5 ms·

For me this falls apart on the consumer side of things. UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially w

by branon 2mo ago

For me this falls apart on the consumer side of things. UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially worse. UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps. I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. Homogeneity of this type is horrible for customers of the gaming sector.

keyle 2mo ago
That's a ridiculously biased and short sighted opinion. UE5 is just an evolution of UE4 and the early adopters suffer from being early adopters. Beyond that there is a skill issue in studios shipping less than ideal performances on time constraints. UE5 is a marvel of modern technology from all angles.
caconym_ 2mo ago
> I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.
tapoxi 2mo ago
I am not a graphics engineer so I hope someone corrects me, but my understanding is that Unreal uses a deferred rendering pipeline to handle complex lighting, and deferred renderers only work with temporal anti-aliasing. The FSR/DLSS upscalers are typically superior to TSAA and are a reasonable replacement.
- kilpikaarna 2mo ago
  Deferred rendering requires a post process type antialiasing, can be TAA but also FXAA etc. It doesn't work with traditional MSAA. A lot of the UE tech is built around the assumption of TAA though.
ragequittah 2mo ago
>I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. I don't really understand making hard and fast rules like this. Clair Obscur is one of the best and most beautiful games I've ever played. The Witcher 4 has the best graphics I've seen come from a video game. Satisfactory is nuts to look at when you see an eloquent end game build. I also don't understand why people knee-jerk hate upscaling/fake frames so much. I can understand for fast-paced competitive multiplayer games, but for something like Clair Obscur where the ideal way to play is on the couch on a 4k TV give me all the upscaling and fake frames you can muster.
- branon 2mo ago
  For me, the hard-and-fast ruleset is implemented from an ideological perspective rather than a technical one. Stipulated, UE5 games can be fun and certain genres suffer less from upscaling than others. Fact remains though, that homogeneity and monoculture in tech is bad. The inability to properly render all the frames of the product I paid for, without burning thousands of dollars on hardware and emitting hundreds of watts of waste heat (and sometimes not even then!) is worse. I refuse to believe that upscaling/framegen is a solution to any existing problem, because I remember when we didn't have to do that. I want to render ALL the frames at actual resolution. Hardware is so powerful now, there should be no excuse. The only reason I will accept upscaling is as a power-management strategy to be employed while on battery. For upscaling to be required for any other reason represents a failure somewhere in the game development process. I won't pay for failures, especially when it costs me yet more money in hardware to run the failure-enabling technology. I'm not talking about playing 4k@60fps native and I'm not railing against system requirements. I get modern games require modern hardware, but the ratio of what's required to run UE titles now is skewed by an order of magnitude. Simultaneously, it feels like lowend (or even midrange) optimization has been completely forgotten. I also think that by using software like UE or Unity, you're necessarily deprioritizing a decent chunk of the "game development" process. Instead you are choosing first & foremost to participate in cottage-industry dynamics as a business strategy, with all gamedev-related decisions relegated as subordinate to your chosen business partner(s). Additionally - and I'm getting into conspiracy theorist territory here a little bit - I believe (to an extent) that a lot of these games are made with "cutting-edge" technologies mostly as fodder to propel the industry "forward" by whatever means necessary. By this I mean: producing the "Next Great Photorealistic Game" (which looks/plays mostly the same as the previous year's photorealistic game but requires NVIDIA's new $2,000 graphics card to run) props up AMD and NVIDIA by requiring their latest generation of hardware. It enriches Epic Games by requiring their latest engine with new features. It encourages studio consolidation because now you need an entity like Microsoft to bankroll development if you want any hope of competing in the AAA space. Despite how bloated and ridiculous this has become, the industry continues to grind forward as these companies perpetuate and profit from the model, because there's a decent contingent of consumers who can be relied upon to purchase whatever comes out, no questions asked. And that's fair! If it's fun, then it's fun right? But that consumer is ever-more taxed by the state of AAA gaming. And it only gets grimmer every year (as evidenced by TFA and recent happenings at Xbox). I'm willing to believe some of this comes off as arrogant or elitist (not a gamedev, no real perspective), but these are my honest thoughts, and are how I inform the purchasing decisions I make as a consumer. Looking at where we're at and where we're going versus where we came from clashes with my ideology and makes it unfun to me personally.
simoncion 2mo ago
> UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps. I don't know exactly what you mean by "baseline", but the most recent UE5 game I've played that pretty consistently gets better than your "basic target" is The Last Caretaker (TLC). For me, it always did better than your target in the starting area, through to the point where you embark on your main quest. Prior to that, I played a whole lot of Satisfactory, which ran much, much better than TLC. I run without AA, "upscaling", or frame hallucination. I'm using a Radeon RX 9070 on Linux, and spent most of my Satisfactory playtime with a Radeon 5700 XT.

