Unreal Engine 5 First Generation Games: Brilliant Visuals & Growing Pains

First revealed back in 2020, Unreal Engine 5 promised next generation detail and lighting quality - and since then, the technology has only got better and better. Three years on, we're finally getting to play actual games using cutting-edge tech like Lumen, Nanite and virtual shadowmaps, so just how well is the engine shaping up in actual shipping titles? Alex Battaglia checks out the first wave of UE5 games including Immortals of Aveum, Jusant, RoboCop: Rogue City, Remnant 2, Fort Solis and Desordre to discover where UE5 excels, where it needs improvements and how developers can better utilise the features it has for PC gamers.
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[@Obraxis]

We’re working in Unreal Engine 5 for the next Subnautica… trying to be mindful as we work. UE5 really does let you do amazing visuals. Can’t wait to show people when we’re ready! Thanks for the video, always great to see what other Devs do with the same tools.

[@TNM001]

will it perform as fantastically as most 2023/UE5 titles did? just asking for entertainment value. ;)

[@gronkymug2590]

Next Subnautica!!! Link please!

[@jmarasco8342]

Love Subnautica!

[@savedbybravado4382]

Industry news in yt comments

[@mechanicalmonk2020]

The first subnautica is still broken tho

[@OptimumSlinky]

Something worth noting: For good multithreading to come to more game engines and more games, the industry itself has to change. Writing MT code is hard. Writing good MT code takes experience and expertise that isn’t found in the games industry frequently, as the programmers good enough to do it will leave to go make more money elsewhere and not risk getting laid off every 12-18 months. Turnover, compensation, and retention actively stand in the way of progress in this regard.

[@Nintenboy01]

yeah we seemed to have more programmers good at MT code back in the PS3 and PS4 era, and that was important due to how weak each individual core was. Now a lot of grunt programming work is outsourced or handled by relatively new hires. Might also explain how Nintendo gets so much out of the Switch CPU - they have great employee retention

[@tbunreall]

Epic / Unreal is working on their "Mass" systems which will be rolling out and helping with memory management and multithreading.

[@Aidiakapi]

Whilst of course plenty of excellent engineers leave the industry for better working conditions, it's also worth noting that those with passion for optimization are more welcomed in this industry to apply their skills than in most others. Most "business software development" simply does not require much performance work, and that's the largest segment of the dev market. The problem isn't that multithreading when designing a system for it, is that much more difficult. It's that porting systems that were designed as single threaded (such as Unreal's UObject systems, on which all worlds in the games are built) to multiple threads, without breaking all code written on top of it, is nearly impossible. In more isolated problem domains, such as the rendering, animation, simulations, and particles, Unreal does leverage the many cores, but the core which orchestrates it all wasn't designed around it. So they need to develop (and are doing so), new systems that allow more code to leverage it, without breaking all projects.

[@Falconite]

Well said.

[@tbunreall]

@@Aidiakapi It will be impossible to fully multithread game engines. There are just too many systems that rely on each other to work in a certain order, that means there will always be the main thread waiting on another even if it certain threads finished first. Obviously you can optimize those other systems to use more, which unreal is doing with its Mass system

[@wrong1189]

As an avid Unreal Tournament 99 player still to this day, I love when Alex uses music from the OST in his vids just like in this one.

[@sapphyrus]

It's the biggest disappointment of the last decade that Epic dropped UT.

[@Guil_P]

Hearing the music always brings a little smile to my heart.

[@Rubicon1985]

Amen - UT99 was a very special game

[@PSYCOMMUnist]

Too bad Epic hates their own game.

[@mbsfaridi]

@@sapphyrusThe unreal tournament community project didn’t get enouh attention so epic moved he devs to crunch on fortnite.

[@charlieni645]

4:30 Hearing the phrase "from software Lumen" when talking about Lords of the Fallen was such a head turn.

[@desertfish74]

Praise the sun

[@Kubose]

The RoboCop shader stutter situation gives me a little hope for UE5 games, that demo had the classic shader compilation stutter on day 1, but the devs saw the complaints about it and got a patch out within a few days that basically cleared it up. My hope is that if devs can tackle 95% of stuttering that quickly through UE5 tools, it'll just stop being a thing for future games, but that's probably hopium.

[@chexmixkitty]

Which makes me think as to why they didn't see that as an issue in the first place.

[@WayStedYou]

​@@chexmixkittyprobably distracted by all the other work. Small dev team or they were so used to testing it before their later optimization passes that theh sidnt motice it anymore because they are so close to the project and dont notice it anymore. At least they fixed it before launch

[@CeezGeez]

i think you’re right. as devs get more familiar with ue5 some of these issues will be a thing of the past

[@mikaelkarlsson8969]

​@@CeezGeezUnreal engine has had these stutter since forever. Only a handfull of games runs without any stutter and they are often not open world. Probably around 70% of all pc games that has been realeses since 1998 has had mild to severe stutter. I dont think so many unreal engine 5 games will run flawless.

[@SidorovichJr]

Its funny, like the devs need to see us all crying on basic issues that are present once you launch the game first time, like if they never launched that game before we did to tell them its bad, whats going on here :)

[@Anna_Rae]

Hearing that UE5 is going to parallelize more of the work is the biggest thing i needed to hear.

