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[midnightAI]

Devs can use any engine they choose, or they could even make their own, so, no, its not killing games.

I do however believe UE5 is a little ahead of its time in that lots of the features will eventually be amazing once hardware catches up, by then UE6 will probably be out but hopefully it just builds on what is already there rather than tanking performance due to more power hungry features that the hardware cannot handle, but then thats up to the devs not to go after the new shiny and still with features that run well on that generation of hardware (they can do that now, they just choose not to)

 

[The Cockatrice]

Silent Hill 2 is good.

Its a good game but it has the same issues all UE5 games had. Crazy that most people ignored its performance issues.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

The guy in the OP video is completely clueless and so are all the people in this thread saying Unreal is a bad engine.
I have worked on UE engine games since UT99 and it is still one of the best engines out there in terms of workflow!
Technically there are better engines (Decima etc), but not many devs can afford to do that anymore.

Alot of the complaints in this thread have nothing to do with the engine, they have to do with modern development realities!
Games have just become too expensive to make, with hundreds or sometimes even more than 1000 devs involved.
Optimization is expensive, and publishers simply dont want to pay for it. And yeah that sucks, but thats not a tech fault!

 

[yipchunyu]

It's greatly depends on how the developers use it.
Recently, I played the Mario & Luigi: Brothership and surprised it's using the Unreal Engine instead of Nintendo's in-house engine.
I think the next Switch could have great games with this engine assumed that it supports higher resolution with more stable performance / framerates.

 

[DanielG165]

The engine is just a tool that exists to do a job. Whether or not a group of people know how to properly, effectively, and efficiently use said tool is up to skill, manpower, resources, knowledge, and time. Look at Gears 4-5, two heavy UE4 AAA titles, yet they run incredibly well across all platforms. An Xbox One X can render Gears of War 4 at native 4K and not drop a single frame, or 60fps, depending on the mode and rarely drop frames, and that console is stuck with a decade old Jaguar CPU. Gears 5 runs at a dynamic 4K/60 on Series X, and can hit 1440p on Series S, despite being a massive game produced on UE4.

Stalker 2, despite performance mode needing work, runs at 1440p internally, before being upscaled to a full 4K resolution on Series X quality mode, and contains every feature set that is available in Stalker 2’s version of UE5 (lumen for lighting and RT, and nanite), yet maintains a stable 30 fps nearly all of the time.

Robocop runs excellent on both Xbox and PS5, despite being UE5, and Final Fantasy Rebirth runs immensely well on PS5 Pro, despite being a heavy UE4 game.

Ultimately, a tool is just that: a tool. If the likes of The Coalition and other devs can utilize UE and make their games run properly across different hardware configurations, consoles included, then why can’t other developers, if it really is the engine? UE5 is immensely heavy, absolutely, but so far, from my 4 hours into Stalker 2, the current “premium” consoles can absolutely handle said engine well enough.

 

[DenchDeckard]

The guy in the OP video is completely clueless and so are all the people in this thread saying Unreal is a bad engine.
I have worked on UE engine games since UT99 and it is still one of the best engines out there in terms of workflow!
Technically there are better engines (Decima etc), but not many devs can afford to do that anymore.

Alot of the complaints in this thread have nothing to do with the engine, they have to do with modern development realities!
Games have just become too expensive to make, with hundreds or sometimes even more than 1000 devs involved.
Optimization is expensive, and publishers simply dont want to pay for it. And yeah that sucks, but thats not a tech fault!

Can you answer why all ue5 games suffer from traversal stutter and stutter in general when other engines don't suffer from those issues?

I'd love to know why it happens and if it can be fixed

 

[hinch7]

Devs can use any engine they choose, or they could even make their own, so, no, its not killing games.

I do however believe UE5 is a little ahead of its time in that lots of the features will eventually be amazing once hardware catches up, by then UE6 will probably be out but hopefully it just builds on what is already there rather than tanking performance due to more power hungry features that the hardware cannot handle, but then thats up to the devs not to go after the new shiny and still with features that run well on that generation of hardware (they can do that now, they just choose not to)

Pretty much. By the time the PS6 is out, UE5 would be a mature engine and a lot of game designers/devs would've gotten some years of experience of working on it. We should see some amazing stuff by the end of the generation.. and moving onto the next; also will get much more interesting when we have much more capable hardware - can't wait for Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk.

