What is causing performance issues in Unreal Engine?

What is causing performance issues in Unreal Engine?

even fortnite stutters, if epic themselves can't fix it then no one can

Epic made Fortnite. Epic have shit for brains and are child molesters.

devs are saving time and money using default lumen and nanite

No shit. That is the whole point of using UE5. UE5 is just trash.

Bad Engine + Shit DEI Hire Devs + Pajeet Outsourcing = Games that run Poorly

Stutters from shader compilation and asset streaming are common and require dev input and care.
Otherwise the biggest cause for UE5 performance tanking is Lumen, that shit is expensive without serious tweaking and it's plethora of potential artifacts.

Unreal Engine 4.26 is the last good version of it. It has great performance, you can port over RT features, games shader compile properly, and it works on phones.

UE5 is a total mess. There's a reason Square Enix and Kuro are avoiding it.

epic only cares about graphic fidelity with modern unreal engine, consistent framerate is optional. UE3 was the last good version.

lol Fortnite doesnt' stutter for most people

lumen
I HATE LUMEN

be Unreal Engine dev

before a dev compiles a stuttery pile of shit, give them a popup that says "hey doing this will cause your game to be a stuttery pile of shit"

alternatively make it impossible for shaders to compile during gameplay and force players to override this manually if they feel the need to

Is it that difficult to release a tool that doesn't, as it seems to do, encourage devs to release absolute garbage? There's a reason people blame UE5 because it's the consistent factor. Make your tool idiot proof if it's so excellent.

Fortnite uses the absolute latest version of UE5. Most UE5 games from other studios are still shipping version 5.1 or 5.2 as in the ones that can't even get 60fps in matrix demo on a 5090

how does shader precompilation work? do they just apply every shader to a random object in the background or is it a specific UE5 feature

the fundamental issue of Unreal Engine, as pointed out by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, its reliance on single-threading, is something that will change with UE6, which is still two to three years out from a preview.

as pointed out by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney

its reliance on single-threading

2025

single-threading

i-i-it's not the devs it's management

why are redditors like this?

It depends on the game engine and API used.
DXVK for instance has a feature that allows you to pre compile shaders for any dx8,9,10,11 title even if your driver cache is wiped because it can save a pso cache to rebuild from using Vulkans GPU extensions. It's used by steam deck in case steam can't download shaders, you can steal someone else's cache file and it rebuilds it locally to the appropriate Vulkan machine code

Just buy a $1000 video card bro.

Not wrong, infinity nikki, palword and tokyo extreme racing runs great on UE5.

For UE5 you either have to build caches ahead of time (like from playtesting or running the game with the purpose of collecting caches) which help your GPU make your caches and don't stutter from full compiling.
Rely on their async auto compile but shit is WIP and only helps somewhat.
Or you compile at runtime at either level load or make your own caching level that is a glorified loadscreen like a button in the menu to build shaders and you wait for it to complete.

microplastics

the devs, all of them can generate assets easily but they don't bother optimizing those assets.

they try to guesstimate the shader pipelines but they can't get every single shader. async methods are supposed to catch those stray shaders but it can result in graphics glitching or stutter.

can't play new games because they use meme technology that requires expensive hardware

a single GPU is now more expensive than the first computer I ever built, every part put together

wait for hardware to drop in price once it's a couple generations old

it never drops in price because each successive generation costs even more money

start looking at used GPUs

even used they're still so expensive I could have built a top of the line PC from new parts with the same money 10 years ago

I guess I'm just done playing new games since everybody wants to put in memetracing for no reason. Whatever. I mostly only play games from before 2016 anyway.

Devs simply don't understand the tools that the other devs, who also don't understand technology, have created.
The obsessed tech nerds who made games back then are noit part of the industry anymore.

Man I wish I could get a decent GPU for that cheap. As it is you can maybe find a 40XX series, used, for 1k or less.

Is shader compilation a hard thing to do? How come some games have a shader compilation step on launch but then still have shader stutter in spots? Wukong was riddled with it. Is it hard or impossible to precompile every single shader?

How come some games have a shader compilation step on launch but then still have shader stutter in spots?

Not every stutter is because of shaders, or because of the engine. There are many ways in which someone can just fuck up making a game.

afraid of being accused of racism or some kind of phobia, since devs are so "diverse" these days

Because they are the same wfh do nothings that they know these "devs" are.

