LogInMichael Simard's solution boosts frames from 15 to 60.
Some players associate Unreal Engine with optimization issues, but you can use it and have stable FPS, as developer Michael Simard proves in his experiment.
He replaced UE's grass system with a GPU Procedural Content Generation (PCG) solution he's been developing for Calysto World 2.0, a tool designed to help you create large-scale procedural landscapes, forests, and biomes.
Simard's tests show that while the default grass produces 15 FPS, his solution brings it to 60 FPS. The difference comes from moving the detail placement fully to the GPU, he says.
"The main reason explaining the performance gain is that my tool avoids spawning vegetation inside another vegetation (for example, stacking grass at the same place on the landscape). Doing this greatly reduces the quantity of grass needed to look 'full' and also decreases the overdraw, improving the performance."
Simard notes that Unreal "doesn't always give you all the optimization out of the box, but they really build some good tools to reach your goal. The latest update to UE 5.6, related to PCG and the GPU, is truly amazing." He also thinks every developer should learn Unreal Insights, Epic's telemetry capture and analysis suite that catches events from your project.
If you're interested in Simard's work, you should get his freshly released Calysto World 2.0 and follow him on X/Twitter.
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