Is Unreal Engine 5 truly dogshit, or just used improperly?

Is Unreal Engine 5 truly dogshit?

  • Yes

    Votes: 34 43.6%
  • No

    Votes: 44 56.4%

  • Total voters
    78

spons

Gold Member
Yeah I know this is posted on a monthly basis, but we should keep posting this until the engine is fixed or preferably, disappeared above the sea from a helicopter.

Entire articles and tech blogs covering stuttering from the source itself, which is my main gripe with this engine. It seems to be a major architectural problem with this engine and not something they can fix after the fact.

I also find it quite hysterical that UE5 focuses so much on fancy marketing nonsense like "Nanite", "Lumen" and whatever, while Decima has none of that yet both looks and runs better in the games that use it. Just look at Death Stranding 2. It looks many times better than most current games and it runs perfectly fine. Also the hardware requirements for some UE5 games are beyond retarded. I mean look at Borderlands 4. We need to put a stop to this shit.

Unreal Engine 5 has devolved gaming into a stuttering mess of bad graphics on high system requirements. And I legitimately can't think of any example of this pre-UE5. I just can't. Nothing stuttered back in the 2000s, just get a mid-range rig and you're playing games my friend. Well, except Crysis of course but that had problems on its own (I think the engine wasn't multi-threaded or something).

It seems nowadays developers go for Unreal Engine because there isn't something comparable to it publicly available, so it's the "the least worst" option since we lost any and all engine developers and budget for engines in the last decade or so apparently.

Nobody should care about what engine a game uses, but Epic made us do that due to its stank. And that's very unfortunate.
 
Yes and no

UE5's biggest features (nanite and lumen) were meant to kill two time wasters for developers (multiple LOD models and baked lighting)

The problem is current hardware (consoles and affordable PC) aren't powerful enough to run the latter (or any other ray tracing solution) properly at 60fps.

So now we have a situation that made things worse, developers are having to design around lumen/raytracing for fidelity mode and baked lighting for performance mode.

However, UE5.4 supposedly drastically improves performance. We'll wait and see, otherwise we'll be waiting for next gen for UE5's ambitions to become reality.
 
Last edited:
Yeah I know this is posted on a monthly basis, but we should keep posting this until the engine is fixed or preferably, disappeared above the sea from a helicopter.
And how exactly is you posting about this monthly going to get the engine fixes or whatever the helicopter thing is?

If you want UE5 fixed apply for a job at Epic.

There are many examples of UE5 games that are both good and bad. The reason why devs choose to make games in UE5 is because - for the most part - it just works out of the box. And when it doesn't, Epic has teams dedicated to supporting studios licensing their engine.

Guerilla is not going to support every studio out there who wants to use Decima, and they've put over a decade into making it what it is today.

So I ask again, how is another "UE5 is shit" thread going to fix it?
 
Last edited:
clint_eastwood.gif
 
I really have started to dislike this engine. Idk it can look good but many times games look generic Maybe?
I don't think Unreal Engine 5 "looks" like anything, that's up to the developers.

And how exactly is you posting about this monthly going to get the engine fixes or whatever the helicopter thing is?

If you want UE5 fixed apply for a job at Epic.

There are many examples of UE5 games that are both good and bad. The reason why devs choose to make games in UE5 is because - for the most part - it just works out of the box. And when it doesn't, Epic has teams dedicated to supporting studios licensing their engine.

Guerilla is going to support every studio out there who wants to use Decima, and they've put over a decade into making it what it is today.
I'm not applying for any job. And I'm just stating that I think from a gamer's perspective, Unreal Engine 5 is not good. It stutters, it has high requirements, it just doesn't work properly. It has brought nothing but trouble to PC gamers, yet on the other hand, many games wouldn't exist without it.

So I ask again, how is another "UE5 is shit" thread going to fix it?
It won't and we can't do shit about it.
 
It's a great engine, but it tries to cover too many use cases, now even films production, so the code optimization is not possible, it can eventually run fast but it will take time to get there, like it probably already did with 5.4, in the meantime more skills are required.

IdTech and Decime don't hace this issue because they're focused on specific studios use cases so if they're not optimal for 2D pixelart rogelike platformers nobody will give a shit, as long as they're good for open world narrative stuff or whatever.

That's my assumption so far.
 
Last edited:
It's a great engine, but it tries to cover too many use cases, now even films production, so the

Conversely, isn't it impressive that we now have videogames that use an engine used for movie CGI?

