Tim Sweeney Blames Unreal Engine 5 Issues on Game Developers

The engine came in hot this gen and the early versions of UE5 were almost like an alpha version, bad performances all around, otherwise they wouldn't make 4 hours specials for a 5.5 or 5.6 engine performance improvements. Those improvements are a little late, the gen flew by. They also require high end hardware to even look good. Its so funny to see MGS 3 remake running on a Steam deck which is roughly PS4 power and it looks worse than MGS 5 did.

It just doesn't run like it looks.

But the biggest culprit is the ecosystem. UE5 is also an ecosystem. UE5 being the most documented graphic engine out there with the most tutorials with the most peoples having knowledge of because it's free, is an ecosystem that Epic have sold to publishers that they don't need the expensive graphic engineer nerds in the studio anymore. They don't need the seniority levels they had, they can just offload to cheap labour countries to save a buck. Of course the accountants in publishing houses LOVED that. So optimization left the building.

Surprise pikachu everything runs like shit.
If they're really being truthful to all what they said then they must have no issues when Emulators fix all their s lazy work on PC. Personally, I have no problem enhancing my gaming experience on PC and that's non of their business to experience their content better than the alternative way, otherwise, they're just behaving like Nintendo unreasonably.
 
It's a 50\50 problem or you would not explain how some ue5 games run much better than others.

Heavy engine and you need a pc for the best (but not perfect) results, but it also offer the best fidelity by far and enable indie devs and AA devs to punch way above their weight.
 
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Sell your engine like the holly grail of automatic optimization.

Complain that the devs are not manually optimizing their games.

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He not complaining. He explained the reason. And to be fair it's a very common problem of this industry.
 
Sell your engine like the holly grail of automatic optimization.

Complain that the devs are not manually optimizing their games.

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I was just about to bring this up.

Even though this article is more about scaling to lower end hardware, it's still extremely tone deaf after CDPR's tech demo of Witcher 4 and them specifically going over their solution for those certain issues that plague UE.
 
No doubt developers aren't optimising enough but unless studios are targeting a 200 TF GPU that doesn't exist, then this is nonsense. I have seen stuttering and freezing on a 5090.
 
I mean, he's not 100% wrong. Devs have gotten lazy with optimization. But I think the fact that there are 20 different console types and graphics modes doesn't help. I think devs should go back and make one console per generation and not give graphics options. That means way less optimization needed.
 
Blame series S, and MS obligating developers to make a lower version of a game for Series S.

It goes back again to the importance of exclusives. Exclusives are so much better since majority of exclusive games are so optimize and really push and harness the capability of a specific console and platform
 
Oh yeah?

Then fucking push the unreal engine yourself you fucking coward.

Release a new unreal tournament that pushes your engine.

Instead of giving us fucking marvel shit cartoon in forknife
 
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I mean let's be honest, compared to last generation, developers gave up optimizing games this generation, so in some ways he is right.

BUT... The engine does have problems, but I think the majority of the problems could be solved with optimization. 🤷‍♂️
 
Tim Sweeney needs to take responsibility, the engine's performance is absolute ass. It's why games like Marvel Rivals (and other UE5 titles) will make some PC's sound like a jet engine. But then you have games like Battlefield 6 with everything cranked on the same PC and there's no sound at all.
 
When they next Stellar Blade comes out (supposedly will be on UE5) and runs as good as the original one, what will you guys say? Engine sucks?

I think he has a point. Some devs don't seem to have optimization as a priority.

PoE 2 runs like ass, actually should even be removed from PS5 cause it's a disgrace. Rogue Trader, same. Guys rather have Unity engine? Got suckered into buying this game and could only play couple of minutes on the pro, it runs like dog shit.
 
He's probably right about devs avoiding some best practices, but that's still a weakness in their documentation then for people learning/using the game engine.

This many games consistently having the same problems across so many developers, and those same games on top-end hardware having stutters tells me the engine has limitations. Unreal is middleware, it should be automating away this problems with feedback, not telling devs to do more work.

I know Epic at some point will fix the problem...I just want there to be a way to fix the older games somehow so they're not stuck being bad.
 
Devs always did better with id software engines, back when they licensed their engine to anybody. Only time I've seen the unreal engine being efficient is from devs that heavily modify it. Also the amount of UE5 games without HDR is embarrassing. Someone get Epic some HDR monitors.
 
as Unreal is not so simple to handle
Yes but Mr.Sweeney and co. sell it like it Is.
The entire premise of 5.0 was that it abstracts away the need to optimise from large parts of the pipeline, that's what they sold most of these studios on.

Not that this is anything new, UE3 had the exact same boom bust cycle in pa3 era
 
It's true dev's could do more work, but that's always true. The reality is: if they could, they would. The point of an off the shelf engine is that you don't need technical staff - which means, as long as dev's work within the engine's guidelines, the engine should perform beautifully out of the box in most real world situations. We're seeing pretty universal issues with UE5, present in Epic's own releases and tech demoes. It's so universal that the same set of Enigne.ini tweaks make the rounds every time an UE5 release hits with shit performance - which seems to be every release.

So, what makes more sense: every developer in the industy is incompetent, save for one or two? Or, Epic needs to step up Unreal Engine and spend serious time and money on pre-built automatic optimisations and fixing their fundamental issues that are clearly impacting literally dozens of titles?
 
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So, what makes more sense: every developer in the industy is incompetent, save for one or two? Or, Epic needs to step up Unreal Engine and spend serious time and money on pre-built automatic optimisations and fixing their fundamental issues that are clearly impacting literally dozens of titles?
Problem is that "paying customers take priority". This always in place even if carefully hidden.
You may spend years optimizing engine to lowest common denominator but what will console gamers will take out of it? nothing? but they are biggest revenue driver and I expect that Epic to be under pressure to cater to this playerbase. This leave less resources for others - delaying/reducing scope of features and optimizations for them.
 
