Unreal Engine 5 adds complexity in some interesting ways that allow the development of games that may not have been possible before but at a cost on PC that will likely only get mitigated in the future by brute forcing better performance.
Speaking during the latest episode of the Moore's Law is Dead's Broke Silicon podcast, Massive Damage's Bryan Heemskerk discussed Unreal Engine 5 at length, highlighting the many issues developers face with the engine but also how it adds complexity in ways that is allowing them to do things that maybe couldn't be done before, but with a base cost that was, at launch, two GPU generations behind in terms of performance, a really unsurprising statement considering we have seen, time and time again, how Unreal Engine 5-powered games don't seem to run well even on top-end hardware. On consoles, things are quite different, according to the developer, as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S have dedicated hardware, such as their IO controllers, that handle data compression and decompression. On PC, on the other hand, there are a lot of data bottlenecks that prevent the process from being smooth, and, as of now, it seems like performance will only get better with the faster interface and CPUs, essentially brute forcing through the issues, getting to the point where latency will be so low and the interface speed so fast that things will get better at least until the next generation of consoles. As such, it may be until the RTX 6000 series when Unreal Engine 5 will run as it should on PC.
Unreal Engine 5 creator Epic is well aware of the performance issues in games powered by their engine and has recently outlined what the engine features to mitigate the issues and what they are currently working on to further improve the situation. Some of these systems, however, don't seem to be working properly out-of-the-box, and require developer intervention, so there's definitely more work to be done until shader compilation and other performance issues become a thing of the past in UE5 games.
The latest version of Unreal Engine 5 is version 5.5. You can learn more about some of the features it introduces, including the Nanite of lights, MegaLights, by going here.
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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