Epic CEO: Unreal Engine 5 performance issues mainly due to devs not optimizing properly

[curl-6]

My sense is that stuff like Nanite, Lumen, and Virtual Shadow Maps look great, but they can be resource hogs on current console hardware, especially when devs push for 60fps.

You can get a UE5 game looking great on console, such as Split Fiction, Hellblade II, Clair Obscurr, etc, but all too often devs layer on the expensive effects and lean too heavily on image reconstruction to shore up the results, leading to games that look ugly.

Soundwave said:

I don't think it's a laziness issue.

It's like asking a mom of triplets to also make a top cuisine class meal for dinner every night, while keeping the house spotless ... she's already dead tired looking after the kids all day and you're nitpicking that the dinner isn't Michelin star quality.

The scope of today's games and graphics even at a PS4 level is incredibly high and is driving teams to exhaustion to hit release dates as is, unfortunately proper optimization has gone out of the window. Something has to give and the two things that are "giving" it looks like are budgets (ballooning out of control) and optimization (no time for it, and too complex with projects of that scale).

For the programmers doing the grunt work maybe, but for the devs in charge, it's their own fault for trying to make everything so unnecessarily big and complex and ambitious and biting off more than they can chew. Trimming the fat and going for more focused experience with a tighter scope would go a long way to alleviating this.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 30 August 2025