Unreal Engine has issues. Alongside cutting-edge graphics replete with unimaginable floor texture and beautiful lighting are efficiency points even essentially the most prime tier of PC rigs can’t keep away from. Certainly, video games made inside UE5 and launched to console aren’t immune to those points both, however the issues are prevalent for PC gamers essentially the most. With an rising variety of studios switching from their proprietary sport engines to utilizing Unreal Engine 5 – CD Projekt Crimson and their upcoming sequels to The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 included plus previously 343 Industries now Halo Studios crafting Grasp Chief’s latest house taking pictures foray simply two principal examples – fear is rising amongst avid gamers that these efficiency points will turn into ubiquitous.
The issues amongst Unreal Engine 5 video games launched to this point centre on subpar body charges and stuttering. Once more, these issues dominate on PC, however we’ve seen problems with stuttering within the likes of Black Fantasy: Wukong, Silent Hill 2, Stalker 2, Tekken 8, Frostpunk 2, and ARK: Survival Ascended, alongside others.
There’s proof the majority of efficiency issues are patched out by way of post-release updates which factors to studios maybe not optimising their video games completely sufficient throughout growth, as a substitute counting on fixing points prevalent at launch later. Nonetheless, this downside has existed for a while, and is definitely a problem with video games not made on Unreal Engine 5.
No, the difficulty is larger with Epic’s toolkit. Certainly, builders – solo and indie to AAA – are discussing points on Epic’s boards which can be extra widespread than the stuttering simply talked about. Examples embrace struggles to realize body charges past 20 fps even in low settings, unusually excessive GPU run instances, once more on low settings, overheating, blue display crashes, laggy textures, gradual loading, even in near-empty scenes – the record goes on. And, once more, these are points throughout growth; we’re not even remotely speaking about completed product right here. If sport makers are grappling with these points throughout growth, then it’s no surprise these video games with publisher-imposed launch dates are coming into the world with efficiency issues. And that’s to not point out sport builders which can be small scale. On account of these points, their initiatives would possibly by no means even see the sunshine of day.
There should be options. Fortunately, Epic’s in-house engineers have posted to Unreal Engine’s official weblog on February 4th, 2025, their ideas regarding shader stuttering alongside upcoming concepts they’re iterating on as fixes. Given the size of this submit, we’re to imagine Epic imagine this to be the principal trigger behind the wealth of points studios are experiencing throughout growth, and avid gamers are struggling while taking part in.
To elucidate shaders as per the weblog replace, these applications execute on GPUs to carry out the assorted steps in rendering a 3D picture. Ostensibly, they’re items of code written to finish a selected process. Shaders can govern shadowing, deformation, remodeling, even intricate processes corresponding to the color of particular person pixels based mostly on floor materials, a number of gentle sources, varied environmental results, so on and so forth. As graphical constancy will increase, the method behind shader compilation turns into extra advanced and thus extra time consuming for drivers to compile shader info and translate into code readable by way of GPU. The consequence: when a render engine realises it must compile a brand new shader the sport stops functioning to finish this course of. We’re speaking milliseconds right here however given the exorbitant quantity of shader code in any given scene in-game the result’s the on-screen stuttering that we’re seeing in these video games listed earlier.
The weblog dives deeper, outlining distinctions between CPU applications, approaches taken by totally different GPUs, the instruction units outlined by utility programming interfaces (APIs) corresponding to Direct3D or Vulkan, and is nice studying for anybody tech-minded sufficient to make sense of all of it. For the remainder of us, the underside line is that this: Epic have completely outlined these points and are working onerous to repair them.
Launched inside Unreal Engine 5.2 was the flexibility to precache PSOs, or pipeline state objects. PSOs describe the rendering of objects by way of a number of shaders working collectively alongside different GPU settings. The intricate element of contemporary sport worlds ends in thousands and thousands of PSOs needing to be compiled to render a picture appropriately based mostly on quite a few parameters: shaders rendering supplies on totally different meshes along with varied pipeline settings concurrently, for example. It’s technical studying once more, however the need-to-know summarisation is that Epic’s resolution is to find out PSOs throughout a sport’s loading time by precaching a cloth’s probably mesh info along with video high quality settings. It’ll produce subsets of potential PSOs, a smaller quantity than the total vary of potentialities however by-and-large sufficient to appropriately render 3D objects in scene with out efficiency associated points like stuttering. An API which gives hints to the system on what is probably going going to be wanted forward of time can be within the works at Epic, as per the weblog replace.
Will precaching PSOs eradicate the efficiency points we’re seeing? In any case, a fast scour of Reddit yields gamers who’re nonetheless scuffling with shader pre-cache following Unreal Engine 5.2’s launch. Tekken 8 has suffered from quite a few types of enter lag, Stalker 2 gamers expertise inconsistent traversal stutter, Frostpunk 2 harbours shockingly low framerates, a problem sure customers – once more on Reddit – describe as simulation velocity points and never essentially issues remoted to framerates. ARK: Survival Ascended is amongst the worst offenders, with gamers reporting body fee drops, unplayable display stuttering, and system crashes, even on high-end PC {hardware}, on PS5 and on Xbox Collection X|S.
These efficiency points tremendously have an effect on the enjoyment of gameplay too, even once they’re not at their worst. Living proof is Black Fantasy: Wukong, a sport with rapid-fire Soulslike fight the place even the slightest mistimed button press can spell sure doom in your character.
The options for avid gamers as end-users are maybe to decrease resolutions, to disable ray tracing, to scale back texture high quality, or to cap body charges. And while these options would possibly show fruitful, they aren’t long run fixes, they usually definitely seem counter-intuitive given Unreal Engine 5’s promise of superb wanting video games. Taking steps to make video games look worse for them to operate appropriately is backwards, so the hope that Epic’s resolution to repair shader stuttering by way of precaching PSOs is nice.
Extra options by way of Epic are probably coming, so hopefully these grave issues might be ironed out en masse earlier than this {hardware} technology’s fruits. Price mentioning at this juncture are the handful of UE5 vibrant spots; video games launched by way of Unreal Engine 5 that haven’t exhibited anyplace close to the extent of efficiency issues skilled by different video games. For an instance: Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 options boundary pushing constancy, most notably in its utility of Unreal Engine 5’s Metahuman facial character rendering, and this all works fluidly to current one of many biggest visible spectacles ever dedicated to video video games. RoboCop: Rogue Metropolis is one other one, in a position to apply all UE5’s floor texture functionality, international illumination, real-time reflections, and digital shadow maps while nonetheless concentrating on a buttery easy 60fps on current-gen consoles.
Extra UE5 video games are coming and given Epic’s dedication to fixing efficiency issues there’s hope that the quantity releasing with out points will enhance. For groups like CD Projekt Crimson who’ve switched to growing in Unreal Engine 5 the priority for video games like The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk Orion received’t dissipate except the usual throughout the trade improves.
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