The Unreal Engine 5 continues to prove extremely demanding for current consoles, leading to extremely low resolutions and visual cutbacks on the weakest current generation console, the Xbox Series S.
In a new video shared online yesterday, the tech experts at Digital Foundry took a good look at the Marvel Rivals beta's technical features, visuals, and performance on consoles and PC. Regarding some of the engine's defining features, the beta uses Lumen Global Illumination on both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X but falls back to screen space reflections instead of the Lumen Reflections available in the PC version. This choice was most likely made to keep the performance as steady as possible without dropping the resolution too low.
On both systems, the beta runs at dynamic 1440p resolution, with the resolution dropping as low as 810p. The beta fares much worse on the Xbox Series S, with major cutbacks in visual features, such as the removal of Lumen Global Illumination, screen-space reflections, and character shadows, and lower quality textures for both character models and environments, and a lower target resolution, dynamic 972p, which can go as low as 540p to maintain the 60 frames per second target. On all platforms, performance is stable 95% of the time, but that 5% is really felt, according to Digital Foundry, as there's stuttering and hitches when moving around the map, something that has sadly become expected in Unreal Engine 5 games.
The more time passes, the more it becomes evident how current gaming hardware is not ready for the Unreal Engine 5. Last week, a video highlighted how the RTX 4080 GPU, one of the best GPUs on the market, has trouble running most games powered by the engine at framerates higher than 30 FPS. The fact that most of these games did not employ Lumen and Nanite makes the whole situation even more troubling, although Epic is constantly updating the engine with performance optimization and improvements.
More on the Unreal Engine 5 latest version, version 5.4, can be found on its official website.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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