It’s time to admit it: Unreal Engine 5 has been garbage in most games so far, and I’m worried about the bigger projects to come.

Stalker 2 made me look back and realize that perhaps it was a mistake to make Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 the industry standard for the next decade.

Of course, GSC Game World’s big comeback in the first-person shooter and survival genre is a “worst-case scenario” for a UE5-based game to crash at launch, but I’ve played my fair share of UE5 games in the four years leading up to this generation. , and perhaps Epic’s powerful engine isn’t as good for everyone as it was made out to be after early demos and The Matrix Awakens.

Some context before my rant: I don’t know much about the intricacies of game engines, programming, 3D modeling or anything else. I tried Bethesda’s Creation Engine once and that was it. I’ve never had much interest in working with software and professional tools beyond the “advanced user” level. However, I am (and understandably) very curious about all the processes and work involved in creating all kinds of video games and interactive entertainment.

Of course, I’m also someone who plays way more games than he should during the year, and this is a good way to start to understand things, good and bad. Combine that with educating yourself on the hardware and working with the OS, and as a consumer you’ll start to understand performance issues beyond just saying “it works like a wet ass” and asking for a refund (which I encourage everyone to do more often).

Anyway, do you remember the big Fortnite update at the end of 2022 that brought the whole thing to UE5.1 to make good use of Nanite, Lumen and all that? After a couple of years of hyping the new engine and trying to get developers to work around the limitations of the PS4 and Xbox One, this felt like Epic’s big moment of triumph with the new technology. Introduce everyone and their mothers to the experience for free All the stunning new visuals introduced in UE5 are brought to life in a fully featured AAA online game.

Unsurprisingly, things didn’t go as planned. The average Fortnite pro has been using the lowest possible settings for years to maximize the K/D ratio, and those of us who have packed fairly powerful hardware have made the leap only to find even more stuttering than later versions of UE4 and an overall decline performance that wasn’t worth the bother. Two years later, the situation has not changed much. If you start playing Fortnite right after updating your drivers or the game itself, it means you won’t be successful as the shaders are completely reloaded again and all that hard work is done on the fly. Not ideal.

For those who don’t know: The whole point of shaders is that every hardware configuration should (or should) prepare them to load quickly. upcoming regular gaming, which is why consoles aren’t as prone to these woes and why modern PC gaming can be pretty brutal these days, at least until your PC gets “introduced” to the latest AAA/AAA beast. Different engines (and developers) handle this differently. In the case of UE5, “fighting stuttering” is a very real thing, especially when going through huge levels/worlds, and the lack of good, correct shader compilation at launch in some games only makes the situation worse.

Even when UE5 is used quite well (see Remnant 2), with Lumen and Nanite adding lighting and levels of detail to scenes that just a few years ago would have seemed impossible, the accompanying performance hit, even on expensive PC hardware, is negligible. It’s not worth it for the casual gamer who is simply looking for a smooth and painless experience, especially when playing particularly intense and demanding games.

The solution that took over the industry even faster than UE5? Aggressive scaling and talent generation based on artificial intelligence. Both AMD and Nvidia agree on all this, with the latter using the (admittedly more robust than its competitors) technology that powers the 40 series and above. Since developers can now create frames out of thin air, it feels like graphics fidelity is advancing faster than the actual hardware used to run all that jazz, with ray tracing leading the way. The end result? Most major studios are trying to be like Crytek in 2007, achieving ridiculous visual quality that current hardware can only deliver at high frame rates thanks to crutches like DLSS, FSR and the like.

And guess what? I think the technology is working quite well and is showing more promise every year. I love the way my 4070Ti can produce frames. But even when you get all these nice improvements… some games remain stuttering and uneven, and I’m not happy to report that UE5 continues to be the worst offender. A good recent example was 2023’s ill-fated Immortals of Aveum, a game that, even after several patches, is still largely broken on a technical level. Despite supporting FSR3 and DLSS 3, it’s a wobbly mess that’s prone to crashing. This also applies to several other 2023 games, such as the surprisingly good Lords of the Fallen reboot, which won quite a few fans but suddenly freezes for a second no matter your settings and remains harsh on consoles.

These are just a few examples, but you can see a pattern here. If you don’t believe me, let the wonderful folks at Digital Foundry convince you with more data and in-depth research than I could ever provide. Also, if you’re an avid gamer, check out this list of recent games you’ve played and complained about their performance. The big exception, at least in my experience, is Hellblade 2 (not surprising considering how much time Ninja Theory spent on the audio-visual presentation compared to everything else), which was surprisingly smooth and stutter-free, save for the occasional glitch related to PC problems. I was suffering around the time it was launched. But Hellblade 2 is also a very linear game, so make of it what you will.

As we look to the future, with UE5-based giants like the next Witcher, Mass Effect, and Star Wars Jedi games looming closer and closer every day, I can’t help but worry about everyone major studios who abandoned this project. their own technology, based on the Epic Games engine, which still seems completely unsatisfactory in real-world use, outside of wild tech demos and projects where a lot of time and resources have been devoted to fixing its shortcomings.

Stalker 2 may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, and while we could lay a lot of the blame on GSC Game World for not spending too much time on it, I can’t help but think about how super slick Dragon Age is: Veilguard runs on a very wide range of hardware, all on an engine (Frostbite) that until recently was considered unsuitable for anything other than FPS. Have we all been fooled by Tim Sweeney again? Oh-oh…