[@jimmenychristmas7208]

🥴

[@anusmcgee4150]

Wait so it will actually use my CPU?

[@cunnyman]

Will 8 cores 16 threads finally be used???? Doubt lol

[@andyreeves6771]

Tim Epic Engine 5 the home of “omgbbq teh next generation of graphics” but also not properly using CPU architecture that’s been around for almost 20 years and is crucial for maximizing performance on consoles

[@spike5499]

@@bryanedds8922 you're cringe

[@sgtsanity]

My guess as to the reason for flat lighting in Lords of the Fallen: you can set a minimum lighting level (and it looks like they set it too high). This is usually to avoid the fizzling you point out in really dark areas lacking in samples. Fortnite uses the same trick but chooses a more appropriate value so you don’t really notice it.

[@lolroflmaoization]

I don't think that's it, if you look there is actually no "real" light source at all, it seems they went with the lazy option of just using hidden lumen emissive shapes, because the environment was designed without considering real light sources lighting it, but to be fair torches are usually too dark for environments like this, so it would require creating a lot of new art work if you want convincing light sources, thats why a lot of games with underground sections just opt to use weird plants that emit light everywhere.

[@jose131991]

@@lolroflmaoizationinteresting observation for the last part. Never thought about that. Souls games use that technique in abundance and I never just thought about it but makes sense 🤔

[@jonny-b4954]

All Bethesda games use that trick too. @@jose131991

[@Freejack001]

Lords of the Gurbage.

[@enricod.7198]

A lot of ue5 demos I've seen have really blown out highlights and flat lighting with little shaowing, in an unrealistic way. I think most devs don't know about setting this correctly.

[@SHKInteractive]

Thank you for featuring my game Desordre! ❤

[@UNMERILLY]

Loved the artstyle of the game ! Such a great vibe

[@gozutheDJ]

never heard of it before this video, it looks cool!

[@desertfish74]

Looks great

[@SHKInteractive]

@@UNMERILLY Thank you 🥰

[@SHKInteractive]

@@desertfish74 Thanks ☺

[@nomercy8989]

I honestly hope we see more games with their own art style and not just realistic graphics in the future...

[@Drstrange3000]

Honestly, same. I still think they look the best still. Having every game look photorealistic gets boring after a while. Fornite and Jusant look great on UE5.

[@patrickbateman1660]

THIS. Its why the new spider man looks meh. Zero personality.

[@QuentinBrutus]

NO this is the right step forward , since Crysis graphics barely developed and the ultimate goal should be to imitate reality to a scary amount of detail. You can always downscale but my immersion skyrockets when it looks like real life.

[@speedracer2please]

Photorealism can be fun sometimes, but yeah two of my favorite games this year were Hi-Fi Rush and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. I'd like some variety of thought put into art direction, not just assuming photorealism when it doesn't make sense.

[@spike5499]

@@QuentinBrutus this has to be a joke lol

[@azazelleblack]

Read up on Amdahl's law. Games are simulations, simulations are serial, and so games will always ultimately be bound up on a single thread. The fact that games are even able to fully load two threads concurrently is actually rather impressive. Expecting games to make full use of even eight cores is a rather preposterous ask. By the way, disabling the E-cores improves performance as it causes your ring bus clock to go up -- quite significantly on 12th-gen, somewhat less so on 13th/14th. Disabling HT also helps performance because it removes thread contention for a core's assets, and reduces the stress on ring bus ports.

[@Lightsaglowllc]

I have a 7800x3d and Cyberpunk uses every single thread.

[@azazelleblack]

@@Lightsaglowllc Yeah, sure. I have a 5800X3D and same. What Alex is talking about in that part is "full" utilization, though, which is also what I said.

[@Lightsaglowllc]

@@azazelleblack the issue is unreal 5 barely uses more than a few cores. Cyberpunk does a good job of saturating multiple cores whereas unreal 5 just can’t do it.

[@azazelleblack]

@@LightsaglowllcSure? I'm not saying Unreal 5 can't be improved, but Cyberpunk doesn't "fully" utilize all 8 cores, which was my original point to begin with.

[@Lightsaglowllc]

@@azazelleblack got you.

[@konga382]

Jusant definitely has the most stable-looking implementation of Lumen I've seen. I've noticed very few light leak issues and almost no "boiling" shadows. The virtual shadow maps also seem really well implemented, with a perfect amount of softness. There are also some indirect shadows that look so good that I'm convinced some of them are faked (not that I mind). In an odd way, the high-fidelity lighting model really compliments the untextured aesthetic. That game makes the best use of the UE5 feature set so far, in my opinion.

[@ZacDonald]

It's usually emissive lights that will boil (and that is avoidable with large or weak emissives supported by actual lights), and sometimes light leaks. Jusant is smart to just focus on using the sun as a light source.

[@mattcy6591]

Except the game has stutter every single scene change during cinematics

[@2drealms196]

It could be the lower texture resolution & texture variety, lower poly count, less demand on ai/pathfinding, and overall lower shader complexity of Jusant is hiding the performance issues we've seen in these bigger more visually demanding UE5 titles.

[@virtualpilgrim8645]

I played through the Jusant demo about 8 times. The first moment I saw the game I was impressed with the lighting even though I didn't understand exactly what the technical feats were.

