[WhereIsTheTruth]

I once made the mistake to buy some sound effects from Fab, I had to download the entire Unreal Engine and start it to create a project to then import the assets..

It took the whole afternoon

It's no wonder UE5 games have the reputation of being poorly optimized, you need an insane machine only just to run the editor..

State of the art graphics pipeline, but webdev level of bloat when it comes to software.. I'd even argue electron is a smoother experience tan Unreal Engine Editor

Insanity

[Cthulhu_]

It's just like your computer and IDE, you start it up and never shut it down again.

Wouldn't it taking the whole afternoon be because it's downloading and installing assets, creating caches, indexing, etc?

Like with IDEs, it really doesn't matter much once they're up and running, and the performance of the product has ultimately little to do with the tools used in making them. Poorly optimized games have the reputation of being poorly optimized, that's rarely down to the engine. Maybe the complete package, where it's too easy to just use and plop down assets from the internets without tweaking for performance or having a performance budget per scene.

[Stevvo]

No, it is not. You don't have to restart your computer/IDE every time you compile a project. With UE5, you nearly always do need to restart the editor.

[redox99]

It took that long because it had to compile shaders for the first time. After that it would open in seconds.

[daemin]

Yet it is the engine dominating the industry and beloved by artists of all kinds.

To get UE games that run well you either need your own engine team to optimise it or you drop all fancy new features.

[Ekaros]

Being around back in days when LCDs replaced the CRTs and learning importance of native resolutions. I feel like recent games have been saved too much by frame-generation and all sort of weird resolution hacks... Mostly by Nvidia and AMD.

I am kinda sad we have reached point where native resolution is not the standard for high mid tier/low high tier GPUs. Surely games should run natively at non-4k resolution on my 700€+ GPU...

[ThatPlayer]

Native resolution was never good enough though. That's why antialiasing is a thing, to fake a higher than native resolution

And now antialiasing is so good you can start from lower resolutions and still fake even higher quality

[boomlinde]

I don't agree with the framing of it as "faking" a higher than native resolution. The native resolution is what it is. The problem lies in how the view is sampled as it is rendered to the screen. What you ideally do when you have higher frequency content than the screen can represent is to oversample, filter and downsample the view, as in SSAA, or you approximate the effect or use it selectively when there is high frequency content, using some more clever methods.

It's really the same problem as in synthesizing audio. 44.1 kHz is adequate for most audio purposes, but if you are generating sounds with content past the nyquist frequency it's going to alias and fold back in undesirable ways, causing distortion in the audible content. So you multisample, filter to remove the high frequency content and downsample in order to antialias (which would be roughly equivalent to SSAA) or you build the audio from band limited impulses or steps.

[daemin]

Games haven't been running full native resolution for quite some time, maybe even the last decade, as they tend to render to a smaller buffer and then upscale to the desired resolution in order to achieve better frame rates. This doesn't even include frame generation which is trading off supposed higher frame rates for worse response times so the games can feel worse to play.

By Games I mean modern AAA first or third person games. 2D and others will often run at full resolution all the time.

[cheschire]

You mean back in the day when 30 fps at 1024x768 was the norm?

New monitors default to 60hz but folks looking to game are convinced by ads that the only reason they lost that last round was not because of the SBMM algorithm, but because the other player undoubtedly had a 240hz 4K monitor rendering the player coming around the corner a tick faster.

Competitive gaming and Twitch are what pushed the current priorities, and the hardware makers were only too happy to oblige.

[daemin]

There is something to having a monitor display at a higher than 60fps frame rate especially if the game runs and can process inputs at that higher rate as well. This just decreases the response time that a player can attain as there is literally less time between seeing something on screen and then the game reacting to the player input.

For a bit of background modern games tend to do game procesing and rendering at the same time in parallel, but that means that the frame being processed by the rendering system is the previous frame, and then once rendering has been submitted to the "graphics card" it can take one or more more frames before it's actually visible on the monitor. So you end up with a lag of 3+ frames rather than only a single one like you had on old DOS games and such. So having a faster monitor and being able to render frames at that faster rate will give you some benefit.

