• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen

But UE5 still doesn't have big open worlds, that's always the same discussion when it comes to that engine. Witcher 4 will be the first one I guess? And epic is going through a MAJOR overhaul of the engine to make it happen
Didnt we do this already? Days Gone is UE4 yes, but UE5 is built on UE4. It's open world. borderlands 4 is open world. People trashed UE5 for Borderland's performance issues and then the devs themselves improved the framerates by 42% just a few months later.

BL4_PC-Performance-850x478.jpg


Samson just released to absolutely garbage CPU performance despite being built on UE5.7 which already has the CPU optimizations from CD Project's dev team. Guess what? two patches later, the CPU related framedrops are almost all gone, and the game is finally GPU bound on my 5080.

This youtuber says Epic hasnt done anything to fix performance. Like wtf is he talking about? UE5.3 improved software lumen performnace by 25%. 5.4 fixed the single threaded CPU bottlenecks and Alex himself saw 50-80% performance uplifts in the Matrix demo. 5.6 improved hardware lumen GPU performance by 25% so now it has the same performance cost as Software Lumen did in UE5.0. 5.6 also eliminated traversal stutter and improved CPU utilization even more.

None of that really matters if devs dont put in the effort. Stalker devs didnt upgrade to UE5.4, and their game dropped to 35 fps in camps. Expedition 33's 3 person programming team did upgrade to 5.4 and the game ran fine at 60 fps. MGS3's levels are even smaller than Expedition 33's and performs worse. It's the devs, not the engine.
 
Witcher 3's RT patch added extra crowds in cities and villages and it completely killed the framerates. Even smaller villages were dropping down to 35 fps. Everyone says UE5 is CPU bound and earlier iterations definitely were, but the RED Engine wasnt any better

It's actually staggering how many times they broke that game, fixed it, and then rebroke it with patches. There was one patch that broke how LOD transitions worked. There was another that made the camera go all wonky while on horseback and it could only be fixed by reloading the save. Along with a bunch of other weird shit. I remember when it first came out and the torches around Novigrad would tank the FPS into the teens. And the dreaded swamp area.

It's a great game but it's also a giant fucking mess lol. I bet the devs have some serious horror stories.
 
Last edited:
Didnt we do this already? Days Gone is UE4 yes, but UE5 is built on UE4. It's open world. borderlands 4 is open world. People trashed UE5 for Borderland's performance issues and then the devs themselves improved the framerates by 42% just a few months later.

BL4_PC-Performance-850x478.jpg


Samson just released to absolutely garbage CPU performance despite being built on UE5.7 which already has the CPU optimizations from CD Project's dev team. Guess what? two patches later, the CPU related framedrops are almost all gone, and the game is finally GPU bound on my 5080.

This youtuber says Epic hasnt done anything to fix performance. Like wtf is he talking about? UE5.3 improved software lumen performnace by 25%. 5.4 fixed the single threaded CPU bottlenecks and Alex himself saw 50-80% performance uplifts in the Matrix demo. 5.6 improved hardware lumen GPU performance by 25% so now it has the same performance cost as Software Lumen did in UE5.0. 5.6 also eliminated traversal stutter and improved CPU utilization even more.

None of that really matters if devs dont put in the effort. Stalker devs didnt upgrade to UE5.4, and their game dropped to 35 fps in camps. Expedition 33's 3 person programming team did upgrade to 5.4 and the game ran fine at 60 fps. MGS3's levels are even smaller than Expedition 33's and performs worse. It's the devs, not the engine.

Dune: Awakening is open world too. So is Oblivion Remastered. STALKER 2 as well. ARC Raiders isn't open world but it handles very large environments well. Same goes for Fortnite, Hell is Us, Immortals of Aveum, The Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, etc.. etc..
 
Last edited:
Didnt we do this already? Days Gone is UE4 yes, but UE5 is built on UE4. It's open world. borderlands 4 is open world. People trashed UE5 for Borderland's performance issues and then the devs themselves improved the framerates by 42% just a few months later.

BL4_PC-Performance-850x478.jpg


Samson just released to absolutely garbage CPU performance despite being built on UE5.7 which already has the CPU optimizations from CD Project's dev team. Guess what? two patches later, the CPU related framedrops are almost all gone, and the game is finally GPU bound on my 5080.

This youtuber says Epic hasnt done anything to fix performance. Like wtf is he talking about? UE5.3 improved software lumen performnace by 25%. 5.4 fixed the single threaded CPU bottlenecks and Alex himself saw 50-80% performance uplifts in the Matrix demo. 5.6 improved hardware lumen GPU performance by 25% so now it has the same performance cost as Software Lumen did in UE5.0. 5.6 also eliminated traversal stutter and improved CPU utilization even more.

None of that really matters if devs dont put in the effort. Stalker devs didnt upgrade to UE5.4, and their game dropped to 35 fps in camps. Expedition 33's 3 person programming team did upgrade to 5.4 and the game ran fine at 60 fps. MGS3's levels are even smaller than Expedition 33's and performs worse. It's the devs, not the engine.

