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

Is Unreal Engine 5 truly dogshit?

  • Yes

    Votes: 65 44.2%

  • No

    Votes: 82 55.8%
  • Total voters
    147
It's a powerful engine that can truly impress on the graphical side, however only a few developers (so far) can properly optimize it with proper performance. I think the latter is the main issue and the former the big benefit.
So far I know it's supposed to be an easy engine to understand and work with, but quite hard to master. Not many devs take/have the time to master it because targets, too many people and huge budgets that don't allow for innovation from which they might learn more.

But hey, this is all gossip from me based on the things I read and watch.
 
RetroGamingUK said:
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.
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Nanite is great, but lumen is just low quality, talking about (forced) HW lumen here btw, SW lumen doesnt even deserve to be talked about or exist.

Even affordable GPUs can run good quality RT, just look at games that make their own RT solutions like Metro Exodus enhanced or Control. Lumen is extremely heavy for the mediocre (if i am being generous) results that it produces and when devs try to optimize it, it results in Expedition 33 situations where it causes visual issues. I love ue5, but fuck lumen.
 
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T4keD0wN said:
but lumen is just low quality, talking about (forced) HW lumen here btw, SW lumen doesnt even deserve to be talked about or exist.

Even affordable GPUs can run good quality RT, just look at games that make their own RT solutions like Metro Exodus enhanced or Control. Lumen is extremely heavy for the mediocre (if i am being generous) results that it produces.
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Not in 5.6. Runs significantly better now.
 
Ue5 games look all the same:


STALKER-2-Heart-of-Chernobyl.jpg

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Like holy shit you people are funny.

Oh wow, photorealistic, real materials like rocks and trees look similar because real life rocks and trees look similar and ue5 has the highest fidelity out of all engines, hot water level of discovery over here...
 
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What gaming companies failed to realize is that there is no escaping the technical debt. Engine don't solve problems, they add tools. You need to hire people that know what the type of game you want demands and and make sure they stay in the company for as long as that game needs to be supported.

That what Kojima did. It's not his engine that is amazing, bit the people he put to work with him.
 
wafflecioccy said:
Not in 5.6. Runs significantly better now.
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Yes, there were a lot of efficiency improvements since 5.2 which is great, but the main issue with lumen remains, its low quality returns relative to how much performance it eats up even now and the quality ceiling is low.

Great for shortening development time and making it easier, no doubt, but consumers should only care about results, wish more devs gave us the option to use full RT as an alternative at least.
 
StueyDuck said:
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.
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It also help with unlimited triangles\polygons or some shit, and that is how you improve geometry on something so though to render like ground or rocks, the whole ue mountain demo was all about lumen and nanite and was all about the microdetails of those rocks, both up close and while traveling fast.

Straight up from the epic site about nanite:



  • Multiple orders of magnitude increase in geometry complexity, higher triangle and objects counts than has been possible before in real-time

that is not about just lod from a distance, that is literally a different bullet point:

  • Loss of quality is rare or non-existent, especially with LOD transitions
 
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It's only used because of development time shortening, not because it's exceptional & fancy.
It just allows devs & studios to lower cost because lumen.
In-house engines are USUALLY better but they cost fucktons of money.
 
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GymWolf said:
It also help with unlimited triangles\polygons or some shit, and that is how you improve geometry on something so though to render like ground or rocks, the whole ue mountain demo was all about lumen and nanite and was all about the microdetails of those rocks, both up close and while traveling fast.

Straight up from the epic site about nanite:



  • Multiple orders of magnitude increase in geometry complexity, higher triangle and objects counts than has been possible before in real-time

that is not about just lod from a distance, that is literally a different bullet point:

  • Loss of quality is rare or non-existent, especially with LOD transitions
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exactly, so moaning that Death Stranding 2 doesn't have high quality pebbles on the floor would be fundamentally misunderstanding the tech and what it's used for.

It's just complaining that the team didn't put time into making a bunch of useless pebbles.
 
StueyDuck said:
exactly, so moaning that Death Stranding 2 doesn't have high quality pebbles on the floor would be fundamentally misunderstanding the tech and what it's used for.

It's just complaining that the team didn't put time into making a bunch of useless pebbles.
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This might sound crazy.. but perhaps it's because decima can't handle the insane amount of triangles that ue5 is capable.
 
