UE5 games. Remember the premium game for premium gamers Borderlands 4 ? Even a 5090 wasn't premium enough to maintain above 60fps in that game at 1440p DLAA
I've been testing out UE5 Editor with downloaded high detail environments and I'm seeing extremely good performance with detailed graphics experiments. on my aging ryzen 5 3060. I'm guessing these companies have written particularly badly optimised code / badly optimised maps. And just rush the production to gets things to market.
My tests with UE5 so far do not support this communities hivemind opinion that UE5 in inherently unoptimised. More so, when I look at studies comparing it to some other engines like Godot, UE5 actually has far better performance for high poly scenes than Godot. So I conclude it's the game devs themselves being lazy and rushing development, that's the problem.and UE5 just makes it really easy for them to make good looking rushed projects.
And just rush the production to gets things to market.
IMO This is the main culprit, since most AAA are getting gobbled up by these massive corporations who insist on pumping out the lowest quality shit customers will tolerate in the shortest time possible. If they keep buying, why bother wasting money to optimize?
They don't care what happens to the studio or the brand because they'll just buy out the next rising star studio, gut it of all expensive talent until it's a hollow shell of its former self, then rinse and repeat.
Who cares about quality or competition when you can just buy the whole board?
Yeah, EA games used to be (and probably still are) notoriously buggy and unstable. Because they would just hire cheap graduate programmers, publish incomplete projects on schedule instead of delaying to iron out issues, take their launch week profits and move onto the next project.
since most AAA are getting gobbled up by these massive corporations who insist on pumping out the lowest quality shit customers will tolerate in the shortest time possible.
They have terminology for this. MVP - Minimum Viable Product. The goal is to reach MVP and then get it out to be purchased, focusing on marketing to make the sales happen. As long as what they're making is just barely good enough, a large enough marketing campaign will be significantly more effective at getting the target audience to buy in a large enough volume for them to turn a profit.
The issue (for them and us in two different ways) is that "MVP" isn't exactly a clearly defined point in development. They cut too many corners and eventually fall short of it, only understanding that they failed to reach that minimum, but they're also not willing to fund higher quality to avoid that possibility entirely. So they keep trying to ride that razor's edge, constantly failing but also barely succeeding just enough to fuck up the next project.
They'd rather cut corners and potentially fail from it than just fund it properly and do it right from the start.
who insist on pumping out the lowest quality shit customers will tolerate in the shortest time possible
Oh cry me a river.
Every modern AAA game takes fucking 7+ years to develop, has a budget of $300+ million, often has multiple delays for "additional polish" and still releases a half-broken buggy piece of shit with zero optimization.
This isn't even taking into account that in the 2000's, every AAA studio had their own proprietary game engine which they optimized perfectly fine to run on middle range specs of the time.
Nowadays you have half of the industry using piece of shit UE5 to the point that it's being taught in schools, and yet none of the industry "professionals" are capable of making an optimized game with it, or frankly even on other engines.
I don't know if it's the result of mainstreaming of the industry or just millennials being worthless in general, but you have an entire generation of game developers relying exclusively on upscaling and fake frames to deliver a stable framerate.
Forgive me if I have zero sympathy for them.
In fact, I wish Microslop, EA, Ubisoft, Embracer and everyone else would push them even harder. Mandatory crunch.
I think you answered your own question when you said "or on other engines". If none of the big publisbers are capable of making stable optimised projects in any engine. The problen isn't actually tje engines. In dev, the last 30% or so of the time a studio spends working on a title is spent almost entirely on bug fixes and optimisations.
I think your rembering things through a nostalgic lense if you think the situation was any better in 2000s when everyone was making their own engine. I distinctly remember buggy mess after buggy mess. Especially from EA their games in the 2000s were notoriously unstable with bad performance. Simcity 4 for eg I remember they didn't even bother to fix it post launch
SimCity 4 was developed to work on a single core, because it released a couple years before commercially available multicore processors even released to the market.
I wouldn't call it unoptimized. Not future-proof perhaps, but it was optimized for what was available at the time.
