I want to rant real quick.
I want to preface this by saying I’m not a game developer, but I have played a fair share Unreal Engine games and my honest opinion as a consumer is that it is a literal plague especially in the indie game world. Show me 1 second of gameplay of any game and I could tell you with 100% certainty whether it’s an unreal engine game or not. And the main issue isn’t the engine itself, I bet its a fine engine that can do everything that a developer needs it to do.
The main issue in general gaming but most noticeably in UE is the absolute horrible TAA antialiasing. Somehow we went from crisp and sharp looking games in 2010 to absolutely blurry messes today. UE is the biggest offender, every single on of their games uses TAA as its main AA method and only with the sharpening filter turned to a 100, is it barely serviceable. And on top of the blurriness you have visual artifacts especially in Picture-in-Picture (PiP) rendering, so forget realistic scopes or mirrors or particle effects. And if you decide to use any other method for AA, all the characters hair looks like an unacceptable flickering wiremesh. We always see these tech demos of amazing lighting and huge open landscapes rendered in realtime with UE but it all amounts to nothing if everything is blurred beyond recognition.
The second biggest gripe is the abysmal performance. Sure if a game looks good you can expect it to be a little bit more demanding on the hardware side. But thanks to TAA, no UE game actually looks good. So you’re just left with the hardware demands. But in the past, if your PC couldn’t handle a game at max setting you just tone them down a little bit and “viola” your game runs good. That is absolutely impossible with UE. I have 3 UE games that I regularly play, and the difference between lowest and max settings on all of them is ~5 FPS. So your game looks like a PS2 game and you get barely any performance gain, awesome, good job UE. Not to mention that in an attempt to maximize “performance” most NPCs that are further than 50m are rendered at 5 FPS, looks realy good on those big open landscapes with amazing lighting.\
I am sure that all of those problems are solved if the engine is in the hands of a talented developer that knows what their doing and puts value on visual clarity and performance. But that is not what the vast majority of UE developers do. UE feels to me like a modular package. You just slap things together and it supposedly works. But you can’t expect to create art by just slapping things together. It also feels like UE tries to become the jack of all trades but master of none to appeal to the broadest market so that Epic can cash in on all that licensing money.
These are real issues but what is the alternative?
Most other engines are not better. Creating a new engine is very expensive, takes time, and is risky.
It seems like Unity is the go to engine for 2D applications. But I’m always surprised how much developers can squeeze out of it for 3d games. Konami could get their heads out of their asses and sell the Fox Engine or make it publicly available since they aren’t using it anymore. The CryEngine always looked stellar and is available for licensing.
I just dont understand, is the Unreal Engine so much cheaper and better for development than any alternative? Is Epics support better than any competitors? Why does it seem like every 2nd indie or double A title uses UE?
We also have more and more developers transfer to UE for sequels even if they already have a working engine. (Insurgency: Source, Insurgency Sandstorm: Unreal)
Unreal is way more versatile and easier to use than CryEngine, and a lot more capable for AAA game development than Unity. Looking at UE5, none of these alternatives have equivalents for features like Nanite or Lumen.
Another big factor is developer engine knowledge. It’s expensive to train developers on a new or unpopular engine when you can hire plenty of devs who are already familiar with a popular engine like Unreal. 343i continues to have this issue with Halo Infinite running on their Slipspace engine, which is why (IIRC) they’re switching to Unreal for future games.
There isn’t a great alternative. SSAA is way too expensive, and old anti-aliasing techniques do not work well with shader-heavy games or really fine detail.
The fucktaa crowd would rather just live with really nasty shimmering and other artifacts of aliasing, or they have obnoxiously expensive setups that can drive SSAA or displays with really high pixel densities. Personally I think they’re crazy. I find most TAA implementations look way better on my 27” 1440p monitor than no AA.
