Lumen Lite boosts ray-traced lighting performance but risks becoming a default

Epic unveiled Unreal Engine 5.8 with a new scalability option, Lumen Lite, designed to bring ray-traced global illumination to the Nintendo Switch 2 with a 60 fps goal. Because the mode also runs on PCs, I ran quick tests to see how it behaves outside the console context.

In the Unreal Editor's 11 scalability options, Lumen Lite only alters global illumination (GI) and reflections. Older UE builds disabled Lumen at Medium settings; in 5.8, Medium enables Lumen GI while reflections remain screen-space (SSR). Lumen Lite replaces a key lighting stage with a faster, lower-quality method to improve performance.

A Skydek YouTube demo earlier showed up to 40% more performance in a simple software Lumen scene. Using UE5.8 and UE5.6 with Epic's Electric Dreams Environment on a Core Ultra 270K Plus and a GeForce RTX 4080 Super, I observed roughly a 25% uplift in the editor viewport with Medium (Lumen Lite) settings.

lumen lite, unreal engine, ue5.8, ray tracing, global illumination, reflections, switch 2, 60 fps, rtx 4080, performance uplift