Before the obsessive nerds were working within constraints like having to fit the game on physical media and the knowledge that the average consumer wasn't going to have top of the line hardware. Nowadays it feels like games are all targeting hardware that doesn't even exist on the market yet, and there's no restraint at all. If the game takes up half a TB then oh well. They'll just have to uninstall a few games if they want the privilege of installing yours.

shader compilation is just a boogeyman, modern games have simply dogshit optimization overall because you can't advertise optimization to normies and there is no clear data that prove it would sell better so as soon as it run, it's shipped.

Again it depends on the game engine and API.
Unreal Engine in particular stops their render thread so the shaders can catch up. If they don't then everything gets desynced and you end up with graphics errors. Some people prefer a hitch over broken RT. If Unreal supported Vulkan they could take advantage of SPIR-V and GPL to prevent shader stutter but that's a Epic problem more than a game dev problem.

So are PC gamers finally going to admit that PC architecture just isn't good enough for games like it used to be? The problems you have don't exist on dedicated gaming console designs where bandwidth and throughput aren't an issue.

If Unreal supported Vulkan

Well they do but it's entirely focused on Android devices, while the desktop version is treated like a neglected child.

This problem basically doesn't exist on Linux because RADV compiles shaders without stalling any threads. Steam can also download shaders on Linux.

True. Wuthering Waves is probably the biggest Vulkan game they have on mobile.

You only need to avoid "meme" AAAAAAA-etc games, most of the rest will be fine. Two years ago, when I was buying new PC, I grabbed RX6700XT, ignoring people claiming that "ayymd is bad!" and suggesting burning twice the money on some Nvidia card instead. Fun thing was, that AMD had same price as Nvidia 3060 at that point, which had much less memory and worse performance. Overall it runs fine since then, barely hitting 70C and 50% fan speed on most games (while tech spec suggest that card can run quite well even at 110C, which sound crazy). It was first upgrade in around 8 years previous PC also served around 7-8 years and each time overall cost of entire PC was around 20-30% higher, which, given the time between upgrades, was rather good scaling.

If the game has a shader compilation step and also continues to have stutter then it's more likely a stutter related to spawning assets or level loading.
Unreal is especially bad for this. Level loading causes actor spawning and actor spawning freezes the gamethread until the actors are ready which exhibits as a frametime spike.
This isn't a new issue. Unreal has suffered from this since at least Unreal 3.
And Unreal 5 introduced a new level streaming system which really didn't address this issue at all. The new system works fine for static meshes but actors (i.e. enemies, loot, etc) spawning in/out with world partition will still cause hitching.
I'm not convinced Epic knows how to fix the issue at this point.

If you think that's bad? This is how a game made by Indians is like.

When will they fix the performance issues?

I read a dev saying once that their shader pre-compilation tools were nearly useless, and I'm inclined to believe that since literally every UE5 game has stuttering issues.

Unreal no longer stops the render thread for shader compilation. This was one of the changes for 5.0 or 5.1. They just won't render the object until it's ready now.

play the thaumaturge

sends my gpu fans into take off mode

fuck ue5

It's not a hardware model lines or architecture problem. It's a lack of optimisation problem. Which is dictated entirely by business decisions just like when everything turned into shitty PC ports over like 2 years. The average user's PC could compensate for the inherent shittiness for a long while but now it's becoming too expensive. So the OP pic is right, programmers are at fault because retarded suits ordering them around are at fault. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month and all that.

From what I understand a lot of devs, especially smaller ones, are just using UE5 straight out of the box without doing any alterations. I can't wait for the Witcher 4 shitstorm.

i am

I read a dev saying once that their shader pre-compilation tools were nearly useless

I saw a video with someone from Croteam that basically said the same thing and resorted to manual caches for Talos 2, even made a special actor during development that would go around and collect them.

I don't understand how the fuck that's still a thing.

Yeah culling an object until the shader is ready is also a way to deal with the problem. Segas MMO does this where player models are generic grey models or invisible models at first until the shaders finally load. You still see their name tag to know it's a real player.

They are pussies and scared of giving devs shit since according to the narrative, they are poor bastards, very overworked, always under pressure and crunch culture le sad. Except that has been the standard since forever, the only thing that changed is their quality and the fact they now make 6 figs.

Every game seems to have performance issues these days whether UE5 is involved or not. Doom Dark Ages might be the only game I've played in years with 0 stuttering.

Blueprints are meant for things that only run once per frame, like scripts.
Anything more and you should use C++, despite the macros of the UE engine turning it into completely fucking unreadable shit, unlike unity where you write hello world tier code to communicate with it.

Doom uses Vulkan. Same with Indiana Jones. Both run really well and have forced RT to boot.

Honestly, Witcher 4 is going to run great especially for a UE5 game. CDPR did a talk on all the shit they've fixed in UE5 and it's entirely stuff to fix stuttering. They basically created their own actor system to replace Epic's shitty one.

studio uses its own engine like Valve or Capcom

the performs 1000x worse than any Unreal game

I don't get where this hate comes from? All the alternatives are way worse.

I had a lot of stuttering with Indiana Jones actually. I was surprised at how well Doom ran considering they're basically the same engine.

Source 2 runs really well especially on Linux.

Probably need to update your Vulkan driver.

Why did they even switch from RED Engine? They seemed to have a good thing going on there.

RE Engine when used for its original purpose runs great. See: RE7, RE8, DMC5
It's just not built for open worlds.

My assumption is after a decade of running a meat grinder all the devs who have worked on it were all gone and the codebase became a mess that would constantly break when they kept expanding it.

Training someone on your custom engine takes a lot of time and money.
CDPR had a very high turnover rate after Witcher 3 and especially Cyberpunk.
So they didn't have anyone to train the new staff on RedEngine.
Unreal and Unity are taught in schools so the onboarding process is a lot quicker.

Same thing happened with Halo Infinite and 343.

The problem lies somewhere between Iran and Myanmar.

Decima Engine is better than Unreal. Did you know that Lego Horizon gets less fps than the actual Horizon? Crazy.

Nonsense. Capcom is just committing the same mistake EA did with Frostbyte aka trying to use the same engine for every game. And let's not forget this fucking unit.

DMC5 runs fantastic.

There is a lot more to making something thread safe than pushing the the magical multi-thread button.
Can be really hard when you need to maintain a specific order of operations for things to not go haywire.

Last time I checked all games still had one main loop with some tasks moved to parallel threads.

Decima uses baked lighting so I'm not surprised to hear that desu.
Though Lego Horizon runs on a Switch so it's clearly more scalable.

Isn't this partly because there's way more shit to load now than there were years ago? I played it on my older pc and it slowly went from running flawlessly to raping my computer.

Most game engines are still running their game logic on a single thread.
They'll run rendering and physics on a separate thread (which Unreal does for rendering anyway) but game logic is very hard to multithread.

The CPU cores basically sit idle in Unreal unless it's shader compiling or doing SSD access for loading. Meanwhile something like FFXIV will use multiple cores to balance things like the game, network, cape physics, etc.

Never happened.

Again

Show your posting history, you liar.

Your consoles are just locked down PCs these days. What are you talking about?

Indiana Jones stutters like crazy because the auto save implementation is horrible. Every time the game saves it fucking stutters, and it saves constantly

You're rendering that menu at 700 fps, of course your GPU is sweating.

Indiana Jones

run really well

Runs good on AMD at least they made mantle/vulkan

terrible performance is le shader stuttering

231 updoots

holy digitalfoundryfag

UE 4 really is good but you can start seeing the engine's single-threaded limitations in some of the most ambitious games e.g. Hogwarts, Callisto, Jedi Survivor especially if you turn on RT as it leads to a further single-threaded bottleneck. ofc it got worse with UE5 where the 9800X3D + 5090 gets you cpu bottlenecked at 50 fps. insane shit.

It has nothing to do with GPU or drivers... it's the engine trying to save too much stuff at once. There's no getting around it. The game just stutters when it saves and it stutters more if there are more objects around that the positions needs to be saved

the latest hitman and control are where we should stop. Looks good but still unmistakeably gamey.

That person could not be more wrong
It IS epics fault and it devs ARE lazy

before unreal:

it's devs fault for optimizing!

after unreal:

it's the engine's fault, the devs are trying their best!

2012 graphics, mogged by kingdoms of amalur

powered by unreal faggotry 5

looks like complete shit yet runs at sub 60

cpu bottleneck using a 9800x3d

epic

We should've stopped back in 2007 honestly.
Halo 3, Assassins Creed 1, BioShock. They all look great and didn't take an army of Indians to make.

What game?

don't worry about it, it's peak mobile slop

I'd take that

Fortnite looks incredibly shit for how poorly it runs, used to be fine in the old engine, it only got big because it was just a polished version of of pubg that actually ran well when it came out

Retarded devs doing something wrong, I remember when WuWa came out it was barely unplayable for me even in 1080p, but now it's 1440p 100+ fps on max with few stutters when you are flying too fast into other areas and stuff like that.

barely unplayable

Barely playable/unplayable

It does especially with DX12 and having to cache shaders during the game instead of on boot or something.

