It’s mostly not UE5 exactly. UE5 just let’s devs turn on features that are performance hogs easily. Squad, for example, just upgraded from UE4 to UE5 but they took their time and did things in a smart way (like not using Lumen), and performance increased for a lot of people, with much higher detail too.
UE5 isn’t the issue. It’s devs who turn on all the features they can and ignore optimization because “the engine just handles it.” It’s got some really impressive technology, but it’ll ruin your game if you let it.
I’m still not convinced the engine is the problem. Maybe it’s not helping, sure, but heavy reliance on upscalers to achieve nominal performance is probably a bigger issue.
That, and shipping before proper optimization passes is probably more profitable in the short term, so publishers will push for that.
UE5 can run well, but all the defaults that Epic suggests devs use are really quite bad for performance. They improve performance on horribly unoptimized scenes, but actually optimizing the scene would allow a 10x performance improvement at no reduction in visual fidelity. But devs don’t tend to optimize much anymore because those Epic-suggested defaults “take care of optimization”.
I’m becoming more and more convinced it is the engine honestly. It is probably harder to optimize and devs not having enough time to do so if I had to guess.
Yes, the engine could be used well, but it’s used for it’s out of the box “good” graphics, lighting and such. Which then yes, devs slap on shitty DLSS, frame generation or whatever at the end to reach a somewhat playable framerate (or “framerate number” should I say with the way things are going. Fuck you Nvidia).
No developers are going to spend ages tweaking the engine to get good performance when people will just buy the game regardless. I’ve yet to see a good performing UE5 game with good fidelity and I probably never will because it’s entirely reliant on TAA as it’s deferred rendering as standard. I hate seeing developers abandoning their own in-house engines just to swap to shitty UE5. I know, I know, it’s all about the money…
The engine is a plague, as every developer is seemingly moving to it. Chasing “upgraded” graphics that no one asked for. All games consolidating onto one engine is very bad.
It’s good for movies, bad for games. Give us good raster performance back, no TAA, no upscaling, no frame gen.
I partly agree with you in that everyone using the same UE5 engine is bad
But I really don’t agree that deferred rendering techniques are inherently bad. Maybe they cause negative incentives for developers that lead to worse games in the long run, but you might as well blame capitalism at that point
I like techniques such as TAA because they do work better as anti-aliasing in my experience. I’ve multiple times had the choice between TAA and traditional AA and I think TAA simply does what it sets out to do better. Upscaling and frame generation are also nice to haves as optional features people can enable. Sometimes I use them, sometimes not. But it is bad that companies use these techniques as a crutch, indeed, but I don’t want to see them gone
Modern gaming, why expect anything more?
Avoid UE5 games, they are all the same. Underperforming messes.
It’s mostly not UE5 exactly. UE5 just let’s devs turn on features that are performance hogs easily. Squad, for example, just upgraded from UE4 to UE5 but they took their time and did things in a smart way (like not using Lumen), and performance increased for a lot of people, with much higher detail too.
UE5 isn’t the issue. It’s devs who turn on all the features they can and ignore optimization because “the engine just handles it.” It’s got some really impressive technology, but it’ll ruin your game if you let it.
I’m still not convinced the engine is the problem. Maybe it’s not helping, sure, but heavy reliance on upscalers to achieve nominal performance is probably a bigger issue.
That, and shipping before proper optimization passes is probably more profitable in the short term, so publishers will push for that.
UE5 can run well, but all the defaults that Epic suggests devs use are really quite bad for performance. They improve performance on horribly unoptimized scenes, but actually optimizing the scene would allow a 10x performance improvement at no reduction in visual fidelity. But devs don’t tend to optimize much anymore because those Epic-suggested defaults “take care of optimization”.
I’m becoming more and more convinced it is the engine honestly. It is probably harder to optimize and devs not having enough time to do so if I had to guess.
Yes, the engine could be used well, but it’s used for it’s out of the box “good” graphics, lighting and such. Which then yes, devs slap on shitty DLSS, frame generation or whatever at the end to reach a somewhat playable framerate (or “framerate number” should I say with the way things are going. Fuck you Nvidia).
No developers are going to spend ages tweaking the engine to get good performance when people will just buy the game regardless. I’ve yet to see a good performing UE5 game with good fidelity and I probably never will because it’s entirely reliant on TAA as it’s deferred rendering as standard. I hate seeing developers abandoning their own in-house engines just to swap to shitty UE5. I know, I know, it’s all about the money…
The engine is a plague, as every developer is seemingly moving to it. Chasing “upgraded” graphics that no one asked for. All games consolidating onto one engine is very bad.
It’s good for movies, bad for games. Give us good raster performance back, no TAA, no upscaling, no frame gen.
I partly agree with you in that everyone using the same UE5 engine is bad
But I really don’t agree that deferred rendering techniques are inherently bad. Maybe they cause negative incentives for developers that lead to worse games in the long run, but you might as well blame capitalism at that point
I like techniques such as TAA because they do work better as anti-aliasing in my experience. I’ve multiple times had the choice between TAA and traditional AA and I think TAA simply does what it sets out to do better. Upscaling and frame generation are also nice to haves as optional features people can enable. Sometimes I use them, sometimes not. But it is bad that companies use these techniques as a crutch, indeed, but I don’t want to see them gone