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[Durin]

Witcher 4 and Epic devs said that they have resolved the traversal stutter with UE5.6. So you dont have to wait till next gen. Whenever that might come now that its been delayed.

I'll believe it when I see it in a full game rather than a tech demo, and if it's scalable for smaller teams without CD Projekt money + close Epic partnership.

I just know back in 2025 Sweeney spoke about UE6 making the complete transition to multi-threaded use across the board with the engine. I'm optimistic with whatever improvement happens though, and I'm also hoping there will be some way to improve older games in future so we're not stuck with compromised games.

 

[SlimySnake]

Yes, but to be fair you can't really expect tech know how from the casual mainstream. They only see bad performance and IQ and are ofc looking for a scapegoat and Epic's marketing did their best pretending that the consoles could actually punch above their weight with UE5 out of the box which is simply not true.

Epic was actually fairly honest with their marketing. They came out and said they were targeting 1440p 30 fps when they revealed the first PS5 UE5 demo. Then when they revealed hardware lumen, and the valley of the ancient demo, they said xsx and ps5 would target 1080p 30 fps. And thats pretty much what they delivered with the Matrix. Actually closer to 1440p at times.

The problem like you said is that people are just ignorant of the facts. The vast majority of UE5 games target 1440p 30 fps just like Epic claimed. They just dont remember that. Or maybe they do and they just dont remember that back in May of 2020, 30 fps was the standard everywhere and they were perfectly fine with it. Commence a long 2-3 year long cross gen cycle full of 1440p 60 fps games, and everyone's standards changed, but Epic's claims and the reality of UE5 software have remained the same.

The only time ive seen Epic talk nonsense is when Tim Sweeney placed all the blame on developers. Clearly UE5 had a lot of issues, otherwise it wouldnt have taken them till 5.4 to resolve CPU bottlenecks and till 5.6 to resolve traversal stutters.

 

[Nigel]

I've never been more incensed by an engine than UE5. I don't care for the specifics, but 99% of them run terribly AND look awful. Like fundamentally bad. They're always blurry and riddled with weird artefacts with reflections and lighting. It's dog water. Furthermore, almost every UE5 game looks the same. So a vast amount of the industry is currently consolidated into one awful dogshit look.

In contrast I played Death Stranding 2 with its shared engine with Horizon. Both are crisp, clean, beautiful and run incredibly. I never got a headache. Fundamentally they looked unique, but the shared elements was from it's competence much like an auteur where you see the echoes of shared competence across unique works. Meanwhile you play 5 different UE5 games and they have the same fucked reflections, shadows and blurry image. God I hate UE5.

 

[P:axMagellanic]

I've never been more incensed by an engine than UE5. I don't care for the specifics, but 99% of them run terribly AND look awful. Like fundamentally bad. They're always blurry and riddled with weird artefacts with reflections and lighting. It's dog water. Furthermore, almost every UE5 game looks the same. So a vast amount of the industry is currently consolidated into one awful dogshit look.

In contrast I played Death Stranding 2 with its shared engine with Horizon. Both are crisp, clean, beautiful and run incredibly. I never got a headache. Fundamentally they looked unique, but the shared elements was from it's competence much like an auteur where you see the echoes of shared competence across unique works. Meanwhile you play 5 different UE5 games and they have the same fucked reflections, shadows and blurry image. God I hate UE5.

There's always something with unreal. First half of the ps360 generation we were cursed with pea soup textures because of streaming issues. UE4 had a blurriness to it etc.

 

[SlimySnake]

I just tried putting MGS Delta and Mafia to 1440p TSR performance which should be 720p to get the console experience, and it looked pretty stable. I didnt change the settings down from Epic, but i was very surprised to see the image quality.

My guess is that the consoles are getting low quality lumen which is probably whats causing all the IQ issues because TSR performance looked pretty good on my 4k 65 inch screen.

 

[Liopleurodon]

The flight part in first trailer is still my favorite UE5 thing:

 

[bender]

Scale back developer ambition.

 

[Arsic]

I ain't reading all that. That isn't a summary… I keep scrolling and it keeps going Jesus Christ.

