Achieving More than 1000 FPS in an Unreal Engine 5 Project

Unlimited Performance in Unreal Engine 5 is possible!

The other day I had the luck to come across a really good article about Unreal performance by Daft Software.

It talks about disabling tons of Unreal features and using the mobile renderer on PC to achieve incredibly performance. I had already been testing with using DX11 instead of DX12 for my small games due to potential instabilities, so I decided to try it out.

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Using lightmaps and Limitations

In my case, I want to use lightmaps in my games, so I tweaked a little bit the settings to be able to use both lightmaps and some other features I like, but I’m liking the improvements.

This, of course, comes with some big limitations.

Say goodbye to Lumen, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps and all those other fancy rendering features. If its new and shiny, its out of the question.

But by leaving those behind, you get access to incredible performance.

One limitation of using the forward renderer, however, is the lack of screen space effects. In this case, what is more notable to me are the screen space reflections, which are completely missing from the forward renderer, so that might be a limitation to you.

Can this run on Integrated GPUs?

I did the first test on my laptop GPU, but then I got curious, how would a scene using this settings run on the integrated graphics card of the CPU?

To my surprise, being able to run at 244 FPS on an integrated GPU is something I would love. And that’s rendering at 2560×1600!

That being said, one of the limitations of the Mobile Renderer is that it does not support Indirect Capsule Shadows, and that’s a pity, as those make dynamic characters in a lightmap based scene really feel grounded.

D3D Mobile vs DX 11 + Forward

So here is what the same scene looks like using both Mobile Renderer and using instead the DX11 Forward renderer with Capsule Indirect Shadows. Both on the Integrated GPU.

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As you can see, there is a big drop in performance, but those indirect capsule shadows really ground the scene, and hey, 161 FPS on an integrated GPU at high res is a compromise I’m willing to take.

I still need to experiment more, but I hope this post gives you a little encouragement to play around with the ways Unreal renders the scene.

Thanks to the Original Article

Here is the article if you want to take a look at it, it’s written by a very talented person, so give them lots of love:

https://blog.daftsoftware.com/unreal-perf-maxing/#ok-so-how-much-faster-is-it

Conclusion

By leaving behind the newer rendering features of Unreal you can achieve really good performance even on integrated graphics card. Remember that these tests were all done at 2560x1600 but you might be okay with lower resolutions and thus even better performance.

So next time you are considering which engine to use for your game, if you love everything about Unreal except its performance, take a look again if by disabling some of its features you can get the look that you need.