Thank you ALL who voted this topic, in only 11 months it has replaced previous #1 feedback thread made 3 years ago. As of now, 5.4 does not tackle a lot of the issues stated here. We did get a major performance improvement from Lumen reflections and slight bump in traditional raster you would see in basepass, but Lumen GI and TSR have canceled out any performance improvements because they became much more expensive. Here was a small, but recent stress test.
Who's posting this.
I’m a writer and director working on a game title. I have independently studied game development for 5 years and began working with Unreal a couple years ago to learn it like the back of my hand. I see clear issues and ideals stemming from the top dogs incharge of UE and they need to be addressed before any next version release. I’m not a graphics programmer, but know enough about pipelines, production, and have many references that show the serious issues.
For better or worse. Unreal surpasses any public game engine(even some in-house) due to years of documentation, years of optimizations, a huge library of free assets, plugins, and it’s easy to find UE experts to hire(If you are a big budget studio) due to its massive popularity.
If such a popular engine like unreal doesn’t fix MAJOR problems like the ones explained below. Gamers will be (and already have) the ones to suffer the consequences, to some an extent even game studios.
The current path of UE5 is focused on virtual production and “games” made to run on insanely expensive hardware nowhere near purchasable by consumers(I.e. 4090’s, even overkill 4070’s)
Too much of UE5’s workflow is completely backwards for specifically game development (which is over shadowed by the many uses of UE today)…
This is not to offend anyone but offer as completely sincere, genuine frustrated and logical feedback. It is harsh but not offensive.
The main things that need to be fixed ASAP for sake of all games using Unreal.
The unethical standpoint of Temporal dependency and Upscalers like TSR.
All temporal upscalers and AA methods undo the whole point of visual breakthroughs in games like amazing FX’s, textures, and object details. These only remain stable in rare occasions of stillness.
STOP making shaders depend on TAA like contact shadows, SSAO(which the command compute smooth glitches and doesn’t work), hair, Lumen, soft shadows, bloom, and SSR(again requires hoops to get working correctly and many games it defaults to the broken non-temporal version). THIS IS RUINING visuals for gamers. You haven’t even updated TAA in unreal. You gave devs another BLURRY, insanely expensive upscaler that ruins all the visuals in motion/gameplay.
There is no point in making a beautiful game that performs so badly, it needs to upscale from 720p to produce eye sore blurry/artifacting visuals. That makes NO SENSE.
It’s an oxymoron.
Path traced like visuals don’t make blur and heavy temporal artifacts prettier and FSR3 lag isn’t the answer either.
Stop targeting PS5 and Series X. Target 20 series hardware playing at their recommended resolutions instead.
PS5 and Series X are more powerful and have biased optimizations that 1080p PC hardware like 3060’s and 6500’s (regularly priced GPUs) don’t have. Yet currently, you encourage studios to upscale from 1080p to 4k.
So when someone buys a regular priced GPU card like a 3060, Epic designs it for you to temporally upscale from dithered 540p to play at upscale “1080p” 60fps.
Absolutely disgusting
The problem with “Just buy a console, you get better hardware for the price”.
Okay, true. But then you are stuck with CRAP software that doesn’t let people control settings like AA preference, motion blur, post processing like ugly film grain. The whole point of PC gaming.
Yet because unreal forces so many important temporally dependent shaders, devs force blurry TAA and upscalers on players.
You are wasting the potential in these consoles by abusing the power they offer for things that are not important when you should be making workflows that create offer the best base performance for things that make a bigger impact. Optimizing for generic PC GPU’s and common pieces of technology(RT cores, mesh shaders, etc) will only be exponentially beneficial on consoles where such major optimizations can be offered.
Nanite is not what games needed
STOP promoting Nanite as God’s gift to rendering meshes. It clearly has worse performance than optimizing LODs yet you continue to spread lies about it.
Nanite performance is not better than LODS [TEST RESULTS]. Fix your documentation Epic. You're dangering optimization.?
Pop in will always be present due to shadows and skeletal meshes.
Epic games also needs to STOP revolving more important features like VSMs and Lumen(and I heard PGC?) around it. VSM’S and Lumen are by far more important for dynamic games.
For a game, there is no point in adding so much detail to a meshes that needs a blurry upscaler to fix it’s performance and extreme subpixel issues. The very detail becomes irrelevant when the temporal motion smearing comes into play during basic camera and or scene movement(gameplay).
This idea could replace Nanite. AI LODs workflow for preserving detail intelligently
Most LODs are made like trash today with deforming and collapsing auto-LOD “algorithms”.
Lumen is the biggest asset over lightmaps but stop catering to Virtual Production and fix the issues before moving to HWRT optimizations
Lumen on the other hand is almost there,as of now Lumen is much more expensive and even on high or known at the 60fps mode, it has a very bad performance to visual ratio on current gen gpus. It still has leaking and splochyness you hand over to TSR. Part of that reason is because it caters to game designs like FN where caching isn’t an option.
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It needs to be temporally(TAA, TSR, DLSS) independent.
Action/Common gameplay motion and temporal algorithms do NOT mix.
Especially YOUR temporal algorithms with inherent flaws. -
Major Optimizations need to be provided on a scene specific level for developers. Such as static(Building ), stationary(destructible) and movable meshes for saving major calculations. If a mass majority of projects perform very similar, this is clear sign of a lack of scene specific optimization tools. This could be done with bakeable volumes with developer controlled interpolation logic and probe based Light/Direct Light/Neither visibility for dimming.
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Here is the concern when comparing FN with City Sample. Both perform very similarly but are vastly different projects. That is a scene specific downfall in the per scene optimization tools. We should have much more caching/less computing on the gpu rather it be performing the near identical in every UE5 project.
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Not everyone is making a stylized game(FN) where a temporal upscaler may not interfere with your presentation. But third person games with actual rotation are still having major issues.
We as the gamers and game developers of the UE community want FN’s 6 billion dollar revenue
invested in common sense based game performance innovations for Unreal such as
micro optimizations, much better caching algorithms, effect algorithms that do not hog computing for a 10% difference in visuals, and offering developer appealing workflows that promote performance.
Look at other games, modern trends and surpass them.
Most games are NOT Fortnite where caching the entire scene is not an option.
Not random crap like substrate and path tracing or dedicated UE5 versions for tiny visual changes that don’t fix core problems.
Stop investing in issues that will not help regular gamers without 4090’s or even 4070s.
Post closing—
Thank you for your time and continue to vote for this thread.
I am VERY glad people agree about these issues and the amount of votes we have now.
SHOW Epic Games WE, the gamers, the GAME developers care about this topic.
Just clicking the vote button shows we care together.
Some people think getting performance gains is an obvious goal for Epic Games but plenty of unexperienced or causal people do not understand how concerning UE5’s current performance is. And after 4 releases It’s been a tug of war of performance between different effect departments, an equilibrium of constant poor performance.
Fast links to my post and replies related to this topic. (Including innovations that would actually help game performance and regular consumers with reasonable budgets)
Post #2–Definition of optimizing.
Post #3–AI workflow for UE5 for optimizing static meshes. -Possibly the best investment Epic could make in.
Post #4–Why 30fps is not acceptable and where FN’s 6 billion revenue should go.
Post #5–STOP relying on TAA and upscalers. A total recap on more issues that hurt gamers excluding lack of optimization focus updates.
And UE5 is fine, but they making new experimental features, but dont polish almost anything and lack of documentation.