Problem is that "paying customers take priority". This always in place even if carefully hidden.
You may spend years optimizing engine to lowest common denominator but what will console gamers will take out of it? nothing? but they are biggest revenue driver and I expect that Epic to be under pressure to cater to this playerbase. This leave less resources for others - delaying/reducing scope of features and optimizations for them.
I'm not sure I follow, sorry. UE5 is a mess on current generation consoles and PC. I have a fairly high-end PC and brute force myself past a lot of the problems - but there are still problems. UE5 performance is scatter-shot, it's IQ is a blurry mess of reconstructed pixels, and frame consistency is non-existent. The two main causes appear to be it's two biggest selling points - Lumen and Nanite. And they impact both PC and console users in the same ways. Lumen is a software-based real-time RT lighting solution - which most of the games using it don't need updated every frame, but it's updated every frame anyway because that's how the engine works. Nanite is a REYES implementation that turns even simple scenes into performance bottlenecks because of the nature of what it's doing. These features needed better scalability options that included using more conservative approaches in their techniques as a half-step for performance reasons. Instead, we get varying levels of "game looks like shit" unless you run things at max settings where they finally look like a modern video games instead of badly upscaled visual soup.
 
I was just about to bring this up.

Even though this article is more about scaling to lower end hardware, it's still extremely tone deaf after CDPR's tech demo of Witcher 4 and them specifically going over their solution for those certain issues that plague UE.

I believe GSC was trying something like this for Stalker too.
 
I kinda believe him. Seems plausible that a lot of, probably almost all, studios just take the cheap route with no one holding the responsible devs accountable because the marketable screenshots look nice so they are not doing it wrong. That the performance is shite is a problem that is kinda outsourced, which Epic certainly won't fix for free.
Epic and Unity both have the problem that their tools are probably used terribly, beyond the limits of current hardware, and they are blamed for results they cannot influence.
They are probably too easy to use, so any dumbass can create something that looks nice but just runs bad.
No idea how this can be fixed. They would need to include some clause that a dev needs to pay damages when their game runs like shit and Unreal gets bad reputation again and again. But who would choose their solution if it would demand something like that? Then they could again make and use their own engine. Either way the cost cutting would need to be reversed.
 
I'm not sure I follow, sorry. UE5 is a mess on current generation consoles and PC.
Consoles usually has much less problems with UE5 generally. They might not have power to run every feature at full power/scale but at least they do it without significant hithes and bugs.
PC, even high-performant one, suffers more, because if game is targets consoles first, it will target also consoles IO stack, that is currently a big bottleneck on PC etc.
In current gen architectures between consoles and console/PC diverge more than it was in PS4 generation and so became less compatible and more trouble for fast/lazy ports

Lumen is a software-based real-time RT lighting solution
Lumen supports hardware acceleration for both PC and current gen consoles
 
No idea how this can be fixed. They would need to include some clause that a dev needs to pay damages when their game runs like shit and Unreal gets bad reputation again and again.
That's current US admin level of accountability. Ie. If it works it's all our GREAT work, and when it doesn't it's everyone else's fault.

These companies have been building middleware for 3 decades(well, epic has) and promising 'ease of dev' as their main sales point the entire time. You don't get to push accountability back just because it's inconvenient, and frankly Unity for all their godawful business decisions (mainly thanks to employing literal devil as past ceo) never had nearly as much of a problem with performance output of their software, despite having massively bigger number of developers using it (and titles running on hw where unreal can't even boot, let alone run at interactive framerate).

This one is 100% Epic's doing.
 
and frankly Unity ... never had nearly as much of a problem with performance output of their software, despite having massively bigger number of developers using it (and titles running on hw where unreal can't even boot, let alone run at interactive framerate).

This one is 100% Epic's doing.
lol what? Unity not running like shit? Unity ran very often like crap in Indie games that looked like one or even two gens older. Unreal stuff at least looks current gen and (supposed) top teams unlearned optimisation only this gen it seems.
 
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Lumen supports hardware acceleration for both PC and current gen consoles
Might as well not exist. 90% of games ship with S/W RT only and for the games that have it, the differences are not noticeable.

It doesn't even lead to a speedup as SDF's are faster. Huge nothingburger.
 
lol what? Unity not running like shit? Unity ran very often like crap in Indie games that looked like one or even two gens older
So does Unreal, UE4 was notorious for bogging down even high end pcs in indie titles last gen. Not to even mention how awful VR performed on it(by far the worst vr tech stack of last decade).

Unity is far from problem free, but in terms of scaling across wide range of hw it's not a contest(Epic outright tells you that you're on your own if you target anything slightly lower end).
 
he said. "Many studios build for top-tier hardware first and leave optimisation and low-spec testing for the end

Wtf is this bullshit.
The issue is that the game runs like shit whether you have top-tier hardware or not. You're forced to use upscaling & Frame Generation to reach or go beyond 60 fps.
Traversal Stuttters happens on all hardware. 4090 here and all UE5 are stuttery fest.
Also all UE5 look like shit in comparison to the power they ask. Lumen is shit. Engine streaming is shit. Texture quality is absolute dogshit.
It's also a smear & blur festival with all games overusing Bloom, DoF, Chromatic Aberration shit, TAA etc... etc...
It's a shit engine. It's like the equivalent of Disney+ & Amazon Prime Video direction specifications level of shit.
 
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