I wonder why exactly somebody decided that the search for a perfect AA method has to stop TAA. We went from jaggy edges to edge detection and oversampling (MSAA) being the standard in 2000-2012 but people where unsatisfied with the performance tank so we needed a lighter method. So we got post processing AA like SMAA which is a scam and does absolutely nothing or FXAA which simlpy applies a blur filter to edges. Not the most elegant solutions but they will do if you can’t effort to use MSAA. Then TAA came around the corner and I dont even know how it looks so bad, because it sounds fine on paper. Using multiple frames to detect differences in contrast and then smoothing out those diffrences seems like an OK alternative, but it should’ve never become the main AA method.
I’ve honestly expected the AA journey to end with 4K resolution being the standard. AA is mostly a matter of pixeldesity over viewing distance. Mobile games have mostly no AA because their pixel density is ridiculous, Console games also rarely have AA because you sit 10 feet away from the screen. PC being the only outlier but certainly having the spare power to run at higher resolutions than consoles. But somewhere along the way, Nvidia decided to go all in on Raytracing and Dynamic Resolution instead of raw 4K performance. And Nvidia basiacly dictates where the gaming industry goes.
So I honestly blame Nvdia for this whole mess and most people can agree that Nvidia has dropped the ball the last couple of years. Their Flagship cards cost more than an all consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo combined. They cost more than mid-high range gaming laptops. And the raw power gain has been like 80% over the last 10 years, because they put all their R&D into gimmicks.
I got quite the good AA by rendering the screen at 4k and letting the graphic card underscale it into the screen’s 1080p resolution. No AA needed, looks fiine.
Well there’s always DLSS and FSR. I don’t even use AA anymore cause DLSS Balanced looks so much better than even native resolution + 8x MSAA.
MSAA doesn’t do anything for modern games because just about every surface has multiple pixel shaders applied on top. This is why few games bother to support it.
I wish could experience DLSS. I’m still rocking a 1080Ti, so no DLSS for me, only FSR. But, in my opinion, FSR is such a visual downgrade for a minuscule performance boost. Especially in PvP games, where you can get killed by a single pixel, playing at a curbed resolution is a dealbreaker. I’ve heard DLSS looks a lot better than FSR but I’m going to run the 1080Ti till it dies, since it still runs nearly everything maxed out at 1440p.
It gets even worse when non-game applications use those frameworks designed for games. Like Stud.io - virtual LEGO building CAD. Even if you don’t touch the thing, it still renders 60 frames per second. Whenever I use it, the fans run high even when it is idling. And don’t even think of running this on a battery-powered laptop…
I could be wrong, but I think on a lot of complaints like that, the issue ends up being at least partially the fault of the studio using the engine being too lazy to adjust Unreal’s defaults like that. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t let you turn off rendering and preserve the current image on screen.
Wasn’t Satisfactory upgraded to UE5?
Yep, although its still on the experimental branch which is update 8. The list seems to focus more on upcoming titles than already released ones interestingly
Source because I looked it up to be sure: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/526870/view/3690183765419759383?l=english
Any benefits aside from maybe better graphical features? Is there improved performance, maybe? My only issue with the game is that it gets a little slow after you are self-sufficient, even with optimal factories. Not that it isn’t unexpected in a game like this, but any little bit helping would be nice!
Apparently there are performance increases because the simulation of distant objects has been optimized. Here’s the Devs talking about it.
Oh I did not know Avowed is going to use UE5. Interesting. I think I might have to upgrade my machine soon. 🙈 Also, Hellbade 2 cannot release soon enough!
I remember watching a video on the Unrealification of modern gaming and the prospect of every release coming with that Unreal Engine look. Does anyone else know which one I’m talking about? I can’t seem to find it.
That “look” has more to do with studios just using the standard shaders and default settings that come with Unreal. Using a different engine wouldn’t really solve this, as they would probably just lean on whatever that engine’s defaults are. Any studio that wants to can write their own shaders to give their game a more unique look.
The engine inherited problems that stick out to me are traversal stutter and shader compilation stutter. These are both products of engine limitations that are difficult for developers to work around.
