Okay so people are yapping alot about the size and speculating alot, I will clean it up for you. Basically all that is happening is something similar to Unity's addressables but in Unreal it's called the asset manager system, where instead of related game assets being stored as separate files, they are clubbed together into bundles with shared metadata and properties. This is why Valorant's file size dropped by more than half after the UE4 to UE5 upgrade, the new engine's asset bundling system removes massive amounts of redundant data that was previously duplicated across individual asset files. So there is a huge change in the storage of assets, where the new asset manager system consolidates what used to be hundreds of separate files with their own headers and metadata into optimized bundles, dramatically reducing the overall size.
And there is also a thing called draw calls, where based on the number of individual assets being rendered, and the amount of computation that is taking up, here if we have the new asset bundling changes, since the assets are bundled together, they have fewer render calls and they will use less amount of compute, so this why the FPS is soo much better. UE5 also has better batching techniques that further reduce the CPU overhead from all these draw calls.
They probably also compressed the 2d sprites and textures with UE5's better compression systems, and the new engine has improved memory management that keeps frequently used assets loaded more efficiently.
#StayGaming 🎮
If you think something i said is wrong, then i will update this post, i just wanna clear up the speculation
Discord