Outside performance issues, I'm sort of glad there's a universal engine (and not just for pushing cutting edge) because this generation has been such a shit-show when it comes to game releases and development times.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

Can you answer why all ue5 games suffer from traversal stutter and stutter in general when other engines don't suffer from those issues?
I'd love to know why it happens and if it can be fixed

The main culprit is shader compilation, something consoles do not suffer from.
Traversal stutter is usually a sign for a lack of optimization when an engine is forced to stream in too much data at once.
The reason why other engines dont suffer from this is probably becasue UE is always at the forefront of engine tech - older engines dont max out modern hardware.
It is basically a double edged sword, the more you push your game on the tech side, the more it might suffer on the performance side.
Devs not having time anymore to optimize is not really helpful either.

 

[Bitstream]

Just wait until Unreal 6 launches alongside next gen, now with 50% more stuttttter!

 

[Fbh]

Just wait until Unreal 6 launches alongside next gen, now with 50% more stuttttter!

Yup.
Next gen consoles will probably be able to handle UE5 better and we'll get a nice cross gen period where UE5 games look and run nicely on Ps6/Nextbox.
Then we'll get UE6, everyone will switch to it for the sake of graphics and it's back to 1080p-1440p 30fps or 720p 60fps.

 

[Wolzard]

There is an interesting comment in the video:

@HansLollo
2 days ago
Having worked with UE4 and UE5 for the better part of 4 years professionally now, I can confidently say that it's not the engine. It's a hodgepodge of previs/vertical promises, knowledge deltas and poor optimization. UE5 is a great engine - but not well documented. You've got to put in work (and a lot of it) to understand how its systems are interconnected, what it does and doesn't do well - and best practices to circumvent common issues. The engine is extremely dependent on manual performance optimization. That includes best practices, as well as hacks (And I can't overstate the importance of hacks). On top of that, when starting production, the engine has a habit of giving you false impressions about how well you're doing on performance. You'll see decent profiling stats all the time - but there's a tipping point you can't easily come back from once you've broken through that threshold because scaling back is way harder than scaling up. In the case of Stalker not everything is lost though, as its main performance issues seem to be happening on the main thread and how the game is handling its AI systems. Depending on what exactly they are doing, there's still tons of potential for optimization. But yes - that should have happened before launch, not after.

I imagine there is a shortage of graphics programmers, who would solve these problems.
The reason is that the gaming industry pays very little and a graphics engineer can work with AI for example and earn twice as much.

 

[GymWolf]

Producing the best graphic out of all the engines has its cost i guess.

I'll take nextgen visuals with some minor stutter over last gen graphic with perfect performance, my pc is capable of bruteforcing most of the problems anyway and i'm generally very luck with ue stutter.

 

[Shubh_C63]

lol
No one is making devs release games that push too much. This is a ridiculous statement.
Unreal is fine ... devs are bad .. gamers only caring about graphics are worse

Devs are bad, that is infact the reason why unreal engine is so good.

Per my limited understanding, In the "golden" era of gaming experiments, everyone was creating their own engines to fit their vision.
Even CDPR switched to Unreal.

 

[ZoukGalaxy]

Far is the time of ultra optimized NES game.

The more you give to devs, the less they use and the less they understand technically what they are really doing behind all the UI engines layers.

It's a curse and a blessing.

 

[Taur007]

Until we see Gears E - Day performance im placing majority of blame on the devs

 

[64bitmodels]

There is an interesting comment in the video:



I imagine there is a shortage of graphics programmers, who would solve these problems.
The reason is that the gaming industry pays very little and a graphics engineer can work with AI for example and earn twice as much.

how can the most well used engine in the industry have aspects of it undocumented still?

 

[cireza]

Just wait until Unreal 6 launches alongside next gen, now with 50% more stuttttter!

Can't wait for Switch 2 Unreal Engine 6 games.

 

[ABrokenToy]

If only Decima Engine was used for everything.

 

[SaintALia]

Man, people just love finding some kind effigy to drag out and beat as the 'demon that's killing X(or whatever you love)'. Picking a game engine to do it is something new I guess.

