It’s a new day, and another badly-optimized AAA Unreal Engine 5 game has hit store shelves. A couple of YouTubers, including Daniel Owen, have discovered serious performance problems in The Outer Worlds 2 that almost mirror Borderlands 4’s atrocious launch day performance. One of the most problematic graphics settings is the game’s ray tracing mode, which prevents even AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming champ from achieving 60 FPS at resolutions well under 1080p.
I love it, but it’s getting treated as a shortcut to lighting when performance would be saved for most by a conventional lighting system. Ue5 is lousy with games that have half their frame rates taken up by a suboptimal implementation.
Honestly it feels like a technology that was designed with a future rig in mind, similar to how it was in the 2000s, but rendering technology doesn’t move that fast nowadays. I much prefer a strategy like NVIDIA did with physx back in the day, where it’s entirely possible to run with existing technology. Feels safer, more achievable.