I don't fucking give a shit about the youtuber, it's just that, there's no fucking open world with high fidelity to speak of with UE5

All the time I see UE5 glazing here are pretty much all hypothetical. The engine came in hot this gen, about 90% of the gen it performs like shit, wow, there's a few optimization now but still looks scaled back/dumbed down no high fidelity and certainly no fucking anywhere near close to Matrix demo. Hoping for Witcher 4 though, but it's just hopium, wouldn't be surprised it comes in and lo and behold, it was mainly made for next gen consoles much like Cyberpunk 2077. Wouldn't be surprised one bit.

edit Duke awakening? Lol fucking hell, it's almost a return to N64 fog. It sure looks like it was made in the UE4 era :messenger_grimmacing_
Hell is Us, outer worlds 2, Avowed, I played them all, not really massive open world are they? FFS peoples. Stalker 2 has some of the most egregious artifacts and Oblivion remastered performs like shit. Hell is Us I know the guys who worked on it. Started as UE4 until late in game development. No nanite. Not open world. Avowed and Outer worlds 2 were probably the best semi open world visual fidelity for UE5 actually but still, not true open world.

Fortnite?

Wow Wink GIF by Musicasa
 
Last edited:
Dune: Awakening is open world too. So is Oblivion Remastered. STALKER 2 as well. ARC Raiders isn't open world but it handles very large environments well. Same goes for Fortnite, Hell is Us, Immortals of Aveum, The Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, etc.. etc..
None of those games have cutting edge graphics that UE5 promised. Many of them, including Arc Raiders, purposely don't use key features of UE5 like Lumen and Nanite

Borderlands 4 is probably the best example and has the graphics of a PS4 game. UE5 has been a big fucking dissapointment. Do i really need to post the UE5 videos from 2020?

I have hope for Witcher 4 just because of the budget behind it. I am sure Gears E-Day will look amazing, but I am guessing it will be as linear as previous games. People have to stop lying to themselves that X version of UE5 has fixed these issues. Developers are clearly struggling with it. "It's not the engine, developers are just lazy" is getting old at this point

Proprietary engines are where it is at. Look at Metro Exodus trailer today. Gameplay looked fire
 
Last edited:
I don't fucking give a shit about the youtuber, it's just that, there's no fucking open world with high fidelity to speak of with UE5

All the time I see UE5 glazing here are pretty much all hypothetical. The engine came in hot this gen, about 90% of the gen it performs like shit, wow, there's a few optimization now but still looks scaled back/dumbed down no high fidelity and certainly no fucking anywhere near close to Matrix demo. Hoping for Witcher 4 though, but it's just hopium, wouldn't be surprised it comes in and lo and behold, it was mainly made for next gen consoles much like Cyberpunk 2077. Wouldn't be surprised one bit.

We haven't had AAA studio with technical chops release an open world game on UE5 yet. Open world games on other engines have big publishers who have the resources to build and maintain their own engine like Sony with Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2, Ubisoft with Assassin's Creed Shadows, Pearl Abyss with Crimson Desert.

We need to see what CDPR and the Coalition can do with UE5 before we can fairly judge the state of the engine. Furthermore, Decima and Sucker Punch's in-house engine isn't as advanced as UE5, you can see the tradeoffs they made to squeeze out more performance if you know what to look for.
 
Last edited:
?? Propiertary engines like this:

GwEaxMrXUAAEwxW


Gu3MJrCXIAAatNQ


GgBH92EWIAAR6QT


GRwNaZ4bIAAlcOv


PC1yv8w.jpeg


JHX29jV.png
It has been a dissapointing generation in terms of developers pushing graphic fidelity overall, but you have to acknowledge that UE5 has not been it either. Borderlands 4, Avowed, and TOW2 are the best games showcasing the engine in non-linear games. 6 years into this generation

This Fall we have Fable, Wolverine, GTA 6, Metro Exodus all using proprietary engines. All of those games will have big open area hubs. Other than Witcher 4, what UE5 game is there to even look forward to in terms of graphics? Halo Combat Evolved Remake?

Also, Indiana Jones is damn good looking game. One of the best of the Generation. So is Alan Wake 2.
 
Last edited:
I don't fucking give a shit about the youtuber, it's just that, there's no fucking open world with high fidelity to speak of with UE5

All the time I see UE5 glazing here are pretty much all hypothetical. The engine came in hot this gen, about 90% of the gen it performs like shit, wow, there's a few optimization now but still looks scaled back/dumbed down no high fidelity and certainly no fucking anywhere near close to Matrix demo. Hoping for Witcher 4 though, but it's just hopium, wouldn't be surprised it comes in and lo and behold, it was mainly made for next gen consoles much like Cyberpunk 2077. Wouldn't be surprised one bit.

edit Duke awakening? Lol fucking hell, it's almost a return to N64 fog. It sure looks like it was made in the UE4 era :messenger_grimmacing_
Hell is Us, outer worlds 2, Avowed, I played them all, not really massive open world are they? FFS peoples. Stalker 2 has some of the most egregious artifacts and Oblivion remastered performs like shit. Hell is Us I know the guys who worked on it. Started as UE4 until late in game development. No nanite. Not open world. Avowed and Outer worlds 2 were probably the best semi open world visual fidelity for UE5 actually but still, not true open world.

Fortnite?

Wow Wink GIF by Musicasa
I really dont understand your point. You are dismissing borderlands 4 because its not high fidelity. Stalker 2 and Oblivion because they perform like shit. You are saying Mafia, Outer worlds and Avowed arent open worlds because they arent as big. But you are blaming UE5 for it? Why? How is it UE5's fault that no one has made a game like Crimson Desert on it? I mean no one has made a game like Crimson Desert on any engine, but how is that the engine's fault?

