I’m a new beginner to Unreal Engine 5, so I apologize if I ask any questions that are obvious or if I have any wrong methods of doing things. I’m also only a little familiar with software specs and data usage, so I also apologize if I ask any obvious questions there too.
So I just finished an online course about Unreal Engine, but they never went over how to export and package your game. I followed a short tutorial and that seemed simple enough. I don’t think there was anything wrong or misleading with that video so I’ll leave it out for now unless someone asks.
I exported my game and ran it, and after a moment or two it starts making my PC really work hard, and probably harder than I think it should. It’s a very simple game with simple mechanics. A few of the assets have some high poly counts but nothing that should be making my game run and use 17% of my pc’s CPU power (when I examined my task manager). For reference I checked other games’ CPU usage. Resident Evil VIII for example only used about 6.8%.
I tried looking up and changing some of the render settings, but none of these worked. Not only that, but now when I preview and run my game in unreal, everything is low quality and grainy. One forum mentioned this was Lumen, but I tried disabling it and got the same results. I thought about resetting the project render settings but I can’t find a guide on how to. As I said I’m still a beginner so I’m very nervous to mess around with files since I’m not entirely sure what they will or won’t affect.
Here’s a snapshot of the game when running a preview in UE5.
The problem is the engine itself, not you, and - for once - not the tutorials.
If you want performance move to a better engine, maybe not Unity given their pay us per install don’t pay us per install BS. Maybe other, better things, like Godot? Cry?
If you want to stick with Unreal, then pay the price.
Have your game run like s*hit until you take the time to optimize just about everything in a custom engine build, right from source code - and even then you are limited to the ad-hoc choiches you probably know nothing about that the engine makes for you like TAA, and deferred rendering.
Or, you can go back to somethibg like 4.25 and publish something that actually somewhat works - when compared to the latest anyway.
Only, its not like the files can migrate backwards. Because “reasons”.
No. You have to re-create everything in the lower engine version.
Copy and past might work for most blueprint stuff (And always works for C++ if you went that route).
But all the animation assets, state machines, etc. You have to spend time moving all parts over…
And before you go with 4.25 because I said - get a few versions and run benchmarks. Start at 4.18 before they f*cked with the landscape system.
Converting upwards should always work on a project. So maybe go even before 4.18 and settle on ehatever works best for you combining performance to visual nicety.
The versions change a bunch of rendering things going upwards.
I appreciate your feedback! However, I’m going to stick with Unreal Engine 5. There are so many games made with unreal that I know there’s a way to make it run more smoothly. I just need to find where I can learn about optimizing the engine and how to save those settings, which might be hard as a beginner. Surely someone has either had this issue before or found a way to get everything working smoothly.
My pc struggles to run any simple project if I set all the engine scalability settings to cinematic, I have old hardware so it isn’t surprising. My suggestion would be to make a UMG widget that will allow you to change each engine scalability setting during the game, and using those settings to determine what is causing more cpu usage and what is causing the game to look bad. This would be good for practice and knowledge.
I think you have a better chance at drawing blood from a stone.
But to each their own.
Start by disabling everything rendering related. Then move to making sure all your assets are oprimized.
Then adjust and change nearly everything.
There is no “guide” or “tutorial” - and thats mostly because there is literally 0 way to make ue5 run decently even on a super cern computer that doesnt exist yet.
This is by design / classic epic.
Make stuff that doesn’t work™.
Double down with adding stuff no one asked for™.
Break stuff that works and shouldn’t be changed with every updadate(also™ !).
Before the engine is viable its usually 4 to 5 years. Which is why for production you use older versions.
Clients that use the engine - you know, after you write a game for some 10 years, you aren’t going to change engine just because the company behind the engine went off the deep end and is completely immoral…
I wish you could.
I’m sure many developers (even those who work for bad companies who put out DLCs before the main game is even out of early access) also wish they could.
The reality is you play with the cards you are dealt. WHEN you can’t trade them in for better ones.
There is no universally excellent engine - unless you build your own, then its definitely uneversally excellent to you.
People/developers are always going to have issues with something rather specific.
The unfortunate part is that with both Unreal and Unity the “something specific” is either crap looking graphics or bad performance.
On top of both companies adopting horrible practices, immoral TOS, and other various antics (like making you believe that suing apple is a good thing for all? Which can be framed that way, sure).
Cry isn’t like this, but its also off the deep end crazy in terms of what you have to bring to the table knowledge wise to make it work for you. At least you get an excellent grahics pipeline with volumetric based ray tracing (which is patented and not reproducible by others). But that’s slim compared to all the things you have to do yourself.
Anyway, the conversation is about how to optimize which is not to say that stating that “other engines require less of you in order to give better performance with the same assets” is offtopic, but its verging on getting there…
Your feedback is a bit blunt, but I appreciate your honesty and directness. What I should have said is that I am sticking to Unreal for now but I will probably learn more engines later to compare them. I do have some follow up questions:
Why are previous versions of Unreal more capable as you inferred? What are the differences between UE4 and 5?
In your opinion, what is the best game engine and/or your favorite to use?
How do studios optimize their games so well, such as Black Myth Wukong, which seems to be a very detailed game made in UE5 (I have not played it). I’ve seen mixed reactions on how smoothly it runs even on high end PCs, but it seems strange that a game that large could be optimized so well in comparison to a 2 minute simple game. Bear in mind I’m not trying to make anything remotely similar to that game.
Why do many people seem confident about UE5 if there are so many cons to it?
Thank you very much for these tips! Looking back at the tutorial I think there were actually a few issues, such as the teacher using a lot of 4k textures, and casting to the third person character for most of the blueprints which is not what you’re supposed to do from what I’ve heard.
@jay001020 thank you as well! I will look deeper into this as this is the first time I’ve heard of UMG.
Night and day basically.
5 is a bloated hosgepodge of nothing working or performing right.
Chaos introduction was the turn for the worse.
Performance between .24 and .25 also lowered a good 20fps.
Cryengine, but you have to do a lot of work to get it viable.
If you start right, without prototyping things you know won’t work (like landscape for one?) Then at lasts you have a chance…
Define people? Grupies on youtube don’t exactly qualify or count in polls…
Other studios? They have the backing to take the source and make stuff work. Indys do not…
I’d say I have a pretty decent GPU. I have an AMD RADEON RX 6750 XT.
As for the frames per second, these are the settings I have, which is interesting because I have smooth framerate unchecked. What’s also interesting is in my game, when I hit Alt + G (I’m on windows) my performance told me the game was running around 140 fps.
I see. I would love to see your recommendations explaining more of some of these answers to give more details. I may try out Cry engine and see if it works for me.
I see. I would expect the fps to feel smooth for you. One possible thing you could try to get rid of the grain, is change the antialiasing settings in the unreal project settings.
I haven’t tried cryengine, however, I think as a beginner, you will have an easier time learning to make something in unreal engine. Unreal engine is pretty great overall, it has just taken some bad turns more recently.