Although, I do miss when there were more bespoke engines. You'd have devs purpose building engines built for the gameplay systems they had in mind, or for graphics tech that wasn't readily available in other engines, or heavily tweaked engines. UE is quite robust from what I hear, so devs seem mostly happy with it. Too bad Cryengine kinda fell by the wayside(for the most part), I was rooting for that one.

 

[Neo_game]

Only reason I think devs are using it because it is easier to make games and still have good gfx but it comes at a price. Surprising to see big game studios like CDPR and other also switching to UE5. We need more competition in gfx engine. I am not sure next gen gfx will matter much. Some UE4 games still look great. UE5 I think will last 10yrs. So now it is more about performance and optimization.

 

[cireza]

It's greatly depends on how the developers use it.
Recently, I played the Mario & Luigi: Brothership and surprised it's using the Unreal Engine instead of Nintendo's in-house engine.
I think the next Switch could have great games with this engine assumed that it supports higher resolution with more stable performance / framerates.

Several Nintendo games have been using UE and they all have framerate issues. This is definitely not the engine that will make the most out of a weak hardware.

 

[cinnamonandgravy]

If only Decima Engine was used for everything.

RE engine is great too

think the RE engine follow-up is "REX".
will be difficult to not name its follow up "TREX".

 

[64bitmodels]

RE engine is great too

think the RE engine follow-up is "REX".
will be difficult to not name its follow up "TREX".

oh boy dino crisis

 

[Killer8]

UE5 has issues with stuttering which will hopefully be resolved in upcoming releases with solutions like PSO caching. Traversal stutter needs to be sorted too but it feels like that is more on the developer to optimize their level streaming properly. That is an issue found in other engines like Frostbite - see Dead Space remake on all platforms. Stutter is also a vague problem afflicting many DX12 games like Elden Ring and Windows probably bears just as much responsibility here.

Other than that, it's a pretty great engine and saves a ton of developer time and money with really good results out of the box. These are the reasons so many developers are switching to it. There is no way we would get the quality of Silent Hill 2 remake with that budget without UE5 putting in serious legwork. Features like Lumen allowing developers to re-light the scene in real-time without needing to pre-bake everything, or Nanite allowing them to forego wasting tons of time creating LODs, have saved literal man-years worth of time. This has been confirmed by developers like Ascendant Studios.

90% of the Unreal Engine bitching of late seems to have been caused by that retard Threat Interactive - who has never shipped a game and constantly gets called out by actual game developers - who is trying to grift $900k for a custom Unreal Engine 5 fork which in all likelihood is just a gigantic scam to buy hookers.

His audience simply doesn't know any better to realize he's talking shite:

 

[bundylove]

Zen2 consoles are simply not good enough

Johnny Depp sucks ass

 

[DanielG165]

I kind of equate this to if a photographer was using a camera that was a bit more complicated to use or get comfortable with, when compared to other cameras, and kept producing lackluster results. At some point, you gotta stop blaming the hardware, or in this case, software, and learn how to actually use the tool to be successful. UE isn’t a bad engine whatsoever, videos like in the OP that are made by people who have no clue what they’re talking about, and create sensationalism, however, are.

You can’t just wave a, “I’m a PC gamer” flag and suddenly believe that such gives you authority or knowledge to speak ingenuously about game and engine development.

 

[Buhaj]

All of these are UE3.
None of them look bad.

What are these games, apart from Dishonored and Batman?

 

[intbal]

What are these games, apart from Dishonored and Batman?

Dishonored | Homefront
Enslaved | Remember Me
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter | Arkham Knight

 

[Justin9mm]

Zen2 consoles are simply not good enough

A 4090 GPU is not even good enough lol

 

[Justin9mm]

The engine is new and devs are still learning, I think the graphical quality needs to be pushed forward. It's not the most important aspect but it's one of the top 5 what we see in games, maybe top 3. Being static at same UE4 will get stale after a while and UE5 can do a lot good if developers learn to implement it and optimize it perfectly. BMWK what I feel did great and it was on UE5.

The problem is, by the time they learn, the next version is released and already on to the next engine version so they are forever learning! It shouldn't be such a steep learning curve in the dev world. Fuck UE!

 

[Justin9mm]

These guys were amidst surviving the war in Ukraine. I think slack can be given to them here.

I partially agree, but if it is your craft you still need to somewhat deliver on expectations. No one is expecting flawless, but Stalker 2 is in a pretty bad state.

