The old video game industry still blows my mind. Competition was so fierce, there were tons of high quality AAA games releasing each year until things suddenly slowed down in the PS4/Xbone era. Granted, a lot of consoles failed and a lot of companies went under but it must have been wild to see Counter Strike, Baldur’s Gate 2, Diablo 2, Deus Ex, Perfect Dark, Red Alert 2, etc. all launch in the same year.
The indie scene today is great, but the amount of AAA games coming out these years are much fewer, and there’s a 50/50 chance it’s going to be a total flop.
Even if the game is well received, if it doesn’t make more money than the last game, then the studio is shuttered, and you’ll never see an official sequel. You’ll be stuck waiting for an indie dev or original dev on kickstarter to come along 5-10 years later, maybe even more.
Indies are making now what would have been AAA back then. And as many great games as there were back then, we get more now. Back then, it was possible to keep up with just about every major release as it came out. Now I’ve got a backlog of 9 games that piqued my interest and came out this year that I haven’t had time to get around to yet, and it’s only April.
Heads up, because I imagine the DF guys were too PC master race to notice, but you can smooth out a lot of the hitches by using framegen.
There's this weird implementation in the game where if you set frame gen to auto it seems to automatically turn it off if you're over the fps cap and then turn it on when you drop below and it's worth giving that a shot. It took some tweaking but I did end up finding a mix where between that and VRR with a low enough cap to maintain it most of the time but high enough to get acceptable latency the game is... mostly playable?
It was still a shock to go outside for the first time (most of the hitches seem to be around outdoors traversal) and it's still not perfect, but it did clean up a lot of it. Well, some of it. Your mileage may vary based on hardware and expectations, though.
Frame gen shouldn’t be a crutch, and by design it’s only supposed to enhance games that’s get above 60fps naturally. It doesn’t do anything good for the open world that constantly tanks to 45. It’s not a master race thing, it’s a poor optimization thing.
No, the point is the DF video never even tested framegen or upscaling before deeming the issue unsolvable in this video. I'm just trying to offer additional options to tune settings they don't cover in the video that may help.
Frame gen, for the record, is fundamentally a crutch. Specifically for CPU limits. It serves no other purpose. If you don't need it as a crutch you don't need it, period. It takes you from wherever you can get natively to hopefully closer to your monitor refresh rate. If you can reach your refresh rate then you don't need it in the first place.
Or at least it does that in the default implementation from GPU vendors where you're locked into uncapped, non vsynced FPS when using it.
I'm calling out that there seems to be a specific implementation here to use it with a frame cap. And with that fame cap if you can get yourself to, say 45-60 fps you can get a semi-decent 90 or 120 cap out on the other end that does trim down some of the stutters, especially if you also have VRR to eat a few extra miliseconds.
So it's not ideal, you're effectively locking the game to 90 or 120 and then trying to scrape by at 45-60 and double up with frame gen just so you can use an AI frame to slide in between the 45-80ms spike and eat the rest of the time difference with VRR. But hey, it kinda works, at least in my setup. Crutch or no crutch it makes the game more playable for me. I don't have the tools to measure exactly how much more playable, and I'd like to see DF test it, but at a glance it seems to help.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't look into the cause and patch improvements, but if it can take the game from unplayable to playable for some people on some setups that's a good thing.
IME framegen hasn’t meaningfully reduced the open-world hitching. It gets the framerate nice and smooth while standing still, fighting a bandit or whatever… until you walk a bit and the game becomes CPU-limited while streaming in new cells, at which point you noticeably hitch.
The performance in interior cells (including cities) is very good even on Ultra settings.
I suspect that this is one of the compromises they made by keeping the old engine running under the hood, because as DF notes this also happened in the original.
That is entirely possible. My setup seems to be in this sweet spot where the normal performance is high enough over the cap AND the framegen gets you enough extra smoothness AND the VRR is able to eat enough miliseconds off the hitches that it is noticeably improved (but crucially not perfect, so if you're more sensitive than me that may also be part of it). Still, even if it doesn't help for everybody it's worth a shot and not covered in the video.
I bet there is something to having to load the world in chunks in the underlying engine and then having to render the chunk all at once in UE5 that makes UE5's struggles even worse. Still, the game was a shadowdrop, you have to assume they could have taken some time to try to figure it out a bit better.
The worst case scenario is that further optimization isn't an option, but... I mean, even if it is related to what people think it's related they should be able to find some way to ease some of the load off. The observation that a lot of the performance hit is related to hardware Lumen alone points that way. Especially since having a faster base framerate does seem related to having smaller hitches. But hey, who's to say? I guess we'll see where they go from here.
I tried it again recently and starts out tolerable but gets worse the bigger your city gets, even when you lower settings. It would be one thing if the game looked amazing and had these deep, detailed simulations… but it just looks okay and the digital corner-cutting trickery becomes obvious when you start looking closely. I feel like there is something fundamentally wrong under the hood of Skylines 2.
If somebody didn’t realize it was almost certainly going to run poorly the second it was revealed to use UE5, I wouldn’t even know what to say to them.
Fortnite, Wukong, Tekken 8, Layers of Fear, Firmament, Everspace 2, Dark and Darker, Abiotic Factor, STALKER 2, Jusant, Frostpunk 2, Satisfactory, Expedition 33, Inzoi, Immortals of Aveum, Starship Troopers: Extermination, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, Lords of the Fallen, Robocop, Myst (UE5 remake), Riven (UE5 remake), Palworld, Remanant 2, Hellblade 2, Subnautica 2… and the list keeps growing.