DF is absolutely not worth listening to unless you yourself own a 5090 and jerk off to the smallest of details to dismiss titles. Fart huffing coupled with overblowing issues like silent hill f which I never noticed what they were talking about because you had to be sitting still in very specific angles. Like come on man…

As for the topic of UE5. Yes it sucks. The industry doesn't care. The cost to make an engine and a game is too high hence the quick desire to have AI to keep trimming workload down to make more profit.

The industry will fall off a cliff in likely another 5 years and it'll be up to indie to pick up the pieces.

 

[Agent_4Seven]

Unreal 6 will fix this.

And then Unreal 7 after that, but Unreal 8 for suuuuuuure, Sweeney promise.

 

[Pokedot]

I've never been more incensed by an engine than UE5. I don't care for the specifics, but 99% of them run terribly AND look awful. Like fundamentally bad. They're always blurry and riddled with weird artefacts with reflections and lighting. It's dog water. Furthermore, almost every UE5 game looks the same. So a vast amount of the industry is currently consolidated into one awful dogshit look.

In contrast I played Death Stranding 2 with its shared engine with Horizon. Both are crisp, clean, beautiful and run incredibly. I never got a headache. Fundamentally they looked unique, but the shared elements was from it's competence much like an auteur where you see the echoes of shared competence across unique works. Meanwhile you play 5 different UE5 games and they have the same fucked reflections, shadows and blurry image. God I hate UE5.

You conveniently leave out that the Decima engine is only used by 2 studios, and they are top tier in the industry when it comes to tech competence. Lets how the optimization fares when Decima is given to some indie studio. UE is used by many studios big and small, and not all of them are as talented as the folks at Guerrilla Games and Kojima Productions. We can see what UE5 is capable of with a game like Hellblade 2 and that was using an old version of UE5. Kojima's new game OD runs on UE5 and it looks good. Making games is hard, and a general purpose game engine doesn't have solutions for every type of game, it's up to the developer to shape the engine to their needs.

Furthermore, the aesthetics of a game has little to do with what game engine it's running on. Does Hunters Gathering look like a Horizon or Death Stranding game to you?

 

[evanft]

Probably a better take.

Denis Dyack who is familiar with Unreal Engine 5 explains why it runs so badly.

That's a name I haven't heard in a long fucking time.

 

[vkbest]

I wonder how much they are paid for hardware companies to making every video the idea games are not unoptimized and the problem is your old/new hardware is not powerful enough.

 

[DenchDeckard]

Some of the earlier UE5 games suffered from CPU bottlenecks due to UE5 being extremely single threaded. This was resolved by UE5.4. Every game since then that has issues is because these consoles are not equipped to run games at 60 fps while pushing next gen tech.

Gamers can go to the 30 fps modes which run at an average of 1440p but they refused to do so, and that is basically the core of the problem. people bought these cheap $500 consoles in 2020 and think they are going to run games at 4k 60 fps while pushing ray tracing and AI upscaling these consoles dont support.


Some of the more recent UE5 games actually run at 1080p 60 fps. Expedition 33 and Mafia both target 1080p 60 fps. mafia has some drops while riding cars through the open world but during normal gameplay its mostly 60 fps. UE5.6 is supposed to make hardware lumen performant enough so that it runs at the same performance profile as software lumen. They already showed Witcher 4 running at 800-1080p 60 fps using hardware lumen.

100 percent!

I don't think it's just down to us. I mean, thinking logically, what you say makes sense, but then we have marketing for these consoles that's doing nothing but talking about 4k, 60fps ray tracing. Even 8k is sometimes mentioned. It's not great.

But I agree, consoles have always been built around 30 FPS since polygons were introduced and we shouldn't be expecting more. Its a nice thing when games are 60fps with great iq on consoles

 

[Radical_3d]

I thought this was one of their better discussions. They do blame the engine in that they are you gotta leave out lumen in games like High on Life 2 that dont have any dynamic lighting or day night cycles.

That's not blaming the engine. But I know better than discussing UE5 with Epic's resident GAF advocate. We've been through this before. We agree to disagree.

