[KronisLV]

> If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected.

Recently I booted up Insurgency: Sandstorm. With a 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 at 1080p and high graphics, the game runs at around 200 FPS. Meanwhile, pretty much any modern UE5 title (with the exception of Ready or Not and Split Fiction, from what I've seen) runs horribly - the interesting thing is that no matter how much you tweak the .ini files or change the graphics settings you can't get something like STALKER 2 or The Forever Winter or Borderlands 4 to run as well as UE4 with the graphics similar to those old games. Instead you get something that runs at like 10% of the render resolution and still doesn't get 60 FPS (I'm not exaggerating, literally the performance I got in The Forever Winter).

There's no good technical reason for things to be that way (Unity still exists, and the games made in it struggle less) other than the devs or the higher ups choosing higher fidelity but more expensive rendering technologies and using upscaling and framegen not as something that helps laptops or when you need the spare GPU capacity (e.g. encoding a video recording of the game), but rather as something that's supposed to be used to even get to 60 FPS in the first place.

I don't know what needs to change for things to get better.

I also don't see anyone particularly caring about regular software, Electron et al are just too convenient to develop in (having to create per-platform UIs sucks in already-overworked teams).

[59nadir]

> I don't know what needs to change for things to get better.

Studios need to start creating custom engines again, for one. We'll get better games with less unsatisfying jank, some of the projects will actually cost less (which is paradoxical to some) and performance is likely to jump significantly. Off-the-shelf engines have as many costs as they have benefits, but like a lot of technology people refuse to look at the choice as a trade-off, and to the extent that they acknowledge it's a trade-off the implicit admission is always that it's a trade-off that the user/player is paying the most for, so it's OK.

If companies start creating custom engines en masse again it will also help solve part of the competency crisis in the industry, because they'll be forced to actually learn and educate people on how things work.

[tuna74]

Do you actually believe in what you wrote above?

[Azantys]

Game studios should choose CryEngine/Decima again over UE5

[SleepyMyroslav]

>There's no good technical reason for things to be that way

Of course there is. What people gets presented is look how new graphics is shining. What devs get presented is look how much less manual work you need to get this graphics out of the door. Look at any UE5 presentation aiming at devs. You will be able to see a lot of 'just do this and technology will handle the rest of it'. There is no going back to manually making 3-5 replacements for each and every thing in the game. And the same goes for lights every few meters of a game world.

As a gamedev I don't really care about the regular software. You can see that the main problem for devs is to get paid for it. All kind of schemes with subscriptions and online services and such were tried. People just don't want to pay for the software. The mentality is 'we will get it for pennies on a sale' is the same like with the steam sales. Or even worse people will choose 'free' version with 'promotions' and data collection and whatever else that saves them pennies. Look at 'free to play games' steam category for the example of the horror show.

Oh and I don't think devs are the saints there. You can find a lots of examples that prey on gullible customers or trick people to buy 'digital goods' they don't need or outright bad things with gambling addictions and more.

The only thing consumer can do is to only vote with their wallet and push their representatives to regulate. The stop killing games is an example of the latter. The former is often deemed inefficient but Imho it is the only thing that will separate surviving studios and the shattered ones. As you may see in the press the names and past successes don't save studios from closing their doors now.

[tuna74]

Yes, Lumen (and raytracing in general) has a performance overhead. If you don't want that you can skip that feature. Split Fiction and other games choose to do so.

I think certain games like Robocop are awesome on UE5.

[KronisLV]

> If you don't want that you can skip that feature.

Unfortunately, for the consumer this can also mean skipping some games altogether: for example, I might not be able to play the latest Indiana Jones or Doom game because they refuse to let RT be disabled (unless they get enough pushback, but we can all see where things are heading).

At least there are some (usually indie) games that let you do that, like Incursion: Red River but even with Lumen and other features turned down, the performance is still worse than UE4 games of comparable scene fidelity (not necessarily complexity). I think the industry might have jumped into Nanite and all the adjacent tech way too eagerly.

[tuna74]

My comment was of course from the perspective of the game developer. For PC/Windows games it has always been the case that you need the required HW to play the game in a "satisfying" performance.

A lot of RT features makes game development faster (or more efficient) so you won't be able to play the game without them.