Gorgeous Unreal Engine 5.4 Abandoned Manor Tech Demo Pushes the RTX 4080 to Its Limits With Hardware Lumen

The Unreal Engine 5.4 is capable of producing some impressive visuals, but they can take a toll on performance, even on powerful GPUs.

In a new video showcasing the Abandoned Manor Tech Demo by SCANS, MxBenchmarkPC shows how beautiful the demo looks at 4K native resolution and hardware Lumen, which is enabled as part of Epic settings. Unfortunately, at these settings, even the RTX 4080 has trouble hitting 30 FPS in certain scenarios. Performance is definitely more acceptable at 1440p resolution, as even at Epic settings, the RTX 4080 can run the demo at above 60 frames per second most of the time, even hitting the 80 FPS mark in certain scenarios.

Related Story Unreal Engine 5.4 Brings Significant Performance Improvements, but Frame Time Stability Is Still an Issue

Unreal Engine 5.4 is the latest version of the game development engine by Epic. Released last month, it introduced a variety of improvements, including the new Nanite Adaptive Tessellation option, Heterogenous Volumes, which can produce realistic and dynamic smoke and clouds, improved Temporal Super Resolution upscaling, easier implementation of AI and machine learning tools, performance and shared compilation improvements and much more.

“With many developers targeting 60 Hz experiences, we’ve invested significant effort into improving rendering performance in UE 5.4. This includes refactoring the systems to enable a greater degree of parallelization, as well as adding GPU instance culling to hardware ray tracing, which also now benefits from additional primitive types and an optimized Path Tracer. Further optimizations have been made to shader compilation, resulting in a notable improvement in project cook times.”

Additional information on the Unreal Engine 5.4 can be found on its official website.