UE5 is built on top of UE4 which produced Days Gone last gen. UE4 is built on UE3 which was used to make Batman Arkham Knight. Engines are engines. It's the devs who are responsible for hitting proper performance targets. Epic has done a great job improving the engine's performance by making lumen lighter, by removing CPU bottlenecks, and adding nanite to foliage which reduces both GPU load and vram usage. And yet devs still continue releasing unoptimized games. Unoptimized games like Crimson Desert which has taken 3 weeks and 3 patches to get to a decent state. And thats just me, several people on the very last page are still having issues you will simply not see in UE5.
 
It has been a dissapointing generation in terms of developers pushing graphic fidelity overall, but you have to acknowledge that UE5 has not been it either. Borderlands 4, Avowed, and TOW2 are the best games showcasing the engine in non-linear games. 6 years into this generation

This Fall we have Fable, Wolverine, GTA 6, Metro Exodus all using proprietary engines. All of those games will have big open area hubs. Other than Witcher 4, what UE5 game is there to even look forward to in terms of graphics? Halo Combat Evolved Remake?

Also, Indiana Jones is damn good looking game. One of the best of the Generation. So is Alan Wake 2.
the point i am trying to make is that there are always exceptions to the rule. there are great looking games using proprietary engines, and there are not so great looking ones. yes, alan wake 2 looks stunning but it has the same performance profile of UE5 and it doesnt even use ray tracing on base consoles. i had a horrendous time running it at 60 fps on PC even without path tracing because of the way it handles post processing effects causing insane shimmering. The cost to fix the shimmering was high post processing setting that cost a whopping 35%. Consoles never got that setting. Ask rofif's ghost.

UE5 has some stunners with great performance. And then games that literally drop 50 frames when an explosion happens (mgs3). I drive around Mafia's massive open world with zero drops, but in SH2's town area, i got frametime spikes that made me suicidal. I have zero drops in Pro Baseball Spirits on PS5 and it runs at 1080p on the base PS5 and 1440p-ish on the Pro. Even the 1080p version looks clean as fuck as im sure you've seen in my gifs.

I can promise you that if multiple devs using the RAGE engine, you will have games with the same bugs and performance woes we see in other games. Hell, we've seen just how amazing Fable looks on the playgournd internal engine and just how underwhelming Forza Horizon 6 looks on the same exact engine. its the dev teams.
 
Also, while im not the biggest borderlands 2 fan mostly because of its art style, i think its a very pretty looking game that uses lumen and nanite to produce some very good looking visuals. I dont think it should win any awards but its a much better effort than the garbage sony put out last year.

G01YCk3XsAA72ry


G01YClKXgAAPVQv


G1fzmeVWoAA5niF
 
We haven't had AAA studio with technical chops release an open world game on UE5 yet. Open world games on other engines have Sony studios behind them like Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2 and UBIsoft with Assassin's Creed Shadows, Pearl Abyss with Crimson Desert.

We need to see what CDPR and the Coalition can do with UE5 before we can judge the state of the engine. Furthermore, Decima and Sucker Punch's proprietary engine isn't as advanced as UE5, you can see the tradeoffs they made if you know what to look for.

By the time CDPR is releasing Witcher 4 we're at the end of the gen, even worse scale up from early gen to end than UE4. To say UE5 came in hot is an understatement. They'll be hyping UE6 around that time.

I really dont understand your point. You are dismissing borderlands 4 because its not high fidelity.

Right

And fog. That seems to be UE5's trick to anything remotely big. If you remove fog then it completely breaks the map edges in that game. Really cheap looking

Stalker 2 and Oblivion because they perform like shit. You are saying Mafia, Outer worlds and Avowed arent open worlds because they arent as big. But you are blaming UE5 for it? Why?

We all know what Avowed, outer worlds 2 and Hell is us are, they're big maps connected with loading screens. Even the city in Avowed is behind loading. They're semi open world at best. Hell is Us is even smaller scale.

Stalker 2 is a dithering mess and just really doesn't look that hot. And you won't believe it but fog. But I'll give a pass here because stalker atmosphere is convenient to pick this engine. Even the patch for so called dynamic shadows, they're actually faked shadows from the flashlight, you can even play around and the shadows go inward inside you, not even using Lumen for the flashlight in the end. No shadows for grass, no shadows casted from firepit, etc. Screen space moments where depending how you look in the room the lighting changes. Really not impressive.

I have no idea for Mafia, but looking online, huge drop in quality in the distance and... fog. Fucking air quality in early 1900s uh? Too many peoples smoking.

How is it UE5's fault that no one has made a game like Crimson Desert on it? I mean no one has made a game like Crimson Desert on any engine, but how is that the engine's fault?

Nobody seem to be able to make a big open world on it, at least if there's trees and you want to use nanite + lumen 🤷‍♂️




UE5 is built on top of UE4

Oh cmon now
And UE4 was built on top of UE3, blah blah blah

which produced Days Gone last gen.

If nanite + lumen were not a problem for optimization in a big open world, then WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY REWRITING THE FOUNDATION OF IT FOR WITCHER 4

UE4 is built on UE3 which was used to make Batman Arkham Knight. Engines are engines. It's the devs who are responsible for hitting proper performance targets.

A jack of all trade engine will not always be the best tool you need for the game you want to make.

Epic has done a great job improving the engine's performance by making lumen lighter, by removing CPU bottlenecks, and adding nanite to foliage which reduces both GPU load and vram usage.