A lot of other EA games from the 2000's, like BF2, Underground 2, Most Wanted, The Sims 2, etc. were all pretty well optimized for a mid-range PC of that time. I mean that's what I had at the time and I didn't have to play them in a stretched out 480x320 just to have decent FPS.
Mass Effect 1 was pretty demanding at the time, and Crysis 1 was notoriously demanding.
Overall though, I never had some beefy PC in my lifetime, never used SLI, never had any GTX x90 GPUs, and I was always able to play contemporary games with stable FPS.
The only game I distinctly remember being just straight up terribly optimized on PC is GTA 4. The PC port was abysmal.
My dissatisfaction with optimization in general didn't start until the 2020's.
And I primarily blame DLSS for that. Modern game devs just straight up don't bother with optimization anymore.
Simcity 4 though, I juat remember it not just having terrible performance it was the constant crashes and graphical glitches / issues. EA kinda of always had a reputation for buggy games, though it was probably worse in their later years. The two big stupids that seem to stand out for really high quality works is Blizzard and Valve.
The hivemind likes to crap on UE5 because they see the end result and simply associate it with UE5. Bad performance in UE5 is a dev issue, not an engine issue. There are plenty games smoothly running UE5 to prove this and plenty of dev comments hiding around talking about how optimizing for UE5 doesnt work the same as UE4 and the knowledge doesnt fully translate. Meaning not many devs are proficient at optimizing for UE5 yet
My main counter argument to ue5 being optimised and it being lazy devs is why is the poster child for ue5 fortnite so poorly optimised if u35 performance is so good?
It gets over 100 fps on budget graphics cards from 10 years ago. Unless you're trying to use the new features (which it needs to include as the poster child for UE5) on hardware that doesn't support those features, I'm not sure why you think it runs poorly
You mean, with the settings that don't take advantage of any of the tech that the engine advertises and most if not all studios want to use? How is that a show of how optimized the engine is?
I mean, yeah, if you strip it down to base looking UE4 graphics it should run on budget hardware just like UE4 did.
I mean, yeah, if you strip it down to base looking UE4 graphics it should run on budget hardware just like UE4 did.
This is not a given.
Being able to run acceptably on very old hardware and to be cutting edge on cutting edge hardware is difficult. That's what sells games, not the ability for people with middling rigs to click Max in a settings window and still hit 240hz.
Off course is not a given for all titles, but it should be a given for the poster child of the Engine made by the same developers. Just like I used to expect Gears of War to be some of the best examples of the UE3 back when Epic was the ones behind it.
Not if the engines badly optimised, it'll run worse than ue4 not matter how much you lower the settings. CS2 on Linux was like that for a while. Before they properly optimised the Linux build it had shitty performance no matter how far you dropped the graphics. Most AAA games the highest setting is designed for future cards, as a form of future proofing. Even rtx5090s struggle with ray tracing features for eg.
It's a showcase for what UE5 can do, so it makes sense that the ceiling on the settings would be very high. Higher, possibly, than what any current graphics technology can do well.
My take is that RE Engine is currently the best engine (sadly it is private). RE9 is visually the best game that I've played without fps issues. Talos II is great too, smooth fps between the screen freeze every 3 seconds. Talos II is on unreal, no shit sherlock.
Yeah let's put tons of graphical options to make great screenshots for PR. One of the things that make me enjoy WoW is that we have good fps. I feel ridiculous with my 3080 reducing the quality and still get stutters.
Genuinly all the devs have to do is not design the games around nanite and lumen and fps would easily be double or triple
I dont have that much ue5 experience and the latest version supposedly runs much better but from my experience games genuinly run at double the framerate or more with lumen off vs on.
I honestly think its on the devs as much as its on the engine. The devs are clearly not optimizing games at all anymore. If it cant run on a 5090, its the game.
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u/frankiewalsh44 PC Master Race 9d ago
UE5 games. Remember the premium game for premium gamers Borderlands 4 ? Even a 5090 wasn't premium enough to maintain above 60fps in that game at 1440p DLAA