There’s a lot of disinformation around what Unreal Engine 5 is capable of. Most people blame the engine for poor performance, when in reality, the defaults are tuned for visual fidelity, not efficiency. When an Unreal game runs badly, people like to blame the engine. When Valorant runs flawlessly on any hardware, no one credits Unreal. The truth is, the engine reflects the developer’s choices, not its own limits. Unreal has been around for nearly 30 years. It was one of the first mainstream 3D engines and has evolved through every generation of hardware. It was also the first major game engine to run on iOS. Contrary to popular belief, much of its legacy code and pipelines have actually become faster, not slower. The same Unreal Engine 3 titles that once pushed PCs to their limits now run effortlessly on low-end hardware, proving how much untapped potential the engine has always had. That same headroom still exists today, if you know how to trim the fat and understand what’s under the hood. I previously wrote a post showing how to aggressively claw back up to 20x performance: https://lnkd.in/eDMFUc-k If you prefer a more conservative, feature-retaining approach, check out Quod Soler’s excellent write-up: https://lnkd.in/eap5HHae #unrealengine #gamedev #unreal #optimization #ue5 #ue4 #epicgames #valorant #performance
I think a lot of gamers who don't know the process of game dev need to hear this. So often you see game communities rip apart a game because it uses unreal, it's not that unreal is bad, most games developed on it are just too comfortable developing only for top end hardware and they often just don't bother optimising. As games such as ARC raiders have show, you can get unreal to look amazing and play amazing if you just have a good team focused on optimisation.
I think this is partly another scenario wherein people who aren’t involved in the game creation process notice a trend and attribute it to the wrong thing. The issue is that a lot of games made in unreal engine, upon release, do perform worse than non-unreal games. As you mentioned this can largely be attributed to choices during development rather than the engine itself. Every engine can be non-performant. But when most games you play in an engine seem to have a consistent issue then, even if there are outliers like valorant, people falsely connect the two. I think this is something that can be solved by just more performant game openly made in UE being released. The more there are the more people can associate the engine with optimized experiences.
What I mostly think is happening is that Epic is pushing ready to use and easy to implement optimising method and simple (in their opinion) GI methods, when optimising is hard. Nanite, while not being bad, is not for every project and the cost is double and even more then trad LOD method. They are implementing Virtual Shadow maps, but stop developping other GI methods like Probe based Lighting which is good for small to huge world and games. They are also putting checkboxes everywhere, when a feature can't always be their or not, it needs to be adapted to the project. They are also removing older features that worked perfectly fine. Like shader driven tesselation multiplier, light baking for small scenes. I'm not blaming the tool, I'm blaming the lack of multiple tool necessary in the engine required to be abl;e to provide for every type of project. Currently nanite tesselation is not stable, nanite landscape as well, GI is expensive, features added to rendering method are bound to TSR or TAA that blur the images, they push for extreme upscaling and Frame Gen instead of using knowledgeable optimising method should be used ! Don't get me wrong, I adore unreal an its user friendliness, but there's flaw in the engine.
You are correct and I have given your post a like. However, it is nevertheless true - and a problem - that Unreal Engine 5 does such a bad job of making it straightforward to create a performant game, even on the latest and greatest hardware, that most developers think that UE5 is not even capable of running well anymore - not on an RTX 4090, not to mention hardware that the average user has. Yes, you can manually tweak 100 lines in config files somewhere and get much, much better performance than most UE5 devs even realise. But the fact is that for some reason that I do not understand, this can be, but it isn't, a simple button click. We are talking about games here - more often than not, what is important for games is not film-level graphics, but fast graphics. Unreal Engine 5 does itself a terrible disservice by not having good enough performance / optimization dropdown somewhere, which would make it a click of a button to give developers the performance that they want. It seems completely logical to me for an engine like UE5 to have just a couple of buttons, maybe: UE3-Like Performance UE4-Like Performance And these could have a couple of sub menus as well for enabling and disabling specific settings.
"I have learned. I have seen. And I have an ambition." If you want to learn media development, I have seen no other publicly available Game Engine that can do what Unreal can from a technical and visual fidelity rating system viewpoint. I have seen the errors, caused both by my usage of blueprint nodes naively, and thing such as cached data hash mismatches (look that one up right??) that...I just didn't know what I was encountering. It took years to get to mediocre code fill ins and learning some debugging to keep things working when stuff would break. I had to learn. To do something, you either one off it or learn. Prioritizing optimization isn't always the answer but if the ambition is there...then there are at least resources to follow through. I think I get some fantastic results. Maybe not for large scale development. We're talking about optimization and the that then leads to failure a, b, or c statements kinda. That statement covers so much of what it really is: There is no success without dedication. That's coincidence. Computers aren't perfect. Unreal has its issues (somebody mentioned the double precision memory load problem) but its not shipped as "do anything". It should be, "can do a lot, not everything".
Sunny!! Right on the money. Unfortunately there's a serious obsession with creating rage-inducing content for maximum engagement revolving accessible software in the games industry. The majority of the writeups online — from random viral posts to "reputable" sites — consistently spread false information about these tools, always suggesting that it’s the engine that determines whether a game makes or breaks. It's ridiculous how people forget these are mere tools, and while features are pushed frequently in this case, the devs will always have the final say on what ships and what doesn't.. Even deeper than that fact, a lot of hate is pushed forcefully around just because it is popular to do so. This is something I have seen time and time again with Blender, up until quite recently where the smear-campaigns have slowed down significantly, since it is a tool now used widely across different industries and by professionals (always was btw, just covered by media far less in the past lol), and its online reputation has improved by a ton since.
Aren't some of the performance concerns with Unreal true though even if blown out of proportion? Replication is so bad Valorant almost exclusively uses RPCs even for state data which goes against what we're advised to do. And now there is a Fork of UE5 known as the Vite Fork which reintegrates some UE4 systems because they still perform better than they do in UE5. There is also the aspect Unreal is heavy by default, which is an issue. Opting in is easy, opting out is hard. There is also the fact disabling some plugins or features will brick the editor. It would be better if Unreal was minimal by default so you can opt in as needed, instead of going backwards looking for broken stuff. To clarify, I'm not disagree that the main issue is the lack of knowing what you're doing. Just raising the point that it is an issue to an extent, which even Epic admits to indirectly via their actions like creating IRIS.
Are we really at the point where people blame the engine, Unreal in this case (any engine would do), for bad performance? Unreal doesn’t decide to run poorly on its own. It just does what you tell it to. If you leave every next-gen feature on, fill your scene with dynamic lights and 8K textures, and then complain it’s slow, that’s not the engine’s fault. That’s you skipping the part where optimization used to matter — specifically for your players’ hardware. Performance isn’t an afterthought. It’s part of the craft. But instead, making things bigger, louder, more “competitive,” and blaming the tools when they break, just seems easier. People expect their tools to do everything for them — all at the cost of pressing a single “build for x” button. Unreal isn’t the problem. The real issue is that too many people stopped taking responsibility for how they use their tools. The tools didn’t get lazy. We did.