[@konga382]

@@2drealms196Certainly, the lack of NPCs is going to help performance a lot. The Talos Principle 2 is the same way. But Jusant actually has a surprising amount of polygonal detail if you know where to look. Many of the objects in the game world are very high-poly with pleasingly rounded edges, there are all those crates with fully 3D high-detail rope netting over them, and then all the little plant/fungi things growing from the ground. They're taking advantage of Nanite for sure.

[@Cinetyk]

We need this kind of DF videos from time to time and for the devs to watch them and take heed. I also appreciate A LOT the scalability argument for PC. In my life over the years it has been excellent to upgrade my GPU and go back to my favourite games (sometimes with 2 GPU upgrades after) and be mind blown with how good it looks with probably a better and higher resolution monitor and also the better performance.

[@tristanwegner]

Yeah. I even go back to some 90s 3D games, and running them in 4K with supersampling.

[@maolcogi]

Agreed. I would also love it if game developers would stop knee capping the graphics of games because consoles can't handle it. Make the graphics as good as you can, then just lower it for the consoles. Please let my PC actually utilize its hardware, and if my 4090 can't handle a game it will be awesome to upgrade later to see it at its best.

[@Pruflas-Watts]

We should have just stayed on Unreal engine 3 for a while and just funneled more modern techniques down its pipeline. Game Engines today are expensive, and the visual fidelity just doesn't justify what I'm seeing on screen. There's no balance between performance, visual fidelity and resolution anymore, and it's pretty apparent that optimization has been lacking by developers on many games this generation.

[@EyefyourGf]

Yeah because that works perfectly as we can see with creation engine from bugthesda🤡

[@danb7601]

I remember there was contrast and color in games

[@GianniCostanzi]

I find these videos very interesting, I love to understand issues and features behind the technologies that power videogames. Nice job!

[@NatrajChaturvedi]

This channel has become "Ray Tracing Foundry"

[@denisruskin348]

Nanite with concrete structures looks absolutely mesmerizing in Lords of the Fallen. The hub area really pushes above anything I’ve seen prior to this technology. Lumen is also amazing, but we have seen already brilliant RT GI implementations before, specifically with Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition. Is Alex right on ''only software Lumen in LotF?'' IIRC the Ultra GI preset ships with hardware Lumen, but the High preset switches to software and there is a clear visual difference and perfomance cost between the two presets.

[@enricod.7198]

Yeah I thought devs said there is hw lumen. The lack of shadows and ambient occlusion is still there though, which is a shame. At least put SSAO, in some scenes it looks like an xbox360 game because it's so flat. They need to add a separate toggle for hw lumen, for virtual shadowmaps and better shadows/ao settings or options. That would make the game look perfect. I don't think they will, but an upgrade to UE5.4 when it drops would be nice and boost the cpu performance which is...meh

[@vamosamorirtodos]

I think is good to point that in Unreal Engine Roadmap website they focus on performance improvements for HWRT Lumen, with the goal of achieving 4ms per frame in typical scenes, which would match the budget for Lumen SWRT running at 60fps. I hope they can do it for UE 5.4

[@sebastianlosecke8160]

Great video Alex. I really appreciate Johns and your Content. Bist halt einfach der einzig wahre Dachsjäger ❤

[@shawty10ize]

Awesome of you to throw an Unreal Tournament song in the video. I was just listening to that song the other day. Classic.

[@TerraWare]

Fort Solis is such a good looking game. I loved it when it first came out, loved the setting and atmosphere. More of a walking sim but an immersive one.

[@collinsgichuhi8255]

Yep, these are definitely some of the games ever releàsed

[@Shieftain]

lol I was thinking that too. I think Talos Principle 2 will be the bee's knees though. I've been playing the previous title recently, and am absolutely loving it, and I enjoyed the TP2 demo as well. I think the Robocop game will have a little cult following too. I tried the demo and quite enjoyed it despite its flaws.

[@Bunta1987qwerty]

The plug-ins for upscaling and ray/path tracing are in the project settings. All of the quality settings, including those for nanite, lumen, and ray tracing are always available. Menus that don’t include them are just that. The parameters still exist, but it’s up to the dev to provide the menu option to the user. Because the whole engine can be compiled from source code, devs can change anything about it, including the way parallelization is handled, and the way ray tracing is calculated. The engine is meant to be easy to use, but depending on the project, optimization may be a difficult task for less experienced teams.

[@deny_s]

Excellent overview! Alex pointed out all the issues I noticed and even more ! Hope the devs see this !

[@gr0men]

I'd imagine destructible items in Lords of the Fallen with lumen enabled is causing a lot of crashes. The devs have been patching the game almost every second day since release and rolling back some UE5 features to make it more stable. In a recent patch they disabled lumen on destructible book cabinets because it was always causing a crash.

[@JoblessJoshua]

What kind of features did they rollback?

[@NickMK]

It's funny, October is the most packed month in years, and Jusant, a damn little climbing game, is my most anticipated release. The demo was so fun.

[@kennymccormick8295]

I don't care.

[@seizonsha]

You have unique taste.

[@TwinOpinion]

Yeah, I loved the demo., Very relaxing yet intriguing.