Wow, as if devs complained and it took 5 fucking years? Just in time for UE6 hype.

What an amazing engine. Thank god UE5, almost, almost up to the PS5 reveal promises /s

And yet devs still continue releasing unoptimized games.

Ah yes, all on devs. It's why for the last 3-4 unreal fests it's basically only been talk about optimization.

Unoptimized games like Crimson Desert which has taken 3 weeks and 3 patches to get to a decent state.

Big open worlds have a shitload of bugs typically. Considering the mechanics and simulation of Crimson desert on their first single player? Fucking miracle dude.

Again you seem to miss the point. You do not have ANY comparisons similar on UE5 side. Fantasize about it all you want, it doesn't exist. You said it yourself, there's no games like it on UE5.

And thats just me, several people on the very last page are still having issues you will simply not see in UE5.

Right, you won't see in UE5 because there's nothing of that scale on UE5 🤷‍♂️ Again the imaginary UE5 massive open world. I don't care you think it's possible, "it's not the engine's fault, Tim Sweeney is trying his best ok goddamnit?", or just didn't have the opportunity for devs to do it, the end result is :
That - UE5 - game - does - not - exist - so - far

I'm tired of seeing the picking apart inhouse engines with the "wow why are peoples shitting on UE5..." when the fucking game doesn't exist.

Look, I really hope Witcher 4 performs good but anyone denying the monumental rewriting of the engine going on for a while now to make this all possible is living in another parallel world.

And for PC actually, UE5 has looked good and you can brute force performance, but for consoles UE5 has been looking quite shit to be honest. Those resolutions are pretty bad.

Your post above for proprietary engines with bad captures is almost comical dude, you're just pulling legs here and not being serious I hope.
 
Last edited:
Holy shit, Pragmata looks incredible with Path Tracing, there are reflections everywhere and everything is super clean, zero noise. That being said, not having photo mode is ridiculous

B7OoxAy2T67UPXry.png

8TrCg36LACjde0uI.png

StpCWZn0NFKyZoyd.png

ruLslT9Fp1UkEJV0.png

O5ESewAQ9dHVbCSa.png

aiTdeq9wExQrdniD.png

LTVCPPvR1ugN0JRG.png

1pCnEM3LdeBqRRtq.png
 
Last edited:
Holy shit, Pragmata looks incredible with Path Tracing, there are reflections everywhere and everything is super clean, zero noise. That being said, not having photo mode is ridiculous

B7OoxAy2T67UPXry.png

8TrCg36LACjde0uI.png

StpCWZn0NFKyZoyd.png

ruLslT9Fp1UkEJV0.png

O5ESewAQ9dHVbCSa.png

aiTdeq9wExQrdniD.png

LTVCPPvR1ugN0JRG.png

1pCnEM3LdeBqRRtq.png
Texture detail is still a hit and miss. Just look at the shoulder of that robot. Immediately noticed the bad textures in the first 10 minutes :( Otherwise it looks and runs excellent
 
Texture detail is still a hit and miss. Just look at the shoulder of that robot. Immediately noticed the bad textures in the first 10 minutes :( Otherwise it looks and runs excellent

I think its an issue with textures not loading in time. Keep in mind I was doing screenshots quickly while the cutscenes are happening with quick changes of camera angles. I think it might an issue on my end but not sure. I will have to check some gameplay in youtube later. But honestly most textures look great to me so far
 
I think its an issue with textures not loading in time. Keep in mind I was doing screenshots quickly while the cutscenes are happening with quick changes of camera angles. I think it might an issue on my end but not sure. I will have to check some gameplay in youtube later. But honestly most textures look great to me so far
Nah it was the same on my end aswell. Most textures are fine, but there are really bad ones. Its an RE engine thing
 
That icy effect in the gun from the last pic looks so cool.
Curious to see if the game will be downgraded from what we've seen in this.
This footage and any upcoming footage will be from very close final build because game gonna release after 7 months, don't expect any downgrade
 
P.S He's lamenting CD Project stepping away from the Red Engine, and 343i stepping away from the Slipspace engine. Do these guys even play video games? Both games were trash at launch. CD project literally spent $125 million and 3 years fixing that game post launch.
So true! And if you remember, by far, the biggest complaints and controversy around Halo Infinite were the graphics quality, most citing it as an underwhelming graphical experience, especially at the reveal back in July 2020. 343 literally delayed it to try and increase its graphical quality on that tired ass outdated "SlipSpace" engine. They switched to UE5 to massively increase graphical quality while providing much more flexibility, expertise and all around shared information & research on the engine.

Fast forward to 2026, I swear to God you'll find someone arguing that…

THIS 👇

o5UXzLpAmgEoM3zD.jpeg


Looks amazing because "art" while lamenting why they're going for higher graphical quality. Gaming discourse has gone insane! It's far beyond me at this point!!
 
Last edited:
By the time CDPR is releasing Witcher 4 we're at the end of the gen, even worse scale up from early gen to end than UE4. To say UE5 came in hot is an understatement. They'll be hyping UE6 around that time.



Right

And fog. That seems to be UE5's trick to anything remotely big. If you remove fog then it completely breaks the map edges in that game. Really cheap looking



We all know what Avowed, outer worlds 2 and Hell is us are, they're big maps connected with loading screens. Even the city in Avowed is behind loading. They're semi open world at best. Hell is Us is even smaller scale.