 

[ResilientBanana]

I partially agree, but if it is your craft you still need to somewhat deliver on expectations. No one is expecting flawless, but Stalker 2 is in a pretty bad state.

So is Ukraine.

 

[simpatico]

I think CDPR is making a huge mistake moving to Unreal. Vex is right.

 

[vodka-bull]

Is it 2008 again?

 

[Justin9mm]

So is Ukraine.

I'm guessing you haven't played the game, there are things missing from this game that are pretty basic. This particular Ukraine War stint hasn't been going for 15 years. Don't use war as the sole excuse it is this way. The game was rushed out the door no matter which way you slice it. Yes, I feel for them, what they had to go through, it is bad and has been difficult but don't give me that 'oh the war crap'

 

[mrqs]

All of these are UE3.
None of them look bad.

These examples are from late in the generation. Arkham Knight was a PS4 game.

Unreal Engine 3 from 2005 to 2012 was absolutely busted.

Also, Enslaved has absolutely all of the hallmarks of a typical UE3 game, and it's worse for that.

Saying that UE3 didn't have problems is insane. It was a performance hog and a visual mess for more than half a decade.

 

[ResilientBanana]

I'm guessing you haven't played the game, there are things missing from this game that are pretty basic. This particular Ukraine War stint hasn't been going for 15 years. Don't use war as the sole excuse it is this way. The game was rushed out the door no matter which way you slice it. Yes, I feel for them, what they had to go through, it is bad and has been difficult but don't give me that 'oh the war crap'

The war crap? Fuck off

 

[Red Crayon Aristocrat]

I saw screens of Stalker 2 from like two years ago that looked really pretty, what happened? Did they switch engines?

 

[FalconPunch]

The guy in the OP video is completely clueless and so are all the people in this thread saying Unreal is a bad engine.
I have worked on UE engine games since UT99 and it is still one of the best engines out there in terms of workflow!
Technically there are better engines (Decima etc), but not many devs can afford to do that anymore.

Alot of the complaints in this thread have nothing to do with the engine, they have to do with modern development realities!
Games have just become too expensive to make, with hundreds or sometimes even more than 1000 devs involved.
Optimization is expensive, and publishers simply dont want to pay for it. And yeah that sucks, but thats not a tech fault!

UE5 games come with performance issues and the only commonality is the engine used. Whether or not you like using it is irrelevant and I do agree that it's nice to use. However, it provides subpar results especially on PC. UE4, shader compilation stutter, traversal stutter, poor results in general. UE4-5's renderer was single threaded up until 5.5. This was primarily responsible for the very poor performance. 5.5 improved things but there are still issues. The promise of UE is to be easy to use, scalable across multiple platforms and it's performant. Unreal engine only gets a 2/3 score on it's promise. However, the one it fails horribly at happens to be the one that affects the end consumer..

The blame falls primarily on Epic and secondarily on developers. If many devs big/small are having issues delivering performant games with the engine, then it's the manufacturers fault. The secondary blame falls on devs for choosing to go with UE5 if they're not willing to partially rewrite the renderer and deal with other quirks that the engine has. Blaming the publisher is laughable and is really passing the buck on personal accountability / craftsmanship.

 

[ZehDon]

I saw screens of Stalker 2 from like two years ago that looked really pretty, what happened? Did they switch engines?

No, same engine. The game actually looks pretty stunning a lot of the time. Outside, in the rain, walking through a forest has an incredible sense of realism that's basically unmatched right now. However, there a couple of key differences that really detract. Pre-release images appears to have been rendered without upscaling, so they're incredibly crisp, whereas the game is basically non-functional without upscaling. The lighting in the pre-release images lacks light leak, meaning it was rendered using a higher quality lumine pass than the game currently has, which has incorrect GI artifacts. And lastly, a good number of lights no longer cast any shadows or have proper material interactions, including the player's flashlight. Any screen shot with the player's flashlight turned on has PBR and shadowed lighting disabled within the light radius, which literally looks worse than the original game from 2007. All of these changes appear to stem from performance issues, where they simply couldn't resolve these issues before launch. Some of that is on the technical overreach of the developer, sure, but a good chunk falls on UE5 and it's incredibly heavy nature. It's simply too heavy for what's ending up on the screen.