[@mancuniangamecat8288]

@kennymccormick8295 Your childish comment says otherwise.

[@mechanicalmonk2020]

​@@kennymccormick8295 "I cared enough to comment 'I don't care'"

[@MrLucasw89]

Great Video Alex! Seeing the application of Unreal Engine's new technology is interesting, especially since many developers seem to have changed to it. Other than the RE-Next engine, I don't see any visuals come even close, though it definetly seems like theres still some work to do. Please keep us updated! :)

[@cody3335]

Lords of the fallen has so much noise without any upscaling added and it’s crazy. Everything looks so over-sharpened

[@yasifaizi4316]

You forgot kong Thay game really used everything UE5 could offer

[@TheBorgey]

Shader comp stutter is the bane of Unreal games, once they work that out it's going to be great. They should just have a pre comp when you start the game up for EVERY Unreal game. Not to mention traversal stuttering.

[@deluxo2901]

Thats what i think too but pc gamera cry because they have to wait 10 minutes for pre shader compilation

[@TheBorgey]

@@deluxo2901 I'm a PC gamer and I want the initial shader comp to be there for all Unreal games 4 and 5. The stutter is one of the most annoying things having high end hardware and having a stutter lowers the overall experience of the game.

[@awsomeboy360]

@@TheBorgey Honestly, why COULDN'T they work this out from the conception of Unreal Engine 5? This was and currently is a very known issue for Unreal Engine 4 and yet they didn't priotize fixing it from the the conceptualization phase of Unreal 5.

[@Ray-dl5mp]

Now we just have to hope they make all these improvements that are needed. We know the visuals will be great, but we don’t want to go backwards on smooth gameplay. Great video!

[@StreetComp]

VERY helpful video so thank you Alex. So helpful to know what’s going on with UE5 and how it works on PC

[@ticogis]

Love your coverage Alex, you just nailed every time. My only request, is to also give some converage to AMD GPUs, i know nvidia is dominant and has a much bigger market share but would be great to see comparisons with 7900xtx and other midrange cards. Thanks for the amazing work !

[@EST84x]

That Robocop demo actually got a massive update specifically for shader compilation.

[@Filip10101]

Alex mentioned it in this video. Look closely.

[@EST84x]

@@Filip10101 Yeah, he mentioned an 'updated demo' but I thought it was interesting that they specifically updated it for this reason.

[@Rubicon1985]

Great to hear three wheels turning. Miss UT games - UT99 had an amazing soundtrack and creativity and gameplay in spades

[@TheBigBallsOfFury]

Awesome video. Absolutely top tier PC gamer content!

[@trashcompactorYT]

It's the same as Unreal 4. Massive hype, slight letdown, eventual takeover of the engine followed by everyone getting tired of seeing it very quickly

[@BurritoKingdom]

Except it's going to be in almost every game since Unity screwed itself over and most devs decided to switch to Unreal. Right now only Sony, Nintendo, Capcom, Ubisoft, Activision and Bethesda are the only development studios that haven't switched to Unreal. Surprisingly EA has, they spent much of last gen forcing all their devs to use frostbite but since this gen started it seems they don't care and have released Immortals of Aveum and Jedi Survivor with Unreal.

[@gavinderulo12]

​@@BurritoKingdomEA let's their Studios decide. They can still use frostbite if they think it's the best fit for the given game. Also you forgot Rockstar games and Asobo Studios. And probably many more.

[@Fighter05]

Nanite/mesh shaders/virtual textures have a upfront performance cost vs traditional materials. Its lite on vram usage because the albedo/basecolor is used and higher resolution roughness maps/normal maps that accompany a modern material are not needed. So you can have a great looking asset that is higher in disc space (due to the higher poly count) and lighter on Vram. But you need to fully take advantage of Nanite by using a lot of virtualized assets to justify the upfront cost of virtualization. Once you hit that point, you can have scene complexity that far exceeds whats capable with traditional rendering methods. The speed and number of shader cores on the GPU also matter. The GTX 1060/1660ti for example are DX12 capable cards, but they have trouble hitting high FPS with Nanite. You will need to use TSR/FSR to hit 1080p medium 60 FPS on those cards if you are going to have an open world scene with a high view distance. So some will dislike it but its the only way to support older hardware with new DX12 features. Ram speed is also can be an issue; more then half of consumer PCs are still running 16 gigs DDR4. If your asset complexity hits a point where the CPU has to wait for the larger asset to be streamed in from the slower RAM it can cause microstuttering and jittering as the CPU is prepping the draw call for the GPU. DDR5 is much faster for this type of rendering. Its also possible for your game to be using a pagefile since most consumers will be running tertiary apps like Discord, Spotify, OBS, Chrome etc along side your game so there might be only 4-7 gigs of system ram available from the start.

