Unreal Engine 5 - worries about performance

[Radical Russian]

Long time fan of the original and below zero. It hits the top 3 games of all time.

The release of Stalker 2 has made me worry about Subnautica 2 and how performance of the game will be. I am certain Unknown Worlds will create a great game, I'm not worried if the game will be fun or feature an enticing story. It's only about the technical side of the game.

All the games on UE5 shows the same issues, large performance issues. Even Epics fortnite that ran on everything on UE4 can barely run unless parents buy super-computers for their kids now.
Stalker shows that those issues inherently worse with large open worlds which Subnautica has.

Unreal engine 5 is obviously not the savior to gaming as many thought it to be. It's the performance killer, especially in the first versions - 5.4 is a tad better according to tests. I miss the era of UE3 and UE4 where everything easily held 200+ fps on a potato, the only sad thing was most games on those engines felt very similar.

Which version of UE5 is being used?
Is performance and framerate a priority for the game?
Will you use horizontal FOV instead of the default vertical?
Default ultrawide support?
Will you add the option to disable mouth smoothing without config edits?

Sure, unity has it's issues. But the original Subnautica still looks gorgeous in many areas. I'm hoping we can at least hit around the same performance numbers but I doubt that is possible with UE5.

[The_Dipl0mat]

I've unfortunately played Fortnite and I'm unsure of the "barely runs" deal with it. As I ran it just fine several months ago on I believe max settings, and I only have a GTX 1660TI and a Ryzen 5 5600g. Neither of which are top of the line as far as I'm aware.

Stalkers 2 deal seems to be more focused on that well, they made it in a warzone. At least if I'm understanding things correctly

Though with new engines does come performance concerns indeed. So hopefully we'll see how things go. One benefit is they are doing EA again, so they'll actually be able to stress test on a large swath of computers and see how to better improve performance

[Sero]

Originally posted by The_Dipl0mat:

I've unfortunately played Fortnite and I'm unsure of the "barely runs" deal with it. As I ran it just fine several months ago on I believe max settings, and I only have a GTX 1660TI and a Ryzen 5 5600g. Neither of which are top of the line as far as I'm aware.

Stalkers 2 deal seems to be more focused on that well, they made it in a warzone. At least if I'm understanding things correctly

Though with new engines does come performance concerns indeed. So hopefully we'll see how things go. One benefit is they are doing EA again, so they'll actually be able to stress test on a large swath of computers and see how to better improve performance

So UE5 needing the top end of hardware is an optimization issue?

I have of course heard about the specs Stalker 2 needs and I also assumed that this was a UE5 issue and so I already dreaded that a lot of games would be using UE5.
I don't feel like spending 2k on a graphics card.

[Buggy Boy]

If the game ends up requiring a GPU upgrade (to something very recent) for many of those who can still happily run the first two Subnautica games at maximum detail etc and have no other reason to upgrade, then I feel they may miss out on that section of potential buyers.

I think the distance drawing will likely be much less than in most games as the underwater murk can be used to cunningly enhance performance and still look perfectly realistic (as much as an alien planet can). When above water, what are we realistically going to see anyway? The horizon distance will depend on the size of the planet we're on, it could theoretically be much further or much closer than what we're used to on Earth, and it's likely to mostly be water to the horizon anyway. Subnautica cheated there by hiding the islands in cloud, the same trick could conceivably used again, only hiding a much lower poly model rather than being just a cloud bank, so what will we have as our long distance other than water and some low poly land masses (or crashed spaceship model).

I'm sure something like UE5 will have some good defaults for LOD, something which the devs will be able to tweak and optimise. I'm not expecting there to be the crazy kind of detail as in a game such as Stalker 2, underwater stuff generally isn't as intricate anyway.

[The_Dipl0mat]

Originally posted by Sero:

Originally posted by The_Dipl0mat:

I've unfortunately played Fortnite and I'm unsure of the "barely runs" deal with it. As I ran it just fine several months ago on I believe max settings, and I only have a GTX 1660TI and a Ryzen 5 5600g. Neither of which are top of the line as far as I'm aware.

Stalkers 2 deal seems to be more focused on that well, they made it in a warzone. At least if I'm understanding things correctly

Though with new engines does come performance concerns indeed. So hopefully we'll see how things go. One benefit is they are doing EA again, so they'll actually be able to stress test on a large swath of computers and see how to better improve performance

So UE5 needing the top end of hardware is an optimization issue?

I have of course heard about the specs Stalker 2 needs and I also assumed that this was a UE5 issue and so I already dreaded that a lot of games would be using UE5.
I don't feel like spending 2k on a graphics card.

That's from my understanding, yeah. I think my only issue with Fortnite was things loading in slowly, but that's due to having it on an HDD I imagine. Of course, I only have two examples to pull from so it's a "we'll see" deal

[kirbybao]

I'm more afraid that there will be anti-aliasing that can't be turned off and that will blur the image when moving at 1080p.