In addition this is why using frame generation can actually hurt the gaming experience as instead of waiting 3+ frames to see your input reflected in what is on the screen you end up with something like 7+ frames because the fake in-between frames don't actually deal with any input.

[boomlinde]

> You mean back in the day when 30 fps at 1024x768 was the norm?

I recall playing games at 100 FPS on my 100 Hz CRT. People seriously interested in multiplayer shooters at the time turned vsync off and aimed for even higher frame rates. It was with this in mind I was quick to upgrade to a 144 Hz display when they got cheap enough: I was taking back territory from when the relatively awful (but much more convenient) flat screens took over.

> because the other player undoubtedly had a 240hz 4K monitor rendering the player coming around the corner a tick faster.

I play 99% single player games and in most of those, response time differences at that scale seem inconsequential. The important difference to me is in motion clarity. It's much easier to track moving objects and anticipate where they will be when you get more frames of animation along their path. This makes fast-paced games much more fun to play, especially first person games where you're always rapidly shifting your view around.

[rkomorn]

I don't play any online competitive games or FPSes, but I can definitely tell that 144 FPS on a synced monitor is nicer than 60 FPS, especially when I play anything that uses mouse look.

For me, it's not quite as big of a jump as, say, when we went from SD to HD TV, but it's still a big enough leap that I don't consider it gimmicky.

Gaming in 4K, on the other hand, I don't really care for. QHD is plenty, but I do find 4K makes for slightly nicer desktop use.

Edit: I'll add that I almost always limit FPS anyway because my GPU turns into a jet engine under high load and I hate fan noise, but that's a different problem.

[Strom]

30 fps was not the norm, at least not with competitive games. Like Counter-Strike in 2000 on a CRT. Yes 1024x768 was common, but at 100 fps. Alternatively you would go to 800x600 to reach 120 fps.

It’s only when LCDs appeared that 60 Hz started being a thing on PCs and 60 fps followed as a consequence, because the display can’t show more anyway.

It’s true that competitive gaming has pushed the priority of performance, but this happened in the 90s already with Quake II. There’s nothing fake about it either. At the time a lot of playing happened at LANs not online. The person with the better PC got better results. Repeatedly reproduced by rotating people around on the available PCs.

[drbig]

> It's no wonder UE5 games have the reputation of being poorly optimized

Care to exemplify?

I find UE games to be not only the most optimized, but also capable of running everywhere. Take X-COM, which I can play on my 14 year old linux laptop with i915 excuse-for-a-gfx-card, whereas Unity stuff doesn't work here, and on my Windows gaming rig always makes everything red-hot without even approaching the quality and fidelity of UE games.

To me UE is like SolidWorks, whereas Unity is like FreeCAD... Which I guess is actually very close to what the differences are :-)

Or is this "reputation of being poorly optimized" only specific to UE version 5 (as compared to older versions of UE, perhaps)?

[mort96]

The reputation of being poorly optimized only applies to version 5, UE was rather respected before the wave of terribly performing UE 5 AAA games came out and tanked UE's reputation.

It also has a terrible reputation because a bunch of the visual effects have a hard dependency on temporal anti-aliasing, which is a form of AA which typically results in a blurry-looking picture with ghosting as soon as anything is moving.

[daemin]

Funnily enough a lot of those "poor performing" UE games were actually UE4 still, not UE5.

[VoidWarranty]

Let's be real. UE5 is a marketing term for a .x version of UE4 that broke a bunch of the rendering pipeline such that they needed am excuse to force devs to deal with the changes.

[Cloudef]

The reputation is specific to UE5. UE3 used to have such reputation as well. UE5 introduced new systems that are not compatible with traditional systems and these systems especially if used poorly tank the performance. Its not uncommon for UE5 games to run poorly even on the most expensive nvidia GPU and AI upscaling is requirement.

[drbig]

Thanks for the replies! Will note the UE5 specificity.