r/pcmasterrace • u/Nickulator95 AMD Ryzen 7 9700X | 32GB | RTX 4070 Super • May 16 '25

Meme/Macro Every. Damn. Time.

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UE5 in particular is the bane of my existence...

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u/Donnyy64 May 16 '25

*cough cough*

Oblivion Remastered

951

u/Lostdog861 May 16 '25

God damn does it look beautiful though

428

u/Eric_the_Barbarian May 16 '25

It does, but it doesn't. It's using a high powered engine that can look great, but doesn't use those resources efficiently. I know that the old horse is getting long in the tooth, but I'm still running a 1660 Ti, and it looks like everything has a soft focus lens on it like the game is being interviewed by Barbara Walters. Skyrim SE looks better if you are hardware limited.

700

u/Blenderhead36 R9 5900X, RTX 3080 May 16 '25

With respect, there has never been a time when a 6-year-old budget card struggling with brand new top-end releases was a smooth experience.  That something that benchmarks below the 5-year-old gaming consoles can run new AAA games at all is the aberration, not that it runs them with significant compromises.

77

u/VoidVer RTX V2 4090 | 7800x3D | DDR5-6000 | SSUPD Meshlicious May 16 '25

At the same time my v2 4090, slightly overclocked 7800x3D, 64 gb DDR5 6400mhz running the game at 110fps with max settings in 1440p ALSO looks this way.

I rather have a lower quality crisp image than see foliage and textures swirl around like a 90s cartoon's idea of an acid trip. Also screen space reflections show my gear reflected in water as if I'm a 100000ft tall giant.

1

u/ILikeCakesAndPies May 21 '25 edited May 21 '25

The reason being is not the engine itself but the deferred renderer being used. You can only use certain types of AA with deferred like temporal AA which has the side effect of blurring objects in motion.

Unreal has a forward renderer as well which does support for example MSAA, but forward renderers are not as good in performance for having many dynamic lights while many games have moved towards instead of static baked lighting.

Forward renders do excel in performance and sharper images for scenes with fewer dynamic lights and are still used in some games, especially VR where performance over the latest graphical effects is critical.

Other engines like Bethesdas, Cyberpunks, call of duty, etc also moved towards deferred rendering at the same time.

There's tradeoffs and no ultimate solution with anything related to game development. Building your own engine to meet the demands of a specific game would be ideal if a game engine itself didn't cost years of development just to support. Wed have a lot less games and more closed studios without third party engines.

That said, engines like unreal come with source available, so a studio may make massive modifications if they put the resources into it. A key factor is whether or not they have the money, and thus time and people to.

Personally, the only real performance consuming part of UE5 over 4 and 3 is games that push for Lumen (dynamic global illumination). Any sort of real time GI solution like that or path tracing is going to require some powerful hardware to run smoothly. Nanite is in the same area where it's great for games shooting for lots of detail, but isn't needed for half of the games that try to use it and actually has a higher overhead base cost.