When a big studio skips QA and releases a broken game, it’s not the engine’s fault, it’s the studios fault. As long as consumers tolerate broken games that can maybe be fixed later (if we’re lucky) then companies will keep releasing broken, unfinished, unpolished, untested games. Blaming UE5 is like blaming an author’s word processor for a poorly written novel.
Idk I think the only one of those on that list that I’ve played that ran well enough that I’d consider it ok was tekken and I’m assuming that’s more because it’s a fighting game.
No I’m saying that it being a fighting game meant that it’s much easier to optimize because you have such a fixed camera angle and few characters on screen.
It’s because there’s a lot more optimization you can do on a fighting game vs a big open world, it just doesn’t have to render that much comparatively.
Fighting games would run well on a fucking smart fridge. They’re by far the least performance hungry game genre. There is no live loading of assets, the Background scenery is 100% static and there are usually just two characters on the screen on any given moment. It would take actual effort to fuck up the performance of something so simple
Well that’s a pretty shit list. You have there games that aren’t using UE5 (Layers of Fear 2), that are known to have poor performance (STALKER 2), that just released into early access (Inzoi) and that haven’t even released into early access (Subnautica 2).
I’d throw half the list out the window, actually probably more because the other half of the list are mostly games I don’t know enough to evaluate their performance.
I didn’t know the original game was remade. I assumed you meant layers of fear 2 because the original layers of fear wasn’t even on Unreal Engine and Layers of fear 2 is on UE4. Nothing I said was explicitly wrong. It was wrong in the context only because you weren’t precise with what you’re saying.
And how nice of you to pick out the one thing I was wrong on while completely ignoring all the other examples. For instance how the fuck can you put Subnautica 2 on that list when it’s not even in early access?
I’m not blaming UE5, but I’m capable of pattern recognition. There’s a pattern of developers not fixing UE5 issues and releasing games with them still present. The fault lies with both game developers and UE developers.
UE is the most popular gaming engine, so it’s used on the most projects and has a high amount of visibility. No matter which engine you build a game with, there are many factors to keep in mind for performance, compatibility, and stability. The engine doesn’t do that for you.
One problem is that big studios build games for consoles first, since it’s easiest to build for predictable systems. PC then gets ignored, is minimally tested, and patched up after the fact. Another is “Crysis syndrome”, where developers push for the best graphics they can manage and performance, compatibility, and stability be damned - if it certifies for the target consoles, that is all that matters. There is also the factor of people being unreasonable about their hardwares capabilities, expecting that everything should always be able to run maxxed out forever… and developers providing options that push the cutting edge of modern (or worse, hypothetical future) hardware compounds the problem. But none of these things have anything to do with the engine, but what developers themselves make on top of the engine.
A lot of the responses to me so far have been “that’s stupid because” and then everything after “because” is related to individual game development, NOT the engine. There is nothing wrong with UE, but there are lots of things wrong with game/software development in general that really should be addressed.
Yeah, I wonder if that’s perhaps the result of basically stapling the old game engine onto UE5 in order to preserve the core gameplay. Back when Oblivion was first released, multicore CPUs were incredibly rare, so it’s likely the engine was not built to take advantage of them. But ever since then, most of the improvements in CPUs have come in the form of adding more cores rather than increasing clock speed, and it’s by no means trivial to convert single-threaded code into multi-threaded. Most likely it would require a complete rewrite, which they’d probably want to avoid in order not to introduce more bugs.
But of course, it could also just be UE5’s fault, since even a single core on a modern CPU should not be slower than a 2006 model.
For day one, performance is actually fine. I have much bigger gripes than getting fps dips in the open zones. Like levelling ffs. I have 100 strength, willpower, and blades, but am doing less damage to mobs now than I was doing in the beginning of the game. Or levelled loot drops and quests.
The key to oblivion is to pick tag skills that you won’t use. If your build is a stealth archer, pick block blunt and restore. You only level when your tagged skills level, so your archery illusion and sneak will be 100 but your character will be sub level 10 so you’ll basically be a god
Sort of. The new leveling system has minor skills contribute to your levels, to a lesser degree. IIRC it’s something like 10 major levels or 20 minor levels (or some combination thereof) to get a character level.
The level system doesn’t work that way anymore. Now when you level up, it doesn’t matter what skills you leveled up when you get a new level, you always get 12 points (called “virtues”) to spread around to any stat. Luck, however, takes 4 “virtues” to level one point, while the others are just 1:1 and you can add up to 5 at a time.
I can level up entirely through using Agility linked skills but then put my stat points into Strength and Intelligence instead of agility.
The real issue has to do with the level scaling on enemies still being the worst of any Elder Scrolls game because they didn’t change anything about that from the OG. So once you’re level 50, everything has the best weapons and armor on them.
I’ve gotten a lot of freezing and stuttering playing on my desktop PC (Linux with Proton). The deck actually seems to be more stable, though it is locked to 30 fps and textures still take a minute to load sometimes.
It’s poorly optimized. At version 0.4 is probably the first thing that looked decent, with final art in place, but no QA or optimization done. My bet is that they had to launch earlier than expected due to the rumors, or they extended way past the due date and the money for the project ran out. If successful, probably optimization will take place, but they are waging on it.
Like many UE games over the years, they didn’t properly optimize Unreal itself for their use, and there were already several ini tweaks up on the Nexus to remedy this the day of launch.
Went from 27 average fps when in exterior cells to a solid 60, with an unsupported GPU by just using one of these ini tweaks.
This is such a common problem with games on any iteration of Unreal Engine, and has been for over 2 decades. Since it’s so common to see, I wonder if the documentation just sucks.
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