StueyDuck said:
exactly, so moaning that Death Stranding 2 doesn't have high quality pebbles on the floor would be fundamentally misunderstanding the tech and what it's used for.

It's just complaining that the team didn't put time into making a bunch of useless pebbles.
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We are underwhelmed because decima doesn't have a similar solution.

And fucking please about moaning, when you get to this level of graphic, every microdetails is usefull to sell the photorealism and what separe incredible graphic from just good/great graphic especially in a game where the ground and location is like a second protagonist since battling against the location is kinda the point of the game when you deliver stuff, if there is one game that should have pristine ground\location detail is death stranding, a game where you have a fucking terrain scanner and wondering outdoors locations is 90% of the gameplay loop.


And it's not just pebbles on the ground, the rocks look terrible aswell compared to the best ue5 games and in this game you are surrounded by rock formatikns for most of the time.


Just say that you don't care in a topic about graphic and move on but don't tell other people what tech is useful or not when you try to do photorealistic graphic.
 
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Actually it's a magnificent engine. It seems like the devs didn't get the hang of it yet for whatever reason.

I'm not too informed about it yet because I didn't bother reading. UE5 suffers from mad stuttering and could be because the devs aren't able to optimise their games on it well enough for now
 
UE5 is an excellent engine that is largely hampered by the unwillingness (or inability) of GPU manufacturers to provide significant uplifts to their buying customers.

Any engine that delivers this good a baseline of visuals at this low cost to devs needs to be applauded.
 
Considering that there are great looking games with amazing physics and effects using U5, the only dogshit thing here is devs who don't use it properly. Till when this narrative is gonna be pushed.

Also, quite funny that the "they look all the same" crowd doesnt count cell shade games or stylized graphics like Infinity Nikki's to prove a point that is esentially wrong.
 
Dalbajobas said:
This might sound crazy.. but perhaps it's because decima can't handle the insane amount of triangles that ue5 is capable.
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Yeah, technical constraints inform creative decisions. No idea about what Decima does or doesn't do to be clear but from relatively low rez ground textures in those screenshots it seems it uses quite traditional methods like distance based ground tesselation at most.

Problem with people here is they construct an alternate version of reality because they have no clue what they are talking about at all (to some degree that applies to everyone) but it becomes egregious when held with absolute self-confidence while being absolutely ignorant.
Opinions here vary mostly along a 2D axis when the reality of the situation is 3D and even opinions that get close to it are just 2D projections and miss most of the substance. Not a huge problem in itself, it's a hobbyist consumer forum on a super complex topic from a professional standpoint, but it does get annoying at times.
One of the things my old lead told me that sticked with me the most is about 'knowing when to hold opinions weakly'.
 
All I know is that all the games I've been impressed with from a visuals versus performance standpoint (Doom D:A, Death Stranding 2, AC: Shadows, Forza Horizon 5, etc), none have been on UE5.

Conversely, few if any of the UE5 games have impressed me using the same metrics. Maybe that's just coincidence, but I suspect not.
 
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I feel kinda bad for Unreal devs at Epic, they try their best to make their engine as accessible as possible and make all these toolsets that are clearly designed to encourage good dev practices and yet people still find ways to misuse them.
 
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Dalbajobas said:
This might sound crazy.. but perhaps it's because decima can't handle the insane amount of triangles that ue5 is capable.
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And you know this because?

look i get it, grrr death stranding isn't the best looking game grrr.

But it's illogical to make such an assumption. Nanite isn't "look how many pebbles we have", and to reduce it to that is minimalizing the point of the technology.

again it feels like people have a strong misunderstanding about what nanite actually is.

looking at ground textures and assuming that Decima can't handle it or only Nanite can do such a thing is wildly speculative with no basis.
 
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GymWolf said:
We are underwhelmed because decima doesn't have a similar solution.

And fucking please about moaning, when you get to this level of graphic, every microdetails is usefull to sell the photorealism and what separe incredible graphic from just good/great graphic especially in a game where the ground and location is like a second protagonist since battling against the location is kinda the point of the game when you deliver stuff, if there is one game that should have pristine ground\location detail is death stranding, a game where you have a fucking terrain scanner and wondering outdoors locations is 90% of the gameplay loop.


