XCOM 2 runs on UE... and the performance is ****.

A bit of a click-bait the title, sorry in advance.

I know that any engine badly used will net you a bad performance, however I wanted to get some juicy opinions from you experienced people to point out possible badly coded/thought out parts of the game.

I bought it a couple of days ago, and on my pretty high end PC, I’m getting tons of frame drops, stutter, you name it.

Any ideas about what they could have done so wrong?.

(turning AA on is no-go for example).

Nice video!, and yeah, I already do that. Except the vsync stuff.

What I’m wondering is, if those problems are coming from UE or if they are just bad implementations of the engine itself.

I know, you couldn’t know since you are not Firaxis devs… but, guess?. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m guessing bad use of the engine.

Yeah I guess that too, but I thought it was a good idea to post here so more experienced people can comment about it. I’m still playing the game, but… yeah, it gets a bit slow at times.

Besides, I think it’s kind of bad propaganda to have a game (close to AAA I’d guess) made in UE out there in such a bad state of optimization.

Ignorant people would think that UE sucks because of that game.

Don’t get me wrong, I love XCOM, and I love UE, and to see how those two things come to play together so badly… it’s a shame.

I don’t think it runs on UE4, but 3… Or, as wikipedia says, 3.5. (whatever that means!).

teak

Have you opened the mod sdk?. Its generating the maps at loading time, and EVERYTHING in the map its actually dynamic for lighting, there is no baked in lights, only static meshes placed in the tiles. Its that what seems to be the bottleneck, UE3 never liked dynamic static meshes that have dynamic light. And the amount of stuff in a map its ridiculous, lots of assets.

It’s UE3?, didn’t know… well.

It’s Unreal Engine 3.

As with every situation like this, the Engine is the last thing to be blamed for poor performance.

Hmm that`s a very bad thing, if you ask me.
I liked the X-Com stuff, since it came out.
This x-com2 looks nice, but gameplay is not to different now, so far i could see.
Only polishing GFX to get ppl buying high spec hardware and you get not so many fresh gameplayideas.
Modding compability is great, but only for elite users.

So far i understand the problem, it is not to fix through update, or they have to patch viewrange/loaded objects in some way?
So many good looking games with bad gameplay/mechanics/sys-usage.
Sometimes i feel a bit like, that even those big companys do no alphatesting, before launch.

This is what I remember from UE3 times aswell. I made a small graveyard with terrible simple meshes with everything being dynamic light. It was painful. So yeah, UE3 really needs big optimization when it comes to dynamic lights.

I watched a stream yesterday and the fps spikes are real. Doesn’t look good at all.

I wonder why they didn’t use UE4… such a shame :frowning:

They’re trying to run MSAA on a deferred renderer. Of course the performance was going to be dreadful.

Also worth considering - most of Firaxis’s recent games have been woefully underoptimised at launch. If it’s anything like the last time round with Xcom, they’ll probably sort the performance out with a patch a few months from now.

In regards to why they couldn’t just use UE4, apparently they’d made such extensive modifications to UE3’s codebase that transferring over to UE4 would have meant them scrapping a whole ton of work and starting again, which isn’t ideal when you’re on a tight AAA production schedule.

Maybe this tips from RPS could help you maximize XCOM performance. Especially tips #7, which is actually a very old trick but apparently it still applicable for modern game engine (I have tried that to make the UE4 editor running smoother, and it does).

As one of the experienced people (I guess ?), I’d like to say that it’s impossible to say anything, really.

It’s incredible what kind of little thing can completely wreck performance. Especially if you’re working with an engine that was made or adapted in-house, and especially on PC platforms. People always talk about graphics but single-thread CPU performance can be the problem as well and that’s usually the one thing there is no user setting for. You can downgrade the graphics all day long without effect if the game is CPU-limited.

Yeah the CPU goes to 100% sometimes, when moving units for example, no idea why honestly… what calculations do you need to do except for some simple path-finding algorithm?.

Well you need to move units or objects, update physics, particles, sound, draw UI or HUD, drive the GPU, etc.

Enemy Within did the same thing, and it performed just fine. I suspect the bottleneck may well not be entirely down to just the graphics :confused:

EU/EW didn’t have procedurally generated levels.