Stalker 2 is a dithering mess and just really doesn't look that hot. And you won't believe it but fog. But I'll give a pass here because stalker atmosphere is convenient to pick this engine. Even the patch for so called dynamic shadows, they're actually faked shadows from the flashlight, you can even play around and the shadows go inward inside you, not even using Lumen for the flashlight in the end. No shadows for grass, no shadows casted from firepit, etc. Screen space moments where depending how you look in the room the lighting changes. Really not impressive.

I have no idea for Mafia, but looking online, huge drop in quality in the distance and... fog. Fucking air quality in early 1900s uh? Too many peoples smoking.



Nobody seem to be able to make a big open world on it, at least if there's trees and you want to use nanite + lumen 🤷‍♂️






Oh cmon now
And UE4 was built on top of UE3, blah blah blah



If nanite + lumen were not a problem for optimization in a big open world, then WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY REWRITING THE FOUNDATION OF IT FOR WITCHER 4



A jack of all trade engine will not always be the best tool you need for the game you want to make.



Wow, as if devs complained and it took 5 fucking years? Just in time for UE6 hype.

What an amazing engine. Thank god UE5, almost, almost up to the PS5 reveal promises /s



Ah yes, all on devs. It's why for the last 3-4 unreal fests it's basically only been talk about optimization.



Big open worlds have a shitload of bugs typically. Considering the mechanics and simulation of Crimson desert on their first single player? Fucking miracle dude.

Again you seem to miss the point. You do not have ANY comparisons similar on UE5 side. Fantasize about it all you want, it doesn't exist. You said it yourself, there's no games like it on UE5.



Right, you won't see in UE5 because there's nothing of that scale on UE5 🤷‍♂️ Again the imaginary UE5 massive open world. I don't care you think it's possible, "it's not the engine's fault, Tim Sweeney is trying his best ok goddamnit?", or just didn't have the opportunity for devs to do it, the end result is :
That - UE5 - game - does - not - exist - so - far

I'm tired of seeing the picking apart inhouse engines with the "wow why are peoples shitting on UE5..." when the fucking game doesn't exist.

Look, I really hope Witcher 4 performs good but anyone denying the monumental rewriting of the engine going on for a while now to make this all possible is living in another parallel world.

And for PC actually, UE5 has looked good and you can brute force performance, but for consoles UE5 has been looking quite shit to be honest. Those resolutions are pretty bad.

Your post above for proprietary engines with bad captures is almost comical dude, you're just pulling legs here and not being serious I hope.

I am not going to address every single point you made so dont get offended, but they promised 1440p 30 fps upscaled to 4k using TSR in the PS5 demo, and almost every single game has delivered on that with some drops to 1296p to hold on to a locked 30 fps. The same target used by Alan Wake 2, Avatar, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar. In terms of performance, they have largely delivered what they promised.

What changed after the PS5 demo was revealed was a period of 2 years of cross gen when everything on PS5 and XSX released at 1440p 60 fps. A next gen game targeting 1440p 30 fps was never going to double its framerate at the same resolution. hence, the poor IQ in performance modes. This was not an issue on PC like you said, but at the same time this issue affected every single engine. Hell, Avatar and Outlaws go down to 720p while UE5 games stayed around 896p early on and moved to 1080p since last year after they finally started getting built on 5.4. Meanwhile, the best looking game of last year did not feature ray tracing in its 60 fps mode. Mafia was 1080p 60 fps with software lumen, nanite and VSMs while AC shadows was 1080p 60 fps with baked GI. Whats worse?

And Epic has been releasing new versions every since its launch in 2022. 2023 was UE5.2 which added nanite foliage. 5.4 was released in 2024 and fixed the CPU single threaded bottlenecks. 5.5 added mega lighting. 5.6 fixed traversal stutters and eliminated even more CPU bottlenecks. its been consistent progress. But we havent seen that in most games because they refuse to upgrade the engine.

Who would you blame in this scenario? Wukong shipped on 5.0. Not even the launch version which was 5.1. In 2024 when 5.4 was already out and had improved CPU performance by 50%. 5.2 had nanite foliage that Wukong didnt use. 5.3 had software lumen performance upgrades that Wukong skipped on. Same goes for Stalker. I told you, expedition 33's dev team had 3 programmers and they were able to move to UE5.4 while other big name studios didnt. If devs were really begging for it then why didnt they jump on the new versions and built their game on it?

I will bring up samson again. Gorgeous looking game. Built on the latest version with hardware lumen, Has the same performance profile of Mafia did with software lumen. Exactly what Epic promised with 5.6. Yet the CPU performance was trash until it was improved and they are promising even more improvements in the next few weeks. Whose fault is that?
 
Last edited:
I also dont get the fog complaints in Mafia and Borderlands. If anything I was complaining that it didnt have enough fog and volumetric effects. Mafia added them towards the end of the campaign when they switched to a dusk time of day, and it only made the game look better even if it hid the impressive draw distance.

72AYXJs.gif
 
I am not going to address every single point you made so dont get offended, but they promised 1440p 30 fps upscaled to 4k using TSR in the PS5 demo, and almost every single game has delivered on that with some drops to 1296p to hold on to a locked 30 fps. The same target used by Alan Wake 2, Avatar, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar. In terms of performance, they have largely delivered what they promised.

