While Unreal Engine 5's Lumen and Nanite redefined modern visuals, the engine makes more than a few gamers shudder in fear due to its heavy system requirements and its widely known performance and stuttering issues, which prevent many from enjoying games powered by the engine properly, especially on PC.
Since the engine's launch, however, Epic has attempted to mitigate these issues, and Unreal Engine 5.7 seems to be yet another step in the right direction.
A new comparison video put together by MxBenchmarkPC highlights the performance improvements introduced in the latest version of the engine by running the Unreal Engine 5.4 and Unreal Engine 5.7 versions of the Photorealistic Venice Tech Demo created by Scans Factory running side-by-side.
In terms of performance on an RTX 5080 GPU, "GPU performance is improved by up to 25% in UE 5.7 (depending on a scene), and the 5.7 version is now better utilizing GPU resources, hence the GPU power draw is now higher," writes the YouTuber.
CPU performance on an Intel Core i7-14700F is significantly improved, up to 35%, which leads, according to MxBenchmarkPC, to "more stable frametimes with less hitches across all scenes." This last improvement is particularly welcome, as the biggest issue in most games powered by Unreal Engine 5 is unstable frametimes that lead to a choppy and very unpleasant experience.
Unreal Engine 5.7 also brings some image quality improvements, as MxBenchmarkPC highlighted in their analysis. "In terms of image quality, UE 5.7 offers more stable and accurate Lumen lighting, and especially higher quality Lumen reflections (with better performance at the same time)." Unfortunately, Lumen denoising quality has only been improved slightly, so tech like NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction still does a better job than the engine's native solution.
While it will be a while to see games built to take advantage of the enhancements introduced in Unreal Engine 5.7, the fact that Epic continues to address some of the engine's most critical flaws is encouraging, and bodes well for the future. Hopefully, it won't take too long to finally see Unreal Engine 5 games running smoothly even on mid-range PC hardware.
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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