Go back a couple of generations, play some games, then come back and just look how far graphics have come.
 
Conversely, isn't it impressive that we now have videogames that use an engine used for movie CGI?

Go back a couple of generations, play some games, then come back and just look how far graphics have come.
Yet the production bottlenecks are there to not take full advantage of it all for games
 
Idk man, i still see the same shitty Motion Blur with vaseline like graphics on many games.
Gears of War syndrome. It's not just the engine, Dark Sector was a one-on-one rip-off but wasn't even UE.
Back in the day games like that started mimicking it, but games like Borderlands (Unreal Engine 3) are heavily stylized and don't look anything like it.
I honestly don't think you can blame art direction on the engine, unless it actively limits it.
 
I would say it's a good engine, but it has two main problems. First, it's still unfinished. Second, because of that, it's often not used effectively by some developers.

Recently, Unreal Engine 5.6 introduced performance improvements specifically aimed at making large, open world maps easier to run at 60 FPS. To me, this is clear evidence that the engine wasn't truly ready for that kind of workload before. If that's not proof that the engine was released in a somewhat unfinished state, then I don't know what is.
 
Never has been dogshit, UE5 always has been one of the most powerful and complete game engines in the world.

Some devs didn't have time (more likely) or didn't know (less likely) how to properly optimize their games for it to get the most optimal performance, that's all.
 
When you can crank up the lumen settings on pc, it really works. Lower budget games can look as good as meticulously baked lighting from previous super-high budget games.

It's too heavy for PS5 though, so it's a bit of a failure that way. Ironically, idtech can do something similar at a faster speed, using the meager hardware rt of the ps5. That's a win for rt at large, or a loss for ue5.
 
There are many examples of UE5 games that are both good and bad.
Sorry, but can you list the truly good ones on consoles and low spec PCs? Fortnite excluded we have… Expedition 33 and Oblivion are kind of good but both suffer from the same motion clarity / temporal artefacts as any other game on UE5… heck The Matrix demo did too.
 
Could we just stick with ue5 and see it maturing for God's sake? why are they keep doing this? if they only mean Business then they must stop, it's not like all previous engines were miracles to begin with.
 
Last edited:
both, but i heard there is new updates sometimes ago, and it make better, but it's kinda too late IMO.
even people work on UE, told us to use 4 if not trying to chase newer graphic. but 4 might kind of obsolete in these days :/
 
Sorry, but can you list the truly good ones on consoles and low spec PCs? Fortnite excluded we have… Expedition 33 and Oblivion are kind of good but both suffer from the same motion clarity / temporal artefacts as any other game on UE5… heck The Matrix demo did too.
Dragon ball sparking zero runs pretty damn well for a UE5 title
 
It's definitely capable of shipping games that look great, but there's a lot of shortcuts they've implemented (honestly, out of necessity) that are detrimental to the game's look. Nanite tends to mess things up in a lot of cases.

The stuttering issues are probably a dev problem that can be alleviated to a significant extent, but when it happens to basically every game that ships on UE5, I'm more convinced that it's an engine problem.
 
Sorry, but can you list the truly good ones on consoles and low spec PCs? Fortnite excluded we have… Expedition 33 and Oblivion are kind of good but both suffer from the same motion clarity / temporal artefacts as any other game on UE5… heck The Matrix demo did too.
Frostpunk 2, Immortals of Aveum, Split Fiction, Atomic Heart, etc

None of these are perfect, and the stuttering issue is something Epic has acknowledged and has been pushing fixes for, but they're not unplayable because of the engine.
 
I played both RoboCop and Talos Principle 2 on PS5, which are UE5 games, and for the most part it was fine.

However, there is the odd issue of "smearing", which I believe is caused by the global illumination implementation.

For example, in RoboCop I would pick up an item, and there would be a subtle afterimage that would fade away over perhaps 1/4 of a second or so.

Talos Principle 2 had a little of that, too. It was also possible in some instances to align yourself at the edges of some structures and create some graphical anomalies, that were clearly down to the engine. These were rare, though.
 
Last edited:
It depends on your usecase, tbh. For some use cases it's neat. For others, it's really janky and/or cumbersome. And Epic tend to let new features rot in experimental for a long time, while also introducing new features. I'd very much like Epic to first fix their shit and make it stable before introducing new stuff.