[@DarrenTorpey]

Loved it, Alex! Can't wait for the follow-ups a UE5 evolves

[@marcdwonn9772]

Kudos for using the UT soundtrack in the background. One of us. :)

[@FPRobber]

I feel like a lot of those games would benefit from baked GI instead of Lumen. I think they wouldn't look any worse for many, many times more GPUs being able to handle them at their best visuals. Talos Principle 2 is a perfect example imo

[@Tycholarfero]

This is very likely why the UE devs allowed Lumen Reflections as a stand alone option that works without Lumen GI. The GI is great but the surface cache and SDF meshes are far too low quality by default for it to shine, and raising the quality of those by either amount tanks frame rates pretty bad; hopefully more games give that new Lightmass GI thing a try, it helps performance a lot

[@eccentricbeing]

There's definitely something going on with Lords of the Fallen's GI. It's not apparent on my laptop but on the ROG Ally, you definitely see it when you're inside places. The lighting doesn't seem to know what it wants to do. Ironically enough, the Steam Deck doesn't have that issue. Not sure if it's driver-specific or something you could manipulate within the ini files.

[@elias41790]

Thanks Alex! Incredible work

[@AngelicLion]

Thanks for the video, Alex. It's helpful.

[@paralipsis]

Interesting about the traversal stutter issue, as the devs of Satisfactory stated that one of their main motivations to port the EA version to UE5 was to rebuild the world chunks in such a way as to minimise the issue.

[@Dribin]

I really hope the traversal stutter issue in UE games gets solved soon because it really hampers the gaming experience for me. I was so looking forward to the Dead Space remake, but had to stop playing due to the constant traversal stutter.

[@Manupaya24]

Great video Alex. Hoping to see a video on AC Mirage. Looks pretty good and is very well optimized IMO, deserves some praise. Also looking forward to your Alan Wake II vid ofc. I know you have your hands full.

[@JonathanLukeAvery]

AC Mirage literally looks worse than AC Origins, a nearly 7 year old game, and in fact reused many of its assets to speed up their dev process. How is that worth praise? Lol

[@arbiter5100]

@@JonathanLukeAveryI agree, Mirage looks very dated and it’s especially egregious when you consider that Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla are all on the same engine as Mirage and yet each of those games look significantly better especially Odyssey.

[@nothingisawesome]

great video Alex, very informative

[@uleertel]

I hope Epic is now really investing on improving the foundation of UE5 with better multicore support and stuttering fixes (maybe related to the poor muticore support anyway) instead of showing new eyecandy functionalities.

[@gnoLeDwerdnA]

Tim Epic is going to get right on that I’m sure :)

[@ZalvaTionZ]

And actually fixing the countless bugs on the editor side before adding more half baked stuff.

[@piotrmazek540]

Let's stop fooling ourselves, eyecandy is what sells the engine, the community fixes the bugs Epic keeps introducing.

[@brettlivingston595]

Another educational and level headed video from Alex. Great content to combat the plethora of "bro" tech arguments accross the internet.

[@p0k314COM]

Very good video. Great comparisons.

[@tyo101]

Great video, Alex!

[@kebrus]

Some of the issues are not easily fixed, take virtual texturing popping for example. Increasing the size of VRAM usage will not do much for the popping, there are multiple reasons but one of the main ones is that you have to indirectly check what parts of the textures you need and only then load them, while you are traversing you don't know what you'll encounter in the future so there's no way of precaching to occur, same with cutscenes, unless they are completely deterministic you don't know in advance what you will need so you always load only when needed which by that time you are already rendering that surface, then it's a matter of how fast can you load it but it will still be visible. Virtual shadow maps are also very hard to use, in theory it's great because it scales detail as necessary but if you shadows are dynamically changing then they become expensive because the whole point of them is to cache results, if the results change all the time it means you need to recalculate everything all the time. So virtual shadow maps are great is the lighting is static or rarely changing but horribly for anything a little bit more dynamic, so you may only see it in games where everything is a bit more static.

[@tristanwegner]

If there is any RAM left, the brute force approach would be to load just any texture from the area into it. Increases the chance of it being found in the RAM when needed. But especially for cutscenes there is no excuse, as it can be checked once before, which textures are needed.

[@kebrus]

@@tristanwegner it doesn't work like that, no one sane will load onto memory possibility hundreds of megabytes of data for something that might not happen. While cutscenes are in theory fixed when they start it's not because it depends on the player. The best you could possibly do is create some sort of corridor or area to the cutscene so when you enter it you start loading it before it even starts with the caveat that the player might not ever start it in which case you just wasted memory. Same for the world, the whole point of using virtual textures is to save memory and your solution is to area load them so they don't pop in, you basically destroyed the whole purpose of using them in the first place.

[@user-ss6et8jt5l]

UE5 have a “prestream” for VT (for any streaming managers actually, even for nanite), but it helps only for cutscenes or other stable points of view. For forward movement you can use increased feedback factor, but it doesn’t work for angular movement We have striped out VT from our game

[@user-ss6et8jt5l]

Theoretically you can achieve more performance with VSM, even with aggressive cache invalidations. With VSM ue5 recalculates only invalidated pages. And you can do it across multiple frames (with engine modification). CSM caching is ineffective too, especially with fast movement (eg racing games). With CSM you will be recalculate all near cascades and far cascades. With VSM far pages will be recalculating rarely.

