I gotta bone to pick with VSM’s
VSM’s rely on Nanite meshes to retain stability (They disappear in weird blockly artifacts after trivial camera distance)
Why is that bad? Because Nanite has extremely bad performance-
Link 1# Nanite performance is not better than LODS [TEST RESULTS]. Fix your documentation Epic. You're ruining games.
Link 2# Released UE5 games-The 60fps performance monitoring of games using UE5. - #2 by _Solid_Snake (Every game not using Nanite performs way better)
Recently just tested Lyra and toggling Nanite off and on ended up in 20% more GPU usage. Now imagine the overhead on actual complex meshes(Cough, Remnant II).
I would stick to CSM’s and distance field shadows for now.
Epic needs to just FIX CSM’s jagged lines, at least for static objects for love of god.
You can take a look at my City Sample profiling post as movement destroys framerate.