Just make iterative improvements on Crysis for a decade or two and work on something actually good as a future successor.

Yea, almost every game stutters even without Unreal Engine. God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West ran flawlessly for me with no stutters but Last of Us Part 2 had stutters like it missed a few shaders even though they were ported by the same company. And it's clearly shader stutters because when I update Windows they all come back. You basically have to turn off Windows update while you're playing modern games or you're going to have a bad time when you boot it back up.

Mordhau runs on UE 4.5 i think, although that might be a misnomer. It runs great, although too many people playing together stresses the fuck out of the servers, too much data

For some reason Nixxes decide to do realtime compilation for TLOU2 instead of precompilation like TLOU1 and all their other ports had.
Why?
Who the fuck knows.

You're rendering that menu at 700 fps

And how did you come to that conclusion?

Stellar Blade, Dead Island 2, Lies of P
You don't need UE5 for good graphics. Late gen Ue4 games were solid.

Shut the fuck up.

devs are pajeets so you can't blame them
now you gotta blame management
always gotta blame whitey somehow

nooo you have to support legacy features forever

May as well cry that support for directx 9 and earlier was dropped. Didn't see anyone crying when dynamic lighting started being a thing, nor shadows, nor EAX audio, nor having to upgrade to a pentium system with a CD drive because games started needing more storage than a 3.5" floppy could provide and more computational power than a 486 could muster.
No, it's all you dumb zoomies who thought 8 years of 2005 was how hardware should be for all eternity.

i have yet to see a good looking ue5 game desu. ue4 looked much better.

Switching to UE was the business reality
The old guard left and they only have new hires and graduates and - the key word - contractors

contractors?

All large companies bring on contractors, whole teams will be majority contractors, employed by a giant contracting firm and merely seconded to work on the game
They will all be indians. No joke. My team is four permanent employees including myself, and about eight indian contractors
And they will all be Unreal blueprint monkeys
Companies can't or won't hire permanent employees and train them, when they can pay a contractor firm and get a rotation of brainless subhumans to crunch through the busywork, then toss them aside when the contract is up. That's why they use Unreal

edit: actually this developer issue is actually not the devs fault it's management because devs can never be wrong

What causes this mental illness? It's like it's impossible for journos and redditors to say something bad about game developers. They are always assumed to be 300IQ ultra competent workers who simply follow the exact commands of the managers who tell them not to optimize the game. Did they consider that gamedev is simply known for third rate programmers who are generally self taught losers that followed some youtube unreal tutorial to make a failed WEG?

I'm happy Clair Obscur is successful but people need to have some perspective about it.
It sold 2 million copies. For any AAA franchise this would not be good numbers.
The idea that a game selling 2 million copies is going to influence a bunch of AAA developers to switch gears is just silly. If it sold 10 million, maybe.

Epic gives devs basically free tools to avoid doing their job

Devs rather avoid doing their job

Wew, who would've known...

Lumen and/or Nanite, mostly.
Also lazy asset store flips with unoptimized geometry/etc.

Alyx/source 2 ran on a 1060 and was the best looking VR game, shut the fuck up

They had a lot of difficulty getting RED to do the things they wanted to do with CP77.

Not even Godot stutters. Why can't Epic fix their engine? perhaps it just has too many years of buggy legacy code to ever fix it

Just like with Unity being accessible, people with no concept of code or logic are the ones making blueprints, and have no clue or inclination to know what's going on "under the hood".

UE4 was better, but you still had the same post-processing effects in most games, so they ended up looking same-y.

Artists, technical artists, and "designers" could learn these things, but they do not, for whatever reason. Knowing how to code does not preclude you from pursuing art in any capacity, but it would take far longer for those "artists" to gain the necessary skills to not fuck up their scripts. And no, shut the fuck up, the 10,000 hour rule is bullshit pulled out of some pseud psychologists ass. You can spend significantly more or less time learning how to do something effectively.

b-but im a misunderstood creative

Yeah so is fucking everyone else, we just don't feel the need to post our creative expression on some twatter clone for likes.

IdTech is also following the shitengine 5 route because they hired the retards and fired the Crytek guys

works fine on my computer, maybe try upgrading

I installed this stutter fix mod from Nexus now my game is fixed

I installed this stutter fix mod from Nexus now my game is fixed