What changed after the PS5 demo was revealed was a period of 2 years of cross gen when everything on PS5 and XSX released at 1440p 60 fps. A next gen game targeting 1440p 30 fps was never going to double its framerate at the same resolution. hence, the poor IQ in performance modes. This was not an issue on PC like you said, but at the same time this issue affected every single engine. Hell, Avatar and Outlaws go down to 720p while UE5 games stayed around 896p early on and moved to 1080p since last year after they finally started getting built on 5.4. Meanwhile, the best looking game of last year did not feature ray tracing in its 60 fps mode. Mafia was 1080p 60 fps with software lumen, nanite and VSMs while AC shadows was 1080p 60 fps with baked GI. Whats worse?

And Epic has been releasing new versions every since its launch in 2022. 2023 was UE5.2 which added nanite foliage. 5.4 was released in 2024 and fixed the CPU single threaded bottlenecks. 5.5 added mega lighting. 5.6 fixed traversal stutters and eliminated even more CPU bottlenecks. its been consistent progress. But we havent seen that in most games because they refuse to upgrade the engine.

Who would you blame in this scenario? Wukong shipped on 5.0. Not even the launch version which was 5.1. In 2024 when 5.4 was already out and had improved CPU performance by 50%. 5.2 had nanite foliage that Wukong didnt use. 5.3 had software lumen performance upgrades that Wukong skipped on. Same goes for Stalker. I told you, expedition 33's dev team had 3 programmers and they were able to move to UE5.4 while other big name studios didnt. If devs were really begging for it then why didnt they jump on the new versions and built their game on it?

I will bring up samson again. Gorgeous looking game. Built on the latest version with hardware lumen, Has the same performance profile of Mafia did with software lumen. Exactly what Epic promised with 5.6. Yet the CPU performance was trash until it was improved and they are promising even more improvements in the next few weeks. Whose fault is that?
I say the jump to (what seems to be) a mandatory requirement to have 60fps in every game has shown people the great costs it brought, it halves this generation's full potential. People don't realize that at all, they lament "game unoptimized" while unaware that their expectations keep rising and rising, especially when they're going against hard limitations like Moore's Law.

It's why I'm so excited about AI-powered Rendering so much as it paves the way for vast generational leaps going forward, freeing us from traditional rendering limits that we've been forced to go through for close to a decade now.
 
Last edited:
And Epic has been releasing new versions every since its launch in 2022. 2023 was UE5.2 which added nanite foliage. 5.4 was released in 2024 and fixed the CPU single threaded bottlenecks. 5.5 added mega lighting. 5.6 fixed traversal stutters and eliminated even more CPU bottlenecks. its been consistent progress. But we havent seen that in most games because they refuse to upgrade the engine.

I know everything UE added and the road ahead for huge open world.

Why can't you guys acknowledge there's clearly an irk on the road for that engine to go big scale? It's clear as day. Will they eventually fix it? Sure, perhaps not even at Witcher 4, but one day. Thing is that, gen came and went. And i'll reiterate again, the UE5 big scale open world just doesn't exist, not with high fidelity.

Who would you blame in this scenario? Wukong shipped on 5.0. Not even the launch version which was 5.1. In 2024 when 5.4 was already out and had improved CPU performance by 50%. 5.2 had nanite foliage that Wukong didnt use. 5.3 had software lumen performance upgrades that Wukong skipped on. Same goes for Stalker. I told you, expedition 33's dev team had 3 programmers and they were able to move to UE5.4 while other big name studios didnt. If devs were really begging for it then why didnt they jump on the new versions and built their game on it?

I certainly would not blame devs. At one point you have to settle on a way forward. Building the car's frame while the mechanics are still in the engine makes no sense.

I will bring up samson again. Gorgeous looking game. Built on the latest version with hardware lumen, Has the same performance profile of Mafia did with software lumen. Exactly what Epic promised with 5.6. Yet the CPU performance was trash until it was improved and they are promising even more improvements in the next few weeks. Whose fault is that?

Not the devs 🤷‍♂️ You're almost there.
 
Not the devs 🤷‍♂️ You're almost there.
why not? game did not change engine versions in the 10 days since launch. And yet two patches improved the framerates from 35 to around 53 at its lowest. same thing happened with borderlands, except it took them 6 months. help me understand why is this epic's fault again?
 
Last edited:
why not? game did not change engine versions in the 10 days since launch. And yet two patches improved the framerates from 35 to around 53 at its lowest. same thing happened with borderlands, except it took them 6 months. help me understand why is this epic's fault again?

You're seriously in the software business and don't know that most devs barely get to finish line, we just saw devs closing down just this month after they released their games, and you expect them to plan a budget incase Tim Sweeney's goodness to finally fix their shit?

come the fuck on
 
You're seriously in the software business and don't know that most devs barely get to finish line, we just saw devs closing down just this month after they released their games, and you expect them to plan a budget incase Tim Sweeney's goodness to finally fix their shit?

come the fuck on
?? But Tim Sweeney already fixed his shit in 2024 with UE5.4 and then improved hardware lumen performance last year with 5.6. This game is already running at 5.7. The latest version. Tim Sweeney had nothing to do with this game post launch when all the CPU related framedrops were magically fixed by devs?
 
?? But Tim Sweeney already fixed his shit in 2024 with UE5.4 and then improved hardware lumen performance last year with 5.6. This game is already running at 5.7. The latest version. Tim Sweeney had nothing to do with this game post launch when all the CPU related framedrops were magically fixed by devs?

