S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl just released and it is built on Unreal Engine 5. UE5 used to be this super exciting thing, because we knew the games using it would look quite incredible. So many studios are switching to using it partially because of this reason. However, as time has gone on… UE5 has started to become a bad omen.
This doesn’t mean that STALKER 2 is a bad game- they have made something truly impressive here- but it is interesting to investigate the trade-offs that they made and the problems the game has run into because of this choice. All this easily applies to almost every UE5 game, so let’s dig in.
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https://discord.gg/xbVEkhPJ72
Digital Foundry: https://youtu.be/cHQ3jAeza60?si=uZltgBCrHW-00hV6
Daniel Owen: https://youtu.be/QcZxQh8RfUc?si=CKQh18LGZcH21voY
0:00- Unreal Engine used to be exciting, now….
2:18- How Graphics improve this game
3:44- UE5 Graphical problems
5:04- Performance.
6:15- STALKER 2 on a 300$ GPU (RTX 4060)
9:02- a 500$ GPU (RTX 4070)
9:33- 1000$ GPU (RTX 4080 Super)
10:15- Budget RX 6600 GPU
11:15- On the PS5’s GPU (RX 6700)
12:45- 450$ GPU (RX 7800 XT)
13:50- 640$ GPU (RX 7900 XT)
14:45- The CPU Performance is Scarier…
15:38- Lost in Translation
18:55- Bugs
19:40- The Affects of UE5
20:48- Why everyone studio is switching
24:55- Scary
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I absolutely despise Unreal Engine with a passion it's taking a lot of the creativity out of the gaming industry and homogenized everything into a harmonious blob of shit
They’ve been really good at advertising best case scenarios that could technically be achievable if you rich asf.
In reality—most of these games just look ugly and blurry with weird effects(or lack of); some of the most vomit inducing post processing shit you’ll ever see.
These bitches probably making our vision get worse
The only thing we can all agree on is that Unreal 5 is still better than Fallout's engine.
Companies don't want to pay their experienced developers let alone using them to teach the inexperienced developers and keep the torch lit, the want profits.
All these UE5 games made my gtx 1080 useless 🙁
Hey, better than x-ray engine
This game is unoptimized af, just like any other new game… If a game need a high tier gpu AND need DLSS or Fsr than its a lack of knowledge about optimization. Reflection are sucks even the 2004 games had better reflection method then any other new game. Just render the game again with cubemap with bit lower resolution and its done. Looks much better than any ssr or lumen.
Why the fuck do they even use Unreal Engine 5 if they can't even get it to work on consoles were the majority of their sales come from. Feels really scammy. We're going half of the gaming Budget on marketing to promote this flashy Next Generation beautiful looking game for you to buy it at 60$ or 70$, and it looks and runs like a pile of shit on all devices that the majority of people own. Like, don't even Target the consoles if this is the way it's going to be.
Ue5 is cancer
I’m currently playing Pax Dei U5.3 it looks amazing, but performance is trash and it’s a MMO with thousands of assets and custom buildings and every day passes a new player joins or a castle is made and less playable it started on my system with 50-40 fps now it is on 20 fps with 8 fps dips on certain views. I don’t know how they going to optimize.
the 4060 is below the minimum recommended ion their website
Good graphics isn't hard to accomplish with all the pre-built tools devs have nowadays. It's about delivering a game that has good visuals while actually being playable. Like RDR2. Technically, photo-realistic graphics have been out for ages, it wasn't just implemented on games.
I’ve been playing first descendent and something I’ve noticed about the performance is very weird. Occlusion culling doesn’t seem to work well at all. Normally, if you get real close to a wall
And stare directly at it in a game, the fps will shoot up. This is because the wall covers all models and textures behind it and the rendering engine culls all that stuff so it doesn’t need to render. But in first descendent, the fps barely increases when staring at a wall. Not sure if the problem is first descendent or unreal engine.
I bought stalker2 on day one I wasn't sure I could call my pc is decent enough to play it? I5-9400F with 3070ti ram16/3200 on SSD all low 1080p barely gets 60 fps in the prologue and it gets worse after the prologue it's really hard to get 40-50 fps it can get worse when I use DLSS my mouse is like slower to respond in the game. Yeah I know it's a great game with a rich story but I couldn't play like that for a long time for sure I refunded go back to stalker gamma and will wait for the game to get optimized and I will buy it back and play it for sure
What was the hardware you ran this on?