[リアンダ]

The problem with Unreal Egnine 5 is that nanites are great but not as great as some developers think they are. I've made models for clients using UE5 that wouldn't fly in any other engine. A metahuman basebody alone has like 40k polys, it's insane. Now the engine can handle quite a lot up to a certain degree but once you get past that threshhold, oh boy do you feel it. I think a lot of devs have become quite lazy at optimizing because 90% of the time the engine can handle whatever they throw at it and so they don't want to invest extra time to make sure a game runs perfectly all the time.

[Radical Russian]

Originally posted by リアンダ:

The problem with Unreal Egnine 5 is that nanites are great but not as great as some developers think they are. I've made models for clients using UE5 that wouldn't fly in any other engine. A metahuman basebody alone has like 40k polys, it's insane. Now the engine can handle quite a lot up to a certain degree but once you get past that threshhold, oh boy do you feel it. I think a lot of devs have become quite lazy at optimizing because 90% of the time the engine can handle whatever they throw at it and so they don't want to invest extra time to make sure a game runs perfectly all the time.

I can also agree that optimization is a big point. Some games seem to run well like Satisfactory and Talos Principle 2, at least when looking at their fidelity.

I do believe Subnautica will look gorgeous on UE5. Nanite for sure won't heal all, especially with the big environments UE5 will show.

We all remember seeing that Matrix demo that ran badly, but for how great it looks it actually ran pretty well.

I know that there's no telling what we can expect until we have it.
Hopefully the others are right that being an early access title again it can be one of the focus points to work on between EA and the full release. Fingers crossed

[miklkit]

Looked at the recommendations and it looks very CPU heavy. My 6750XT GPU is fine but my 3800X CPU is really weak, according to them. Gonna get a new CPU next year.

[Stremniy tip]

Yk, guys, you should not trust the recommendations when it comes to a UE5 game. Look at the awful state of STALKER 2 which is basically worse than Cyberpunk's state when it came out.

[Stremniy tip]

And to OP. Marketing teams push for UE5. There is so much games I know which have nothing special and could run easily on UE4, still remain good looking and have better performance. STALKER 2 is one of them, since it could run so nicely on UE4, yet they went with UE5. Bodycam is another example, it's just a FPS with wobbly camera and a filter applied to the picture, remove the filter and the game looks mid compared to many UE4 shooters, yet there is people always talking about "next gen graphics!".

[The_Dipl0mat]

Originally posted by Radical Russian:

I can also agree that optimization is a big point. Some games seem to run well like Satisfactory and Talos Principle 2, at least when looking at their fidelity.

Oh yeah I forgot Satisfactory uses UE5 as well, and it runs pretty well in my experience, only times I've had lag is when I first load into a big world

[Stremniy tip]

Originally posted by The_Dipl0mat:

Originally posted by Radical Russian:

I can also agree that optimization is a big point. Some games seem to run well like Satisfactory and Talos Principle 2, at least when looking at their fidelity.

Oh yeah I forgot Satisfactory uses UE5 as well, and it runs pretty well in my experience, only times I've had lag is when I first load into a big world

Thanks in advance for warning against this slop. Imma instead get something like Dyson Sphere Program, which has even more content anyways imho :)

[The_Dipl0mat]

Originally posted by Stremniy tip:

Originally posted by The_Dipl0mat:

Oh yeah I forgot Satisfactory uses UE5 as well, and it runs pretty well in my experience, only times I've had lag is when I first load into a big world

Thanks in advance for warning against this slop. Imma instead get something like Dyson Sphere Program, which has even more content anyways imho :)

I mean, I wouldn't call it slop. But you do you boo :)

[Stremniy tip]

Originally posted by The_Dipl0mat:

Originally posted by Stremniy tip:

Thanks in advance for warning against this slop. Imma instead get something like Dyson Sphere Program, which has even more content anyways imho :)

I mean, I wouldn't call it slop. But you do you boo :)

UE5 generally speaking is very stinky un-optimized slop. The only game which is somewhat optimized on UE5 which comes to my mind is The Finals lmao

[The_Dipl0mat]

Originally posted by Stremniy tip:

Originally posted by The_Dipl0mat:

I mean, I wouldn't call it slop. But you do you boo :)

UE5 generally speaking is very stinky un-optimized slop. The only game which is somewhat optimized on UE5 which comes to my mind is The Finals lmao

"Hey, I forgot Satisfactory uses UE5. Only issue I've had is initial lag in large saves"


"Heh, it's obviously unoptimized slop"

I'm assuming you're unaware, but Satisfactory is surprisingly well optimized. There's this one guy, LetGameitOut I think. Who made a really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ laggy world in EA, they asked for his save. And then worked on optimizing it to become actually playable