Ok Slimy

UE5 so good

The best fucking engine around. Why even have proprietary engines right, we see with your screenshots you posted, no need. UE5 is so good and optimized, Epic has nothing to develop and fix for big open world. It's up to devs really. The Witcher 4 CDPR graphic engineers working to revamp the engine? All a fucking collective fever dream, UE5 so good

Happy Love It GIF by The Drew Barrymore Show


There, I don't want to argue with you, I don't give a shit. Continue fantasizing about the large scale open world game that does not exist yet and jerk each others about UE5 doesn't have artifact X or Y.
 
Don't see why we're pitching a fit over no large scale open-world UE5 games just yet. We didn't get any notable UE4 ones until Days Gone near the end of last gen. Yes it's tough to make these big open worlds work on a general purpose engine but so what. I'm struggling to think of any large-scale open world games, period, that achieve current gen fidelity, outside of Avatar/Outlaws/AC Shadows which is no surprise since Ubisoft has always been on the technical cutting edge and is one of the few software houses that can compete with Epic in engine development with Anvil and Snowdrop. And of course Crimson Desert which is just an oddball that does some things great and some things horribly (and took eight years to make). Am I forgetting any? Dragon's Dogma 2 maybe, but that was a technical disaster worse than UE5. Do agree w/ Slimy that UE5 is used to great effect in Borderlands 4 despite its unconventional visual style. Gearbox have always been technically incompetent so I'm reluctant to blame the engine there. Stalker 2 was slavjank so whatever. All of Sony's lauded in-house open-world engines deliver cross-gen visuals at best and are irrelevant to this conversation until they demonstrate current-gen capabilities.
 
Last edited:
UE5 is a mess for what we already know and I'm sure even people with no technical knowledge can surely inference, it's a GENERAL purpose engine. If somebody uses it like shit and others don't, exceptions do not ever become the rule. Besides, none of us should ever forget that the engine so far has been leveraged almost in its entirely by low-tier devs, which still fucked up in UE4 back in the day. There is no right argument here, it's just Unreal being the wild west it has ALWAYS been.
 
Last edited:
Ok Slimy

UE5 so good

The best fucking engine around. Why even have proprietary engines right, we see with your screenshots you posted, no need. UE5 is so good and optimized, Epic has nothing to develop and fix for big open world. It's up to devs really. The Witcher 4 CDPR graphic engineers working to revamp the engine? All a fucking collective fever dream, UE5 so good

Happy Love It GIF by The Drew Barrymore Show


There, I don't want to argue with you, I don't give a shit. Continue fantasizing about the large scale open world game that does not exist yet and jerk each others about UE5 doesn't have artifact X or Y.
i dont want to argue either. i just asked you a simple question. you seem to think the fault lies with epic who have fixed the issues with their engine, and not with the devs and i guess thats where we will have to agree to disagree.

And just so we are clear, im not saying UE5 is better than Pearl Abyss' blackspace engine, or Anvil or snowdrop. I am simply pointing out that they all roughly have the same performance profile, and no one engine is better than others. Crimson Desert's engine has been used as this savior of the industry that cant get performance right on consoles, and it has its own flaws. Ray tracing, virtualized geometry, physics and other next gen effects are taxing on any engine. And consoles just cant handle them at 60 fps. It's not the engine's fault that Cerny went with a 10 tflops GPU. As the captain of team 14 tflops on gaf and era, I am still miffed at cerny wasting money on expensive ssds instead of a bigger chip.
 
Last edited:
Blurry/20.

Seriously is it really THAT HARD to stop using effects that destroy the IQ?? I'm absolutely not convinced by this reveal.

It's more filmic this way! you just dont get it!!

God how i hate chromatic aberration and any other image distortion bullshit
So you're telling me you don't like the ....

Artists intent?

It's there by default because, yes, it does look more cinematic and film like. And thats how they intended you to see their game.

Yes, im throwing DLSS 5 hater arguments right back at them. Artistic vision and all that jazz.

Cant have it both ways.
 
So you're telling me you don't like the ....

Artists intent?

It's there by default because, yes, it does look more cinematic and film like. And thats how they intended you to see their game.

Yes, im throwing DLSS 5 hater arguments right back at them. Artistic vision and all that jazz.

Cant have it both ways.

It looks like a blurry mess. Another sequel to Order PS4 game (after Hellblade 2) - "let's create amazing textures and models and then blurry the whole screen into oblivion so no one can see them properly!" type of game.
 
So you're telling me you don't like the ....

Artists intent?

It's there by default because, yes, it does look more cinematic and film like. And thats how they intended you to see their game.

Yes, im throwing DLSS 5 hater arguments right back at them. Artistic vision and all that jazz.

Cant have it both ways.
Tag checks out
 
I am with Represent on this one. If the artists want a game to look filmic then let them. I dont want DLSS5 replacing all the art work created by artists, and I definitely dont want myself dictating what their vision should be for a game. I play games and watch movies precisely because i lack that vision, the imagination and i need that from people much more creative than myself. If I dont like the art style, I will just skip it. Or like with metro exodus, drop it after a few hours.

KZ2 still holds up because they went with a heavily post processed look that cost them an insane input lag of 181 ms. There are other games with much a much cleaner look. I personally like these post processing effects. This is how you get those CG quality visuals we all crave.

Besides, I am pretty sure they will let you turn off CA, DoF, motion blur and film grain in the final version. Almost every game does nowadays. I think this will be a non-issue at launch.
 