If I had any say, Unreal Engine 6 would just be a fully-implemented Unreal 5 with some more optimizations and a nicer upgrade path between versions. No new features. And most importantly: Documentation. Fix your god awful documentation, Epic.
 
Last edited:
If I had any say, Unreal Engine 6 would just be a fully-implemented Unreal 5 with some more optimizations and a nicer upgrade path between versions. No new features. And most importantly: Documentation. Fix your god awful documentation, Epic.

At this point I can't see what graphical features they could add.

It's fully scalable at this point.
 
Entire articles and tech blogs covering stuttering from the source itself, which is my main gripe with this engine. It seems to be a major architectural problem with this engine and not something they can fix after the fact.
If you want to know why there are stutters with UE5 games, watch this presentation:



But the TLDR is that lots of things need to get initialized as you move through the world, and this is something game developers need to carefully manage so as to not take up too much CPU time at once. However with UE5.5/5.6 Epic have made improvements to take more tasks off the main CPU thread, and this will continue. (The Witcher 4 tech demo was completely stutter free even during cutscene transitions, due to the extensive work CDPR did).
 
Last edited:
At this point I can't see what graphical features they could add.

It's fully scalable at this point.
I think they coul be tempted to include generative models for texture and mesh generation, official support for NeRFs and the most popular Splatting algorithms. Neural networks for object tracking etc.

There's still a lot of shit they can add. But I hope they don't (for now).
 
Clearly it isn't "dogshit" and the engine is in fact pretty fuckin' impressive. No, my issue with UE is that more often than not it makes games all look the damn same, and it's boring.
 
It's both.

You could argue that if something needs sooo much work behind the scenes and tender loving care and doesn't adapt to the wider publics usage like they advertise it, then it's dogshit.

Just change it for any other application in any other scenario or industry and the outcome would still be that it's dogshit.
 
No, but in many instances, it just hasn't been mature enough yet. It has been good to see Epic working with devs lately to f.ex. reduce CPU usage.

Nanite is an amazing concept btw, it's definitely not "nonsense", the reduced sense of LOD geometry pop-in in the games that use it properly is flat out amazing, especially considering it's infamously been one of our most hated visual defects for decades.
 
Last edited:
UE5 isn't well suited to current-gen consoles, but if you have a good PC, performance is solid, especially if you use DLSS. Stuttering was a real problem in games like sillent hill 2, ES4 Oblivion, but besides these two games most UE5 games dont stutter nearly as much and I was never bothered by this problem in games like Robocop or Hellblade 2.

Nanite makes a big difference in games that used it. I was blown away when I played Hellblade 2, Black Myth Wukong, or even Robocop Rogue City (AA game). Even simple ground surface is extremely detailed in these UE5 games.

Digital Foundry said Death Stranding 2 has similar fidelity to nanite, and OP in this thread even beliefs that decima looks better. These are bold claims, so I would like to see some screenshots of the ground surface in Death Stranding 2. Let's see how close the Decima engine really is to Nanite.


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-10-00-44-19-936.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-10-01-20-34-276.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-10-00-41-34-079.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-10-00-28-53-562.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-15-01-16-45-291.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-15-01-21-52-979.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-15-02-35-13-859.jpg



b1-Win64-Shipping-2024-09-01-00-07-05-687.jpg


b1-Win64-Shipping-2024-09-01-00-25-08-987.jpg


b1-Win64-Shipping-2024-09-01-00-30-46-747.jpg


Thanks to the UE5 engine, even small developers can create good-looking games. Robocop had a small budget, yet I was impressed by its graphics. I didn't see a single stutter while I was playing on my 7800X3D CPU.

Robo-Cop-Win64-Shipping-2025-03-20-18-39-51-409.jpg

Robo-Cop-Win64-Shipping-2025-03-20-14-24-15-374.jpg
 
Last edited:
Atomic Heart, Dead Island 2 and The Finals are just a few examples of games that have superb performance while also maintaining very strong visuals.

It's a dev optimisation problem.
 
UE5 isn't well suited to current-gen consoles, but if you have a good PC, performance is solid, especially if you use DLSS. Stuttering was a real problem in games like sillent hill 2, ES4 Oblivion, but besides these two games most UE5 games dont stutter nearly as much and I was never bothered by this problem in games like Robocop or Hellblade 2.

Nanite makes a big difference in games that used it. I was blown away when I played Hellblade 2, Black Myth Wukong, or even Robocop Rogue City (AA game). Even simple ground surface is extremely detailed in these UE5 games.