[@kebrus]

@@user-ss6et8jt5l all that you said is true, it all depends on your context, what you need and what is the game about, like you said, prestreaming only works in deterministic events, maybe in some games that's perfectly fine, but not for all of them, not using VTs is also a possible choice invalidating VSMs everywhere is fairly easy, as soon as you want to change the lighting of your whole scene gets invalidated, even the far pages, for example, try to make a day night cycle. Yes you can spread our the updates throughout different frames but then you run the risk visible artifacts, maybe it's fine in your context but not every case is the same. that's why I'm saying people shouldn't expect these technologies to magically improve over time, most of the times it's a trade off and it's up to the developer to check if it's worth it for their case. Specially for the case of VTs this is not a new technology invented by Epic and they still suffer from the same issues as the original did, simply because they were designed this way.

[@Crimson_201]

11:37 "just because a game is using UE5 doesn't mean it will always look like a UE5" but it WILL run as bad as every UE5 game that's been released.. and some tech / game reviewers will dismiss any performance issues, and claim it's a "next gen" game

[@thelaw3536]

Lies of P doesn't run bad and looks good

[@dekake]

​@@thelaw3536that's because it used unreal engine 4 lol

[@PappaAbe]

Great video, as always :)

[@dethw1sh]

wow can't wait for unreal tournament 5 to come out using this engine! it's going to be so exciting! i'm so pumped!

[@xShikari]

Fingers crossed you will be looking at Ark Survival Ascended. I'd really like to see what each setting does and comparison of their respective levels.

[@lenscapes2755]

I swear mainstream youtubers aren't looking into Ark survival ascended. It's currently the best looking UE5 game imo.

[@jose131991]

@@lenscapes2755heard it runs like oil too 😂

[@Klarden]

I'm almost sure that Remnant 2 didn't use Lumen for the same reason Immortals should've done it - Epic themselves didn't recommend using it in shipping games until UE 5.2 (and it got even better in 5.3). Also turning off nanite is not recommended by Epic themselves, as the culling and streaming of objects (among other things) gets far less optimal with it off. I kinda hope that some of the early UE5 releases are allowed to (and have an ability to, because this might not be always painless) update to 5.4+ with a patch later on

[@ZacDonald]

Nanite is also supposed to perform better than traditional geometry when using lumen and vsm.

[@alpha007org]

I'm a software developer, and I would like to comment on the multithreading part. In PS4 days, when we had 8 weak cores, it seemed like we're getting some progress. If you wanted to utilize the full power of PS4, you had to use 8 threads. And everything was progressing nicely. But then we got insane IPC increase on the PC and PS5 again had very good single core performance. And now we can again rely on Zen3/12+gen CPUs single core performance. Looking back, I wish we got 32 core CPU, but every core was as weak as Phenom or E-core. If that happened, we would get "hard core" multithreading game engines. Because there wouldn't be any other solution. So now we're in this strange situation, where single core performance is very beneficial, but we don't really have to utilize "many core" parallelism (or we use them only as a secondary step). If we were forced to utilize 32 "weak" cores, I believe the situation would be much better. Example: Imaginary Intel CPU with only 32 e-cores would force game engine devs to develop very efficient multithreading code. Prediction. Until 16core CPUs become a normal/minimum in the PC segment, we'll still be seeing 1 or 2 "main" threads, and 6+ helper threads. We want to get to the situation, where all cores are utilized equally... I hope CPU Multithreading gets a new paradigm shift in the gaming segment. As I said, we were half there in the PS4 days, and we were SO CLOSE... Future will be on another level, but I don't know which path we are going to take.

[@Nicolo-ue9xu]

That's why my i7 4770 still runs at not lower than 30 fps

[@MikAlexander]

I've been using UE5 on and off for nearly a year now for fun. It's only in recent releases the performance was increased, and when you are developing a game you are usually sticking to the same release to not to break anything. So I expect that games that started development now in ue5.3 will have more of UE features and with better performance. However, not sure about latest UE version, but previous versions stutter also when loading map chunks too. Another issue that still persist in UE is hardware lumen/raytracing glitching out when using landscape mesh. That's why many games don't have that option. Those that do aren't using landscape mesh for their terrain. Apparently it is supposed to be fixed in UE5.4.

[@Just_normal_youtube_channel]

Metal Gear Solid Master Collection when?

[@ProjectFight]

I have to say I always have better performance with RT shadows on than with Virtual Shadows. VS are still very glitchy, dont' work well with "low poly" smooth surfaces, like faces and the amount of softness is not enough. In the other hand, for very specific use cases, using field meshes shadows for the lights, for environment objects, looks much better.

[@SteamPunk96]

hearing Alex's "Well guess what?" is such a positive context this time around is a lovely turnaround.

[@A-ZoneG4ming]

The 2nd part of the demo from Talos is actually amazing looking

[@pura8898]

Pretty please cover The Talos Principle 2

[@audian666]

less then a week to go !!!!!

[@jacklawsen6390]

It's bizarre how consoles and many PC's are struggling to make sparing use of current graphics features. I don't recall N64 games sprinkling in texture filtering, or PS3 games having a touch of normal mapping.

[@EnglishMike]

The features offered by the N64 were vastly more limited than those available on the current generations. Not to mention the fact that most developers were still just figuring out how to make basic 3D games at all. And most people only remember the classics anyway. Who knows how many N64 games flopped by being overambitious or by simply being a choppy mess. There are still some people writing games for the N64 and with the modern tools and techniques they are finding all kinds of ways to boost performance and graphical fidelity that nobody from that era would have thought possible.

