Saw this today and thought it was an interesting case; Immortal of Aveum is the first game not from Epic to ship with Unreal Engine 5's next generation Lumen and Nanite features. It also targets 60fps on consoles, with no 30fps mode.

The tradeoff? It's 720p on PS5 and Xbox Series X, and 436p (yes, you read that right) on Xbox Series S.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-immortals-of-aveum-pushes-unreal-engine-5-hard-and-image-quality-suffers

A friend played a couple of hours of it. Dropped it and played Goemon 64 instead. I asked for a play-by-play of the mechanics. Writing since he's a game dev and we like to talk about that stuff. Wasn't a glowing review. Really cringe writing and in some aspects, he described I asked so it Eternals the movie or the game? He said yeah lol. This game sounds like trash no matter how you slice it. From the game itself to the performance. Shame I kept an eye on it as it sounded interesting.

The workload will increase from here on out as engines fully utilize new technologies and leave the old consoles behind. Expect sub 400p on Series S, and maybe rare cases of 400p~ at 30fps. FSR/TSR ain't saving this.

I'll just wait for the PS5 Pro and hope it can deliver 1440p+ final image quality on the heaviest games/engines.

Edit: Those visuals cutbacks on Series S are the biggest I've seen thus far. Near-generational difference between it and the other two versions.

Another one in a long line of poorly optimized messes, the trend of the year. Even my PC has trouble handling this game on high settings and getting 60fps in native 4K. There was another recent release, I can't remember for the life of me which one, but it had trouble rendering 1440p native at 60fps on an RTX 4090. Upscaling has become a huge crutch lately, what was supposed to be a helpful aid has become the default cushion to put disinterest in optimization on instead. Games that perform poorly on aging hardware is one thing, it's inevitable, but many new releases perform poorly even om monster systems. I've lost count of how many terribly performing games have released on PC alone this year.

Dont blame the consoles, even the pc seems a mess.

Yeah there's no way the Series S is holding up for this whole generation. Sub 720p is gonna increasingly happen with sub 30fps at the same time as well at some point. Games will often run even rougher on it than late gen games like Control did on the PS4 and Xbox One.

The Series X and PS5 being just 720p is wild though and shows that this absolutely needed a 30fps option and that gamers will need to adjust back to big games increasingly running at around 1080p or a bit higher at 30fps. UE5 is gonna push these consoles extremely hard.

Hopefully a demo drops for it, I wouldn't mind taking a look at it just for the Unreal Engine 5 lumen and nanite effects.

I wouldn't say I blame the consoles, it's just a very strange choice by the devs to prioritise resolution so low and not to offer a 30fps option.

It does suggest though that maybe Lumen and Nanite are very heavy on current hardware; it will be interesting to see how UE5 fares in future console titles.

Digital Foundry even foretold that we're in for a rough generation on console. Hell, even PC hardware is lagging behind if you don't have at least a $2K monster rig. Nvidia screwing over PC gamers with their refusal to put a decent amount of VRAM on anything except the absolute high-end GPU's. I may have to fully switch to AMD on both CPU/GPU when I do my next rig early next year.

That's 720p and 436p as base resolutions, upscaled using FSR2, which has some ... drawbacks. Regardless, the UE5 is relatively new and this the very first non-Epic UE5 game. I guess, just like with the UE4, improvements will come with time. Plus FSR3 is on the horizon, which apparently works on any card released in last 5 years, so it will be utilised in consoles eventually [probably quicker on XB consoles as it specifically targets DX games].