Digital Foundry said Death Stranding 2 has similar fidelity to nanite, and OP in this thread even beliefs that decima looks better. These are bold claims, so I would like to see some screenshots of the ground surface in Death Stranding 2. Let's see how close the Decima engine really is to Nanite.


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-10-00-44-19-936.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-10-01-20-34-276.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-10-00-41-34-079.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-10-00-28-53-562.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-15-01-16-45-291.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-15-01-21-52-979.jpg


Hellblade2-Win64-Shipping-2025-01-15-02-35-13-859.jpg



b1-Win64-Shipping-2024-09-01-00-07-05-687.jpg


b1-Win64-Shipping-2024-09-01-00-25-08-987.jpg


b1-Win64-Shipping-2024-09-01-00-30-46-747.jpg


Thanks to the UE5 engine, even small developers can create good-looking games. Robocop had a small budget, yet I was impressed by its graphics. I didn't see a single stutter while I was playing on my 7800X3D CPU.

Robo-Cop-Win64-Shipping-2025-03-20-18-39-51-409.jpg

Robo-Cop-Win64-Shipping-2025-03-20-14-24-15-374.jpg
Ds2 is nowhere near the best ue5 games detail wise except for the characters that are ue metahumans, so not even decima models.

Df have been a bunch of absolute hacks for a hot minute now, they over-praise everything that is hot at the moment and to make them shine they make comparison with the previous games and not with the actual big boys already on the market, hilarious.
 
Last edited:
Ds2 is nowhere near the best ue5 games detail wise except for the characters that are ue metahumans, so not even decima models.

The distinction is irrelevant regarding MetaHuman.

If Decima can import and render assets created using MetaHuman, that's part of Decima engine functionality.
 
Ds2 is nowhere near the best ue5 games detail wise except for the characters that are ue metahumans, so not even decima models.

Df have been a bunch of absolute hacks for a hot minute now, they over-praise everything that is hot at the moment and to make them shine they make comparison with the previous games and not with the actual big boys already on the market, hilarious.
I just found these DS2 screenshots. Based on the Digital Foundry video, I was expecting something much better! Nanite ground surface is definitely more detailed.


4752530f113d4f5b9d8d.jpg


08d257bc6952e9ce800b.jpg


6328b8e5b909aea8c0af.jpg
 
The distinction is irrelevant regarding MetaHuman.

If Decima can import and render assets created using MetaHuman, that's part of Decima engine functionality.
It means that they have to import models from another engine because decima can't make as good character models from scratches but ok.

Not sure why they should import stuff that they could do by themselves, there must be a reason...

Horizon also had like 178 metahumans models and they were the best thing about the game graphically speaking.

Never heard naughty dog importing character models from other engines.
 
Last edited:
I just found these DS2 screenshots. Based on the Digital Foundry video, I was expecting something much better! Nanite ground surface is definitely more detailed.


4752530f113d4f5b9d8d.jpg


08d257bc6952e9ce800b.jpg


6328b8e5b909aea8c0af.jpg
I think you are misunderstanding what nanite is and what they are comparing.

nanite isn't. "small ground is really detailed", it's about it's dynamic ability to change and scale meshes depending on distance to retain it's quality.

so a prop from 1m away can still maintain it's "quality" 100m , 200m away etc.

i don't know why people think small ground textures equals nanite.
 
I think you are misunderstanding what nanite is and what they are comparing.

nanite isn't. "small ground is really detailed", it's about it's dynamic ability to change and scale meshes depending on distance to retain it's quality.

so a prop from 1m away can still maintain it's "quality" 100m , 200m away etc.

i don't know why people think small ground textures equals nanite.
Nanite essentially provides unlimited geometry, which is why it is possible to render thousands of small rocks on the ground. Nanite also fixed LOD issue, but that's way less noticeable difference.
 
Nanite essentially provides unlimited geometry, which is why it is possible to render thousands of small rocks on the ground. Nanite also fixed LOD issue, but that's way less noticeable difference.
exactly, so because the artists for death stranding 2 didn't create extremely detailed ground pebbles doesn't mean that it speaks to the quality and comparison of the different renderers.

all those Hellblade 2 screencaps could 100% be done without Nanite. Nanite only makes sense in realtime rendering, not in screenshots.

you are complaining about artists work rather than the rendering pipeline.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom