Unreal Engine 5 is an absolute marvel—for developers. With tools like Nanite and Lumen, studios can create stunning visuals faster than ever before, using assets with unprecedented fidelity.
However, current UE5 games tend to be a stuttering mess, plagued by huge installation sizes and terrible, inconsistent performance. Often for very little obvious visual returns. While Epic’s engine has unquestionably made the developer experience smoother, it might be time to ask: is UE5 actually making games better for the people playing them?
UE5 Games Seem to Have Constant Problems
Look at just about any major UE5 release so far, and chances are you’ll see complaints about performance and system requirements. Stuttering, shader compilation stutter, frame pacing issues, and more—even on the highest-end systems.
This isn’t just a PC problem either, console UE5 games are struggling too. They might not suffer from shader stutter, but UE games tend to miss performance targets more than they hit them, and reliance on upscaling methods and other optimization tricks to free up resources for the engine itself hurts image quality and fluidity.
It’s not hard to draw a line between UE5 and trouble for gamers. The tech is still relatively new, and many teams are still struggling to get their heads around the engine, or are perhaps just dazzled by all the toys and want to use them at the cost of performance. However, based on what I’ve read about how UE5 differs from its predecessors, it seems that a key issue is the burden for optimization now lies squarely with the developers.
While this gives game developers an unprecedented level of control close to the “metal” of the hardware, it also means if you lack the resources or expertise to tune this particular engine, the results are going to be half-baked at best.
Nanite and Lumen Are Hardware Hogs
Nanite and Lumen are the crown jewels of UE5. Nanite allows for virtually infinite geometric detail without traditional LODs, and Lumen provides fully dynamic global illumination. While both features are amazing, and certainly forward-looking, they come with performance costs.
The results of these technologies can be jaw-dropping, especially in screenshots, but that doesn’t mean much when playablility is terrible. Developers can opt for fallback options like baked lighting or mesh simplification, but then what’s the point of UE5? The engine sells a dream, but players keep waking up to stuttering cutscenes and fluctuating frame rates.
Developers Are Too Tempted by the Tools
Unreal Engine isn’t just such a popular development tool because of favorable financial rules, or cutting-edge features. Every iteration of the engine has made it easier for teams to do more with the same people, or for small teams to create complex and beautiful games with only a few core members. Just look atExpedition 33orRobocop: Rogue City.Both of these UE5 titles are effectively “double-A” budget games, but look like they should be AAA.
UE5 lets you implement complex features with drag-and-drop ease, offer access to beautiful but massive Quixel assets, and has lots of toggles to dial up they eye candy. However, while getting that stuff in your game is relatively easy, by all accounts, it’s that final fine-tuning that takes the real time and effort investment, and I think with hard release dates and a “we’ll patch it later” attitude, that’s a recipe for games that look wonderful but run poorly.
Asset Bloat Is Out of Control
It’s no secret that game sizes are increasing across the board, no matter what engine you’re game uses, but it seems to me that UE5 games in particular are just enormous, and not always for a clear reason. ThatValley of the Ancientdemo on UE5 back in 2021 weighed in at a whopping 100GB,for a demo.Clair Obscur: Expedition 33is at the smaller end of the scale for what I’ve seen, at around 41GB. The relatively shortSenua’s Sacrifice: Hellblade IIcomes in at 70GB, and it’s not unusual for longer UE5 games to far exceed 100GB.
Compare this to the absolutely massive open-worldCryEngine-poweredKingdom Come: Deliverance II,clocking in at 81GB orCyberpunk 2077including its expansion only takes up around 90GB on my Mac’s SSD. It’s not of these games look any worse than a UE5 game either, quite the contrary, but somehow UE5 games just seem to need a huge chunk of minimum space.
Given that my PlayStation 5 only has around 667GB of usable space, it almost feels like UE5 games are going to force me to buy a bigger SSD—unless I just don’t play them at all, that is.
Some Developers Show It Can Be Done
The thing is, clearly, we can’t put the blame squarely just on a game engine. Anyone can make a game that performs poorly on any engine, and perhaps with those other games using alternative engines, it’s just that the developers are more comfortable with the tools and workflows, or have already learned the hard lessons when it comes to optimization.
It’s not a developer that decides to push out a game before it’s full baked either. Game development is a business after all, and a game that (barely) runs can still make money when you push it out the door.
We’ve already seen UE5 games that run great, and that’s a combination of devs who are learning the ropes, and Epic updating UE5 to address some of the more common complaints. For one thing, shader pre-compilation is now apparently much more automated and less reliant on the developer knowing what they’re doing when it comes to ensuring shaders don’t get compiled during gameplay, causing stutters.
We saw an amazingWitcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demowhich, if you take it at the developer’s word, is running butter-smooth on a base PS5 with virtually all of UE5’s bells and whistles turned on, but tuned to perfection.
Current UE5 games have also received attention after launch, and for many the major performance issues have at least been reduced to acceptable levels, but we’re not at the point yet where I don’t have a negative reaction to a newly-announced game using Unreal Engine 5. Here’s hoping we get there eventually.
