Its disabled by default is this example as it did not exist in the early (4.16) days
What is this doing right that other code is not!!
Glad you were able to get high fps in UE5EA when uncapping the framerate, though I’m not sure I fully understand what you are referring to with your question. The sun temple is a very optimized project (it was originally intended to run on mobile). It makes use of some texture atlases and most textures do not exceed 1024. It also uses baked lighting.
Hi @AJ_Graphix, Still have the GTX1050 2 GB graphics card I just tried the Epic Marketplace example Sun Temple
Well, I turned on Lumin and restarted the editor which meant compiling shadow maps, but it worked.
I get 48FPS with Lumin turned on now, looking at Win Task Manager for GPU, it’s running at 100% utilisation flooded? obviously in need of a faster GPU.
When I got into Project Settings and change the “Shadow Map Method” from shadow maps to “Virtual Shadow Maps (beta)” the FPS drops to 32 to 41 depending on what part of the maps you are in the lag is considerable.
When you have the “Virtual Shadow Maps (beta)” method you can enable Nanite and that’s when FPS falls to 20 to 30 FPS the GPU is just overloaded and the response is sluggish.
When you enable in Rendering → “Virtual Texture Streaming”, the Shaders are Compiled again and I now get 5.8 to 6.2 FPS, but the word “Preview” is showing across the Static Meshes??
Without the use of “Virtual Shadow Maps (beta)” there are gaps where Nanite enabled Static Mesh items don’t meet the Statue in the middle does not meet the floor, you can see light shining through the base.
lol man with the fastest mass-market GPU available, with embedded raytracing hardware, not feeling the effects of software raytracing. Of course you’re not. Do it on a 1050ti and let me know how it works. Or should we only market products for people with 3090s
A 1050ti is ok for just looking and making simple games that ideally do not use Lumen which is a ray trayced lighting solution that will by default run in Software, so on your CPU.
Minimum is a quad core CPU which can run multiple threads per core and that is pretty terrible, with a 1080 GTX don’t expect to run much in terms on Lumen.
There are many Editor and Project features that can change how Lumen works, from full global lighting to partial or not at all.
Epic has stated for Valley of the Ancients:
For 30 FPS, we recommend a 12-core CPU at 3.4 GHz, with an NVIDIA RTX 2080 or AMD Radeon 5700 XT graphics card or higher, and 64 GB of system RAM.
I don’t understand why people are complaining when they don’t meet the minimum let alone recommended requirements.
Thanks for the info @Jimbohalo10 . So basically all the UE5-specific features are really only for current generation high-end cards (or consoles like PS5). I’m sticking with UE4 for the time being. 
The reason is that people were hoping it would run on lesser hardware because…getting new hardware is something of a problem right now in many places. Look at the Steam hardware survey right now: 8 of the 10 most popular cards in use right now are all 10 series cards. RTX 3070 represents less than 1.7% of usership. The 1060 is the most used card at >10%. The 1050ti I mentioned is the 3rd most used card. In fact almost all of the most widely used cards in gaming are at or around this level of performance, with only a small handful of users actually having access to the newest gen of hardware.
So if the new software can’t run on mid-tiered machines (which given the current GPU availability, target audiences will be stuck on for a while) then building a game with the new UE5 features doesn’t make a ton of sense.
It may take several years to develop glorious games on UE5, UE5 is for development it is not a game, Epic are not aiming the engine at gamers. A compiled game in UE5 running Lumen can run really well on a 1080 with 10 core CPU, as Lumen can still be processed with the CPU.
Just started UE5, Early Access 2, and shadow artifacts persist today, black lines, strange ghosting while running, strong white artifacts on the actor body and neck while jumping, lights banding, and FPS still very low… but now, my PC is also overheating really fast with the default scene:
BTW: Disabling “Lumen” and “Temporal Super Resolution”, has no impact on improving FPS.
Not working, no shadows, and it causes Nanite meshes to fail (but FPS does improve, still unusable):
Forward Shading enable:
Forward Shading disable:
FPS is really low with just 1 Quixel mesh with nanite enable (duplicated 4 times), but UE4… is over 180FPS
I think Epic just needs to make UE4 optimized and bug free. Right now, with the state of the engine, development is annoying. 4.27 is horrible, and I made the mistake of upgrading to 4.26. I’m averaging 20 less FPS for the same game. They also need to work on documentation. Instead of making the engine more hospitable to noobs, making Epic more money, they make it NOTORIOUSLY difficult to get info about. The help pages on the blueprints literslly just link to a document that says what each connecters variable type is (like enum, bool, etc). Why link it in the first place? The colors are super simple, that’s not what we need.
This is an issue with epic that is consistent, and everyone on the community agrees: that this fad with “next gen abilities” is bull. In my opinion, I think that we need to optimize the games we do have, because I’m sorry no one needs better graphics right now than far cry 5. Genuinely. I’m not a huge gamer but I don’t think anyone can tell the difference, except ray tracing. I think we need to innovate on VR if anything: even though I don’t believe in the meta verse working or anything, I think the more realistic we can make it, the better. Because rn everything is very low poly usually. Instead of a new rendering system that’s the same as the last one with fps, JUST WORK ON WHAT EVERYONE IS TELLING YOU TO. You don’t need to prove yourself Epic, you’re already the best in the game (imo).