by branon 2mo ago

keyle 2mo ago

That's a ridiculously biased and short sighted opinion. UE5 is just an evolution of UE4 and the early adopters suffer from being early adopters. Beyond that there is a skill issue in studios shipping less than ideal performances on time constraints. UE5 is a marvel of modern technology from all angles.

caconym_ 2mo ago

> I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.

tapoxi 2mo ago

I am not a graphics engineer so I hope someone corrects me, but my understanding is that Unreal uses a deferred rendering pipeline to handle complex lighting, and deferred renderers only work with temporal anti-aliasing. The FSR/DLSS upscalers are typically superior to TSAA and are a reasonable replacement.

kilpikaarna 2mo ago
Deferred rendering requires a post process type antialiasing, can be TAA but also FXAA etc. It doesn't work with traditional MSAA. A lot of the UE tech is built around the assumption of TAA though.

ragequittah 2mo ago

>I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. I don't really understand making hard and fast rules like this. Clair Obscur is one of the best and most beautiful games I've ever played. The Witcher 4 has the best graphics I've seen come from a video game. Satisfactory is nuts to look at when you see an eloquent end game build. I also don't understand why people knee-jerk hate upscaling/fake frames so much. I can understand for fast-paced competitive multiplayer games, but for something like Clair Obscur where the ideal way to play is on the couch on a 4k TV give me all the upscaling and fake frames you can muster.

branon 2mo ago
For me, the hard-and-fast ruleset is implemented from an ideological perspective rather than a technical one. Stipulated, UE5 games can be fun and certain genres suffer less from upscaling than others. Fact remains though, that homogeneity and monoculture in tech is bad. The inability to properly render all the frames of the product I paid for, without burning thousands of dollars on hardware and emitting hundreds of watts of waste heat (and sometimes not even then!) is worse. I refuse to believe that upscaling/framegen is a solution to any existing problem, because I remember when we didn't have to do that. I want to render ALL the frames at actual resolution. Hardware is so powerful now, there should be no excuse. The only reason I will accept upscaling is as a power-management strategy to be employed while on battery. For upscaling to be required for any other reason represents a failure somewhere in the game development process. I won't pay for failures, especially when it costs me yet more money in hardware to run the failure-enabling technology. I'm not talking about playing 4k@60fps native and I'm not railing against system requirements. I get modern games require modern hardware, but the ratio of what's required to run UE titles now is skewed by an order of magnitude. Simultaneously, it feels like lowend (or even midrange) optimization has been completely forgotten. I also think that by using software like UE or Unity, you're necessarily deprioritizing a decent chunk of the "game development" process. Instead you are choosing first & foremost to participate in cottage-industry dynamics as a business strategy, with all gamedev-related decisions relegated as subordinate to your chosen business partner(s). Additionally - and I'm getting into conspiracy theorist territory here a little bit - I believe (to an extent) that a lot of these games are made with "cutting-edge" technologies mostly as fodder to propel the industry "forward" by whatever means necessary. By this I mean: producing the "Next Great Photorealistic Game" (which looks/plays mostly the same as the previous year's photorealistic game but requires NVIDIA's new $2,000 graphics card to run) props up AMD and NVIDIA by requiring their latest generation of hardware. It enriches Epic Games by requiring their latest engine with new features. It encourages studio consolidation because now you need an entity like Microsoft to bankroll development if you want any hope of competing in the AAA space. Despite how bloated and ridiculous this has become, the industry continues to grind forward as these companies perpetuate and profit from the model, because there's a decent contingent of consumers who can be relied upon to purchase whatever comes out, no questions asked. And that's fair! If it's fun, then it's fun right? But that consumer is ever-more taxed by the state of AAA gaming. And it only gets grimmer every year (as evidenced by TFA and recent happenings at Xbox). I'm willing to believe some of this comes off as arrogant or elitist (not a gamedev, no real perspective), but these are my honest thoughts, and are how I inform the purchasing decisions I make as a consumer. Looking at where we're at and where we're going versus where we came from clashes with my ideology and makes it unfun to me personally.

simoncion 2mo ago

> UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps. I don't know exactly what you mean by "baseline", but the most recent UE5 game I've played that pretty consistently gets better than your "basic target" is The Last Caretaker (TLC). For me, it always did better than your target in the starting area, through to the point where you embark on your main quest. Prior to that, I played a whole lot of Satisfactory, which ran much, much better than TLC. I run without AA, "upscaling", or frame hallucination. I'm using a Radeon RX 9070 on Linux, and spent most of my Satisfactory playtime with a Radeon 5700 XT.