I have a 7800xt and fsr 3 was a great setting they added. I capped my frame to 60 and with fsr 3 on, it boosted my frames to a solid 120 fps on mainly epic settings without being so taxing on my gpu(temps hit around 58-60 vs when I first started the game with it hitting 70°C)
Im just glad my pc can run it at 165 fps at 2k with DLSS on, I have never had a problem with the shaders normally I don't even notice it loading took a while when I first downloaded and played but have not noticed it before. In towns I do have some fps changes but never anything under 80. The bugs tho I have had a lot of problems with ai not following you are sidequest just breaking and cant complete them, Artifacts spawning 60m underground as well as one quest item which I had to cheat in order to get it. But I'm still having fun was trying to get in to stalker on the older ones and tried Anomally but the old graphics and systems just made it more like a chore rather than a game. This feels more streamlined which is good (but not a die hard fan of the series just a newbie when it comes to Stalker)
silent hill 2 remake did a real good job with th UE5 engine. It looks really good and runs really well on my 3060. I think we have to wait for more titles to drop before gudging the engine based off of one game
Fortnite switched from UnrealEngine 4 to 5 just to put a performance mode “api” (uses dx11) that looks lile dog poop, basically the mobile graphics just to say here you go high fps for you. I get worse fps than in the older versions of the game on normal api, with high settings, and the game looks fantastic.😀✌️
Lol
3080 i9 and 14fps in 1080p, medium settings for silent hill 2 remake. Same issues I’ve seen in UE5. Other games with negligible visual quality vs UE5 run 80fps on max.
Keep in mind these guys where developing this game while being invaded by Russia
I totally agree that UE is killing games
playing on the lowest settings, i average 110fps with some stuttering near very populated areas
it still looks really good and ive loved almost every minute of it
my only complaint has been the broken/ unplayable missions towards the later parts of the game
Don’t blame unreal for stalker 2 entirely the devolpers fault
What if Source 2…..become a popular engine?
The first Stalker game with mods (Anomaly, Gamma etc) managed to look almost as good as Stalker 2 with Unreal Engine 5… And didn't have the pop in of mobs necessary in UE5.
People who play games on console WONT see or care about any of this stuff
Lol, they all literally use an engine with "unrealistic" it its name 😂
They look soulless idk look all the same with the dark filter and ugly look. I prefer a game on its own engine or a unique one or atleast a more Polished engine
Shader compilation is a good thing no? Considering it doesn't even take that long
In the future, you will get 25fps and you will be happy….
The matrix demo vs everything made with unreal 5 are 2 different things.
Also loosing red engine sucked.
Imagine trying to sell a graphic engine that works mostly on upscaling and frame gen to people when most of those people dont even have the hardware that support it.Truly an Epic Games moment.
Dude, what exactly are you complaining here – the brand new game can not run high settings on 1 year old graphics card? That's what medium and low settings are for. That was completely normal 20 years ago. Brand new software even required brand new hardware. Remember Crysis?
I agree with you, it is a shame, but it is not a disaster ..
I'll never not be impressed by being able to effortlessly run Cyberpunk and being somewhat CPU-limited in Veilguard with the same system that shits the bed playing Remnant 2 and The First Descendant, as if suddenly my computer — that I spent way more money on than I sometimes think I should've — cannot run these games at nearly the same settings. Cyberpunk on highest settings non-RT? Sure buddy, have your smooth performance. Veilguard on ultra settings non-RT? Eh, lags a bit in certain regions, but for most of the combat locations it's perfectly fine. Remnant 2 and The First Descendant? Well buddy, how do you feel about performance XeSS because FSR looks awful and DLSS is only available for the 8GB Nvidia card that was in my budget instead of the 12GB AMD one? Unreal 5 is the new Unity and I can't say I inherently hate both, but clearly both engines had a fuckhuge wave of people who knew jack shit about optimization making games, and now we're stuck paying certain people to deliver us games that force us to pay more in computer parts to actually play them properly.
I think every game should be done with UE5 from now on, hardware will evolve.