[@franciscoreyes4067]

In the October Unreal Engine Development Update, they said that they are working on 60 fps HWRT on consoles, so probably in 5.4. or 5.5 we'll see improvements in lighting and general performance.

[@Hakeraiden]

Rip Serious Engine, you will not be forgotten

[@GotAdam1]

I have a few of the ue5 games and have 13900k and 4090 so get to experience them with everything maxed and haven’t been that impress tbh, the tech is good but the games just aren’t put together well which takes away room the visual fidelity

[@Schizm1]

I would love for more studios to use Lumen as a, less performance heavy, alternative to RT. It looks almost just as good while at the same time all graphic card users can use it. It's not just UE5 tho afaik. I think Remedy's engine also uses software RT and so does CryEngine.

[@Totone56]

Yep, it seems Northlight uses a form of software dynamic GI in Alan Wake 2.

[@now_ever]

Thank you for cooperation with Ukrainian translators. It's really great to have oportunity to listen your videos in my native language to better undestant some minor things which I didn't understand in English. You're the best! Much love!

[@Cheynanigans__]

I'm so glad Epic is FINALLY working on the shader compilation and traversal stutter issues with their engines.

[@CheckmateStallioN]

Lies of P on PC still stands as a rarity in flawless performing UE4 games. Add to that some of the best visuals in any UE4 game and you have a real banger! Round8 are next level engine wizards. More devs should take notes from Round8

[@Lightsaglowllc]

Dead Island 2 also ran flawlessly day 1.

[@lukilladog]

It started to stutter at the beach after a while, for me. But it is one of best looking and best performing games out there.

[@Alovon]

Yeah Lords of the Fallen is a confusing case as it seems to have Lumen active at all settings? That pond you used in your video still exhibits the same reflection low settings (But with a lot more fizzle and pop, but same geometry and positioning as the camera changes, even on Steam Deck. Heck, in other reflection spots, the quality and geometry detail out of screen space increases as the render resolution does like how RT Reflections should.) So seems Lords of the Fallen is a curious case, GI seems to be inconsistent, but Reflections seem to be active at all times?

[@techieg33k]

Thanks for that Pro-tip of a quick optimization on UE5 games!

[@investorsam]

Holy smokes, you guys are on fire!

[@WT83]

The UE5 mod/tool seems like a must have thing going forward.

[@cosmosofinfinity]

The Unreal Engine 5 games I have played, I got the impression of them relying heavily on cheap tricks and STILL looking bad. And STILL the same hideous texture pop-in that has been there since Gears of War

[@SamDavies94]

Really nice breakdown of the technology

[@thedudely1]

as someone with a 1080ti, I am very grateful for software lumen and for what Crytek does with their remastered Crysis games.

[@KingfishWatch]

I advise anyone to look into The Finals, game uses UE5, forced RTGI and somehow still runs beautifully even on my RTX3070+Ryzen 7 5800h laptop

[@acoolrocket]

Well the dev team is made up a good chunk of ex-DICE people that brought the amazingly optimized pre-BF 2042 Battlefields.

[@KingfishWatch]

@@acoolrocket Pre BFV to be precise, but still it is impressive how much they managed to achieve with this game

[@acoolrocket]

@@KingfishWatch I mean BFV runs better than BF 2042 whilst having more complex/mesh density maps.

[@KingfishWatch]

@@acoolrocket For me BFV and 2042 run similar enough in 64 players mathes tbh but 2042 does look way worse while doing it, really shows there is no longer OG DICE engineers left in a company who knows how Frostbite works

[@nimbulan2020]

I was thinking while playing The Talos Principle 2 demo (my first UE5 experience) how unimpressed I was with Lumen, between the huge amount of pixel swimming in some areas and the low quality hybrid reflections. It only being the software version (though I've run into people insisting that it uses the hardware version on ultra) perfectly explains this, and I'll have to try out the UE5 unlocker to boost quality. On another note that demo had a LOT more shader compilation stutter before they pushed an update. I haven't played it since but it apparently did improve the situation significantly.

[@DrGamelove]

I’m going to be hearing the phrase “shader compilation stutters” on repeat in my head long after the video ends.

[@bdre5555]

I've been playing the new layers of fear on ps5. The visuals and lighting are incredible on Unreal Engine 5. Definitely one of the best looking games to date, and perfect game for the spooky season.

[@Jamic9]

Great video as always, but wondering when we are going to get the full tech breakdown Alan Wake 2 PS5 and XBOX video? Wanting to play the game, but not sure which out of the 2 versions to go for.

[@Stephen_Black]

I’m in the same boat, but from everything I’ve seen it’s probably better to wait for a few patches anyways. That game came in a little hot and has a ton of bugs (some game breaking) and really poor image quality on both consoles. FSR makes the picture very noisy and shimmery. Reminds me of HFW performance mode before it was fixed. I love Remedy and want to play it, but I’ll probably wait a few patches to at least deal with the major issues and by then it should be clear which console to get it for.

[@Jamic9]

@@Stephen_Black Yeah you may be right bud. Simmering issues can be quite annoying. Hopefully they will be able to implement a fix that will tone it down if not completely remove it, a bit like the patch for Resi 4 remake on PS5

[@gozutheDJ]

lmfao

[@jmtradbr]

Stuttering Engine 5

[@KyoukiDotExe]

This is a great argument to offer all options and features. This is what we're missing like TAA for instance, often you can with mods but would be much better in-game natively.