 

[Guardian Monkey]

Console best optimization Sony Decima

Weird game choice considering it was completely FUBAR and looked like poop in performance mode on launch which took a while to fix.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Ah yes, the games with an RTGI resolution so low that it misses half the objects on screen....and when you are on PC and turn on PT it suddenly is just as heavy as any other PT mode in other games. Almost as if there aren`t any magic shortcuts with that tech beyond what is generally being used already, only compromises.

this is some strong cope (everytime you refer to the non-UE5 games the somehow get worsen and worsen). UE5, beyond looking good in screenshots (Oblivion: Remastered is the poster child of customers going for bullshots), has missed the mark on one of its biggest markets (consoles) and even its own tech demo was showing issues that became hallmarks of UE5 temporal artefacts (panning the camera around the main character would leave a soup of pixels behind her)

No there is no magic shortcuts, but custom engines made by competent devs for their own games can find compromises that look quite good. For RTGI they did for PT it is quite likely they went a bit more brute force than they did for RT which was the focus and yet it was about a 39% penalty not 2-3x.

Nobody is asking for native 4K and Path Tracing on consoles or PC, lower resolution and upscalers are completely fine (well depend on how shitting you achieve that I guess). You are 6-7 years in the past where we could keep harping on "why use custom engines, I want devs to use Unreal Engine, look how cool it is and these days there is no advantage with a custom engines made for a game vs a generic jack of all trades one?!?"… we have seen the results of CFOs and CTOs everywhere jumping on the money savings promise and between stutter problems on even the highest end machines and other problems on top on all others we can see the engine also trying to make it into Hollywood movies was not the bestest match (the 4K TV report did by DF before a smaller PC monitors from afar is finally getting a bit of needed spotlight).

 

[Panajev2001a]

But I agree, consoles have always been built around 30 FPS since polygons were introduced and we shouldn't be expecting more.

???

What are you talking about?

Go and play some UE5 games like Oblivion: Remastered in the quality mode (30 FPS) and move the camera. Once you have stopped puking we can talk about it some more…

 

[WhamBamThankYouMaam]

I say Arc Raiders. That is just about it.

 

[Shtof]

Recently started playing Spider-man 2 on PS5 Pro after playing Clair Obscur.
Back in the PS3 days, you'd expect a slow, super-linear, turn-based QTE-as-a-feature game to look a lot better than a superhero game where you zip around ray-traced skyscrapers at a 65+ VRR frame rate with no slowdowns or issues.
But alas, that's not the case! It's the slow, super-linear, turn-based QTE-as-a-feature game that both looks and renders a lot worse.
Yeah sorry for shitting on CO, but the entire industry declared this slow, super-linear, turn-based QTE-as-a-feature game the GOTY.
I know Spiderman 2 had probably 10x the budget and sold worse.

 

[DenchDeckard]

???

What are you talking about?

Go and play some UE5 games like Oblivion: Remastered in the quality mode (30 FPS) and move the camera. Once you have stopped puking we can talk about it some more…

I'm talking about consoles have never been able to deliver 60FPS or above in big games, for generations now. What are you talking about?

Consoles delivering a wavering FPS from 20s to 50s is not what we used to mean by 60FPS. All of this shit was goal post moving made by console developers marketing teams.

4k/60fps no longer means what it used to mean. What are you talking about?

 

[Jam Dingo]

My immediate take is that the supposed ubiquity of Unreal 5 games is VERY exaggerated. It's mainly just smaller studios who can't afford their own engines, as far as I can see.

I might be wrong but I think the only Unreal 5 game I've actually bought has been Jusant, and that was on a deep discount. I've played Silent Hill 2 but that was "free" on PS+.

So I think it's a seriously overstated problem, first of all.

As for the actual engine, I don't think it's particularly great, tbh. I've seen lots of games this gen with no Nanite and no mesh shaders push much more detailed meshes just leveraging the SSDs. And LOD transitions aren't a visual blemish that have ever particularly bothered me, personally. So I think Nanite is very overrated as a technology right now. And other studios seem to get on fine just using regular RTGI instead of Lumen without killing performance much more, or even a bit less, so that also seems pretty unnecessary.

Dunno, to me it just seems like a very heavy engine for not that much gain.

 

[Team Andromeda]

I think YouTube forcing creators to do long form style videos to get monetization ruined things. So many creators really don't need to have their personal opinions heard if I'm being honest - just show me how to make a demi-glace and be done with it.

I also think DF are now more and more saying what they think people like to hear, rather than an honest opinion to get likes and subs.