Currently developing my own mobile/pc game, and from my very little experience, I can tell you can't got good high end graphics tech for (lighting /geometry/vfx works) alongside 60fps performance unless you have monster's gpu, i blame early UE5 version for having many problems on high end gpu, this blame also for developer's who using it and want that fancy tech without testing their games, that said I always prefer inhouse engines and support them but saying cirmson desert black space engine is doing what UE5 can't do is totally unfair, for small example cirmson desert use tech called spom for texture which bring fake 3d geometry for textures, so they don't use they virtual geometry tech (which is equivalent to nanite) on all models/Assets, and by the way that spom tech available on all third-party engine's, so the performance problem because of nanite is on lazy developers using one touch effect on all things on Ue5, and measure that on many other graphics tech which can replaced with cheap solution on some places which don't affect game visuals but give good performance /less bugs
 
Last edited:
It looks like a blurry mess. Another sequel to Order PS4 game (after Hellblade 2) - "let's create amazing textures and models and then blurry the whole screen into oblivion so no one can see them properly!" type of game.

Tag checks out


If the artistic vision is the one on the right (and it is, that's why both are always on by default), then by turning it off, you are viewing the game wrong.

francis.png
 


If the artistic vision is the one on the right (and it is, that's why both are always on by default), then by turning it off, you are viewing the game wrong.

francis.png

The one on the right looks like dogshit.
I would rather skip the "artistic visio" than to have to deal with such low image quality.
 
Stalker 2 was slavjank so whatever.
Stalker 2 was self published and they still rushed it out. Then they released two patches, each with 1,800 fixes. I wish i was making this up. 1,800 bug fixes each. Were these 3,600 bug fixes in the first month all Tim Sweeney's fault?

Or maybe these greedy mother fuckers wanted to released the game before thanksgiving and just shipped a broken game knowing they had 3,600 bugs that they knew devs were working to fix. It wasnt big bad EA or Ubisoft forcing devs to ship the game early. It was themselves.

This roadmap was released earlier today by Samson devs. This game launched on April 8th. In 21 days, they would have released 4 updates (plus im pretty sure i saw a hotfix get applied last night). The first two improved CPU bound framerates by a whopping 60%, and the frametimes are still not perfect even at 30 fps. They still have two more to go. They are also self published. Why couldnt they have delayed the game by 21 days? Is this also Tim Sweeney's fault?

efe3dfd1d007826838121e31a5a4e2d72a153d51.png
 
Oh god, those chromatic aberration, film grain, vignette and all the shit effects stacked on top of each others, reminds me of Rofif the fervant protector of that shit.

For me it's almost always a disable if I can. Sometimes I won't be bothered to go and mod it.

Artistic vision is such a funny concept. Take Pragmata, there's such a huge difference from the full max effects on PC vs a Switch 2. Which one is the artistic vision?

Let's not kid ourselves, the artists that spent 6 months in blender to make the models, they're not being asked what they think of the downports nor the additional visual bells, their job is done, the assets are owned by the company, they'll do whatever the fuck they want.
 
So you're telling me you don't like the ....

Artists intent?

It's there by default because, yes, it does look more cinematic and film like. And thats how they intended you to see their game.

Yes, im throwing DLSS 5 hater arguments right back at them. Artistic vision and all that jazz.

Cant have it both ways.


If the artistic vision is the one on the right (and it is, that's why both are always on by default), then by turning it off, you are viewing the game wrong.

francis.png
Games arent movies/photos where image quality is not a concern because they arent rendered in real time

I dont care about artistic vision, i make games look the way i want. That means no post processing and no dlss5, we can most definitely have it both ways, you do you tho and let others do it their way, having a choice is the beautiful part of gaming, there is a reason why its possible to turn stuff on/off.

Also whos to say that artistic vision cant be crap or not good enough and that consumers cannot know better than the developers or that the developers havent failed to achieve what theyve intended?
 
Last edited:
The one on the right looks like dogshit.
I would rather skip the "artistic visio" than to have to deal with such low image quality.
The images are the same resolution, the image quality is equal. You think its "Blurry" when in reality it's an artistic vision. its essentially a filter that makes your product look more.... filmic. Especailly for certain genres. It's nothing to do with low image quality.
 
Stalker 2 was self published and they still rushed it out. Then they released two patches, each with 1,800 fixes. I wish i was making this up. 1,800 bug fixes each. Were these 3,600 bug fixes in the first month all Tim Sweeney's fault?

Or maybe these greedy mother fuckers wanted to released the game before thanksgiving and just shipped a broken game knowing they had 3,600 bugs that they knew devs were working to fix. It wasnt big bad EA or Ubisoft forcing devs to ship the game early. It was themselves.

This roadmap was released earlier today by Samson devs. This game launched on April 8th. In 21 days, they would have released 4 updates (plus im pretty sure i saw a hotfix get applied last night). The first two improved CPU bound framerates by a whopping 60%, and the frametimes are still not perfect even at 30 fps. They still have two more to go. They are also self published. Why couldnt they have delayed the game by 21 days? Is this also Tim Sweeney's fault?

efe3dfd1d007826838121e31a5a4e2d72a153d51.png
Saw this roadmap earlier and cracked up. I'm glad the game isn't getting abandoned but why rush it out so undercooked? Things have gotten ludicrous when even small indie games need these big "roadmaps" post launch to calm people down.
 
Top Bottom