The improvements brought by Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen and Nanite may not be enough to justify the massive hit to the performance they cause, as highlighted by new comparison videos shared online this week.
The new comparison videos, put together by Cycu1, showcase the Unreal Engine 4.27 and 4.25 versions of Abandoned Warehouse and Ancient Temple tech demos developed by Scan Factory with their Unreal Engine 5.1 ports. Both videos highlight how the difference in shadows and accurate lighting is not that massive to justify the performance hit in both demos, which is often close to a 100 FPS difference on an RTX 4080 GPU.
This isn't the first time we have seen the Unreal Engine 5 pushing current generation high-end GPUs to their limit, as the RTX 4080 struggles to run some tech demos with decent performance at native 4K resolution. As such, it's clear that the new version of the engine by Epic needs plenty more work to deliver smooth gaming experiences, although it seems like playing at native 4K resolution may be something that only a few players with the best possible rigs will be able to do in the future, as upscaling is an important feature of the engine that is expected to be used by developers to achieve playable framerates.
The latest version of the engine by Epic is Unreal Engine 5.4. You can learn more about it by heading over to 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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