And it's not just pebbles on the ground, the rocks look terrible aswell compared to the best ue5 games and in this game you are surrounded by rock formatikns for most of the time.


Just say that you don't care in a topic about graphic and move on but don't tell other people what tech is useful or not when you try to do photorealistic graphic.
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Honeslty it just looks like nitpicking some pebbles on a ground in one game vs another.

this is no smarter than the "you can bash watermelons in cod but not halo" or whatever that whole debate was about.

I mean this really reads more like you just don't like death stranding than anything else, which is fine.

But like lets not go overboard.
 
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No, the way games are made today is the major cause of unoptimized crap being put out in the AAA big budget market. It's all about third parties and consultants milking time. no one is trying make things smaller and more optimized. they are trying make code bigger and as complex as possible to get paid more and lock in projects. Corperates do not know the difference they just know that spouting consultant names and work force size can bring in investors.
 
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It's still fairly new and constantly being bug fixed, added to, tuned……. Wait til you see what Gears E day on a 4090 or 5 series card looks like (or even my ps5 pro 😂)
 
As someone who mostly plays on console I dislike it not because I think the engine itself is bad but because current consoles just don't have the hardware to run it properly so you already know the game will either run like shit or have terrible IQ (or both).

Hopefully by next gen we can get UE5 games actually running decently on console and mid to low end PC's...and hopefully devs don't just migrate to some new UE6..
 
StueyDuck said:
Honeslty it just looks like nitpicking some pebbles on a ground in one game vs another.

this is no smarter than the "you can bash watermelons in cod but not halo" or whatever that whole debate was about.

I mean this really reads more like you just don't like death stranding than anything else, which is fine.

But like lets not go overboard.
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It's a topic about engines, nitpicking graphic is part of the game, nitpicking microdetails is what separe a great engine from the best engine since all of them can guarantee at least good graphic nowadays so the microdetails is what count the most if you have to decide what is the best engine.

Maybe posting in a topic about graphic inside an hardcore videogame forum to tell people that they are going overboard is not the high horse moment you think it is.
 
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Dr.Morris79 said:
Yep, both those games ran perfect for me, Stalker 2 took a while but after a few patches it seems fine

Silent Hill 2, Oblivion though..

I think you may be right.
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Silent Hill 2 and Oblivion's faults have nothing to do with the engine.

Oblivion is basically running 2 engines at once, and SH2 renders things in fog at full detail and has issues with occlusion culling (a dev issue)
 
spons said:
Unreal Engine 5 has devolved gaming into a stuttering mess of bad graphics on high system requirements.
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devolved? They have literally improved the stuttering every year since launch. The engine literally has a check box that gathers all the shaders that can be compiled. There is no stuttering in Wukong, Hellblade 2, Avowed, and Expedition 33. If anything it's literally evolved.

Bad graphics? it's literally got the best graphics of any engine.

I dont even know what you mean by bad graphics on high system requirements. You can easily play these games on mid range hardware at 60 fps just like you could back in the 2000s. If anything, Lumen works just as well on AMD cards as it does on nvidia cards unlike a lot of the other ray tracing games that give Nvidia a 50% performance improvement forcing you to buy overpriced nvidia cards.

I play all these games on a 5 year old GPU that you can buy from ebay used for $250. They run at 4k dlss quality to performance at 60 fps high settings. Most new $500 GPUs today can get you the same performance, if not better. Their performance profile is no different than Cyberpunk, Anvil Engine, ID Tech or Snowdrop engine games. The cpu bound issues from earlier in the gen that did not impact any game other than STALKER were also fixed last year. And improved by another 50% in UE5.6. how did you miss this when you make this thread every month?
 
UE5 is incredible but current consoles are underpowered for it.

On PC, virtually all of the best looking games are built on UE5.

Next-gen is where UE5 is going to really shine on consoles.
 
Jesus GymWolf GymWolf why did you post 11 times the same picture? ;)

It´s like saying "I can only take great pictures if I have the newest DSLR camera".
It´s not the tool, it´s the person using it.
 