[@EnglishMike]

The problem is that the more options and features you offer in your game, the more development, testing and quality assurance you need to do, even with stuff that comes "free" with the engine. That's a tradeoff where deadlines and cost typically means limiting those features and options.

[@KyoukiDotExe]

@@EnglishMike Quality -> Speed

[@nsaratts6374]

The perform with pre comp is that driver changes require shader pre comps, updates require precomps. Lots of computing power and time involved

[@YoKhoe]

to Alex or any UE5 experts, is it possible for a game build on a 5.1 or 5.2 version to later improve utilize newer builds as soon as Epic unveils them that address major graphical concerns of the past builds? Or does that mean a full re-engineering that would need a "remaster" new release version from the developer or a modded "enhanced" version from the modding community?

[@CyberWolf755]

You can upgrade a project to a newer version of the engine, but either the dev can't afford to update and it takes time and testing so it doesn't degrade the game with new bugs

[@EnglishMike]

You can always upgrade, and there's typically no need to fully re-engineer anything, and if there are performance improvements to existing features, you'll typically get them for free. However, if you have to rewrite your code to take advantage of new features that bring a faster way of doing things, then sure, it's going to take time and money, and the more point releases you wait between updating your code, the greater the chances of changes in the engine (intentional or not) breaking your game. It's a balancing act. Typically, if you're early on in your development, you'll move with the engine, but once you get closer to your release date, you better have an extremely good reason for upgrading the engine because you will be putting that release date at risk.

[@YoKhoe]

@@EnglishMike I guess it's (unless you're CD Project Red) games that uses a proprietary game engine don't seem to improve on their botch launches beyond upgrading their engine codebase. They seem to be patched to: 1. met the previously decided original design goal 2. Degradation for the sake of performance improvements So when I see videos like this where a point release of UE5 is highlighting so many improvements, you never see them across of the existing games that had been released since the debut of the engine to reap some of (the engine's) new benefits

[@Pimpemon]

Do not turn off detailed geometry in remnant 2 unless you want the game to crash at certain points in an endless loop. Made that mistake recently. Turning it back on fixes the problem but if you don;t know that was the problem you will waste time learning that it is.

[@Taorakis]

Thanks for looking at all those. :) Let's hope they fix the stupid stuttering soon.

[@andersonanderson1009]

Jusant's design aesthetic is so good I legit didn't clock that there were "no textures."

[@xbone8950]

Hellblade 2 and next gears will be true showcases for this engine.

[@2drealms196]

Hopefully they don't have the stutter the UE4 based Gears 5 had at launch.

[@Einuhreins]

i want unreal tournament 2024

[@Stephen_Black]

I miss gibbing my friends with the flak cannon *KACHUNK!*

[@BertoBeats]

Using UE5 for my current project and seeing the same issues crop up, though we've gotten a much better handle on how to properly construct things over time to get the most out of Lumen. It is extremely fickle though, the light bleeding is so easy to cause if you dont put large air gaps between interior/exterior spaces or put opaque light blockers in. Extreme emissives will cause insane ghosting on the screen too. Glad we're a ways out from ship. Super great engine though, nanite especially just keeps getting more powerful. Just up-resed our foliage actors by a factor of nearly 100x on poly count (every leaf is modeled, rather than masked) and saw a perf GAIN lmao

[@simoncodrington]

Cheers for the video man, really great to showcase how these UE5 games are panning out. Keen for precompliation / traversal stutters to be fixed, they're super annoying

[@vighneshsivakumar3418]

I really want a followup of this video looking at performance on older or mid-range cards. I have a 6900xt and Ive had A LOT of issues in many of those games. It seems like as soon as you turn down many of those features to medium settings, they start looking really awful, and in the TP2 demo especially there were a lot of artifacts like GI bleed, reflections so dithered they looked like shit, as well as broken reflections. The reason Ive had to drop so many settings to medium in the first place is that the performance is pretty bad at higher settings, with LotF being especially awful to the point I just refunded the game.

[@jose131991]

Growing pains for sure

[@reethardio6432]

Yeah I see a lot of people excited for ue5 but a lot of games are simply running like trash on the majority of pcs

[@cube2fox]

Yeah. Alex always using his 4090 is such an unrealistic decision.

[@xkxk7539]

i remember when frostbite and cryengine were the pinnacle of game engines about 10 years ago

[@cypherpleb]

Frostbite, like UE5 has never been the pinnacle of anything. Maybe the best one size fits many solution. But bespoke engines, built to push the state of the art forward, have always been the 'pinnacle'

[@Spaceman69420]

cryengine is still way better. frostbite was great for fps games but it seems the devs who made the engine and know its ins and out left a long time ago (around after bf1 release). same thing happened to redengine (devs who know it left long time ago hence the switch to generic garbage like UE).

[@dou5689]

No graphics improvement but with 4x the hardware requirement, literally UNREAL.

[@devaraft]

Cope

[@Gr8VKS]

Brilliant video.

[@paparoxo3606]

Games like Skull Island: Rise of Kong really shows UE5 real power.