 

[Loomy]

Fortnite and The Finals run just fine on everything lol.

On a more serious note. The video title is clickbait made worse by the fact that the person who made it has no idea what they're talking about. There a lot more poorly optimized games being released these days running on a bunch of different engines. The common denominator is not the engine. It's that the floor for what qualifies as a quality release is now subterranean.

 

[Bieren]

Wonder how many of the issues around UE5 and being difficult to optimize are related to Tencent basically being in control. Profits over a quality product.

 

[Seider]

Watch this at 60 fps on Youtube. I cant believe people dont like Unreal Engine 5 after watching this video.

 

[CartesianMan]

It's good to have different opinions and critiques.

I hope Epic addresses the issues. Currently, they are in a race to add new features, but it's time for UE to mature and adopt an approach similar to Apple's—releasing only stable products.

UE5 is far ahead of the competition, and it's popular, but we need a better-functioning engine now.

 

[elbourreau]

On paper, Epic tech is unbelievable and what it could achieve is stellar. It's just too soon.

UE5 is kind of an early access to what futur of gaming engine will be. We as dev can produce many great things with it, but it's just not as magic as the first UE5 promotion demo showed. Nanite is not as easy for Vram size issues, Lumen is very heavy and is kinda tricky to manage (emissive as lightsource can crush the framerate when showing heavy VFX). World partition is OKtiers...

Anyway let's just see how it will evolve.

 

[Z O N E]

I think other than EPIC, Microsoft know how to optimise their Unreal titles. So they're lucky in that department.

They do have the 2nd best known Unreal devs on the market (Coalition).

I think Unreal is a good way for people to get into the industry as it's one of the most common engines now, so when it comes to that, it's very good. I think we're just in a situation where Devs aren't optimising games and it shows.

 

[Puscifer]

Zen2 consoles are simply not good enough

Even the best PCs can't run it and they recommend upscaling in their design documents. I said in another thread UE5 ruined Frostpunk 2 for me and plenty others and I'm running a 4080. City builders are also getting worse and worse, they used to be the most hardware friendly genre on earth to reach as many people as possible and now Cities Skylines 2 is busted on PC and they're saying in so many words consoles can't run it.

 

[FireFly]

UE5 games come with performance issues and the only commonality is the engine used. Whether or not you like using it is irrelevant and I do agree that it's nice to use. However, it provides subpar results especially on PC. UE4, shader compilation stutter, traversal stutter, poor results in general. UE4-5's renderer was single threaded up until 5.5. This was primarily responsible for the very poor performance. 5.5 improved things but there are still issues. The promise of UE is to be easy to use, scalable across multiple platforms and it's performant. Unreal engine only gets a 2/3 score on it's promise. However, the one it fails horribly at happens to be the one that affects the end consumer..

The blame falls primarily on Epic and secondarily on developers. If many devs big/small are having issues delivering performant games with the engine, then it's the manufacturers fault. The secondary blame falls on devs for choosing to go with UE5 if they're not willing to partially rewrite the renderer and deal with other quirks that the engine has. Blaming the publisher is laughable and is really passing the buck on personal accountability / craftsmanship.

I don't believe any engine has a simple "solution" for PSO issues and it's up to the developer to do the QA work required to identify the main shader combinations and pre-compile them. Based on the discussion in the Beyond3D thread, the traversal stuttering is related to actor streaming, and can be avoided through proper optimization. Given that games routinely release completely unfinished, it's not surprising that the required optimization work is not being done, as this would typically happen towards the end of development.

The day 0 patch for Stalker 2 fixed a huge number of performance issues, and yet basic parts of the game that have nothing to do with the engine still seem to be largely broken.

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

Not really when you consider non- AAA and Indie studios releasing titles that don't just push a complex graphics priority.

 

[blue velvet]

Aside from horrible stutters and traversal stuttering, there's something generic about how modern Unreal Engine looks. Not sure if it's the lighting system, filter, color tone, or whatever but it makes the games look so effin generic regardless of the artstyle. Remember that distinct waxy and wet look of UE2 and 3? It's like I could easily tell when a game is running on unreal engine without even googling it. I can't believe CDPR scrapped their in house engine for some Unreal slop. there's one thing Epic is really good at, making impressive tech demos. I can't believe the whole industry falls for their bait