It's a mess because of this 60fps obsession. If devs targeted 30 fps the situation would be much better, similar to prevgen where we still had a clearly visible visual jump .
 
wafflecioccy said:
Except for Avatar, Alan Wake 2, Doom: The Dark Ages, Assassin's Creed Shadows, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Horizon: Forbidden West, God of War: Ragnarok, and oh geez I can keep going and going
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Yeah, there's exceptions. Hence "virtually". and Ragnarok definitely does not belong with the others here
 
GymWolf said:
Like holy shit you people are funny.
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There are a lot of 'UE characteristical' elements that make it into games that otherwise don't look similar.
Frankly I stopped caring post 5.x - but even back at start of this gen - I remember playing Returnal and despite loving the look - various UE-isms (some dating as far back as 2001) were eerily obvious in the presentation. It didn't ruin the game or anything - but I found myself wondering what 'could have been' (especially for a Sony exclusive).

Anyway on the actual topic, historically, UE has consistently been among the worst performing tech-stacks of every console generation.
2.x was held together with duck-tape during PS2 era.
3.x held an entire generation back during 360 era, but I'll grant you - in relative comparison, Ubisoft tech made it look - decent/good. Still that was a VERY low bar to clear.
4.x was the one sure-fire way to find sub 30fps experiences in PS4 era.

And yea all of those had I/O stuttering - that was the defining characteristics of first 2 decades of the tech.

I suppose 5.x is the SDTV-visuals in PS5 era, but like I said - I stopped paying attention as most games built on it just aren't interesting this gen (and those that are like 33 - I've played on PC).
 
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Fafalada said:
There are a lot of 'UE characteristical' elements that make it into games that otherwise don't look similar.
Frankly I stopped caring post 5.x - but even back at start of this gen - I remember playing Returnal and despite loving the look - various UE-isms (some dating as far back as 2001) were eerily obvious in the presentation. It didn't ruin the game or anything - but I found myself wondering what 'could have been' (especially for a Sony exclusive).

Anyway on the actual topic, historically, UE has consistently been among the worst performing tech-stacks of every console generation.
2.x was held together with duck-tape during PS2 era.
3.x held an entire generation back during 360 era, but I'll grant you - in relative comparison, Ubisoft tech made it look - decent/good. Still that was a VERY low bar to clear.
4.x was the one sure-fire way to find sub 30fps experiences in PS4 era.

And yea all of those had I/O stuttering - that was the defining characteristics of first 2 decades of the tech.

I suppose 5.x is the SDTV-visuals in PS5 era, but like I said - I stopped paying attention as most games built on it just aren't interesting this gen (and those that are like 33 - I've played on PC).
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Not sure about the past, but If in the ue5 similarities are realistic looking materials that are gonna lookk samey like in real life and human like models because of metahuman, i say it could have been worse...
Non-realistic games are gonna have their stylized textures like borderlands 4 and realistic games that aim for photorealism like ah2 or ill well they are gonna look more photorealistic.

And even if i say that, not all ue5 games have the same level of fidelity so you still have games with different looking materials and textures.

I guess i'm thankfull that some graphic patterns can't ruin my experience at all.
 
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wafflecioccy said:
Except I listed most of the best looking games.
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Uhh no?
  • Hellblade II
  • Black Myth Wukong
  • Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
  • Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
  • Immortals of Aveum
  • The Matrix Awakens
  • RoboCop: Rogue City
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2
  • Silent Hill 2
  • The Talos Principle 2

Not to mention upcoming stunners like Witcher IV, Gears of War: E-Day, Marvel 1943, Mafia: The Old Country, etc.. etc..
 
analog_future said:
Uhh no?
  • Hellblade II
  • Black Myth Wukong
  • Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
  • Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
  • Immortals of Aveum
  • The Matrix Awakens
  • RoboCop: Rogue City
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2
  • Silent Hill 2
  • The Talos Principle 2

Not to mention upcoming stunners like Witcher IV, Gears of War: E-Day, Marvel 1943, Mafia: The Old Country, etc.. etc..
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Ragnorak looks great in cutscenes which makes people think its doing a lot more than it actually is. In the main levels, especially the open worlds in vanaheim and crater, the game looks last gen as hell.

Some linear levels do look really good but in a 50 hour game, 2-3 levels looking decent isnt next gen when everything else from the lighting to asset quality is last gen by design.
 
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