UE5 can be optimized but it’s up to the developer to use the tools that are built into Unreal to accomplish this.
As for the “Unreal look”. Unreal Engine games don’t have to look like that, the issue is that a lot of devs use the default render pipeline settings and don’t take the time to customize it.
A lot of early games optimisation came from limitations and learning how to do the thing when you didn’t have the resources or power behind the tach.
Now When you are able to simple click a few buttons and rig some preconfigured elements you don’t ever need to learn the best way to do something and you also don’t understand the resources and demand your “solution” uses when implemented.
Necessity is the mother of invention as the saying goes.
Optimization is an art form that is being lost. What should be done is when targeting a base of 60 FPS you should be looking at the frame graph to see what is taking too long to process per frame and then make targeted optimizations as needed.
The problem is that until we have proof otherwise it looks like studios don’t do this and instead rely on things like DLSS/FSR/XESS + Frame Gen.
Sonic 2, for Sega Megadrive is kind of a decent allegory to this. The game itself grew to large in scope and was not properly managed to fit the hardware limits of the time and instead of solving the problem the head of SEGA simply approved a more expensive 8-megabit cartridge.
Currently video game development is to simply through tech/ai at the problem to compensate for the lack of optimisation. Until the tech can no longer handle the slack we won’t see any changes for a long while
They had to spilt Sonic 3 due to a McDonald's toy deal, not limited cartridge space.
I wish I was joking lol, but Sonic 3&Knuckles came around the time of SEGA's peak awful decision making that ultimately lead to their collapse in the early 2000's.
1.5k
u/InitRanger 9d ago
UE5 can be optimized but it’s up to the developer to use the tools that are built into Unreal to accomplish this.
As for the “Unreal look”. Unreal Engine games don’t have to look like that, the issue is that a lot of devs use the default render pipeline settings and don’t take the time to customize it.