This Steam Next Fest killed Unreal Engine for me.
Every single game with that splash screen ended up as a slide show, and not even prettier, I play 15 years old games that look better than most games I saw coming from UE5.
I used to recommend Unreal 4 for everyone, but they are already going for 6 without optimizing the 5.
No need to upgrade, just give a chance to other games, devs and engines that cares for their customers.
I got into Cassette Beasts a while ago and notice all Godot games run well on Steam Deck and my older hardware. Cry Engine looks beautiful and still run well on stuff.
Gothic Remake having 2070 as minimum requirement hit different
Yeah, i fell that when i saw my old 2060 as minimun requirement for Alan Wake 2
Computer I built 15 years ago is just now showing up as minimum requirements on most of the games. It’s called future proofing. If you’re going to spend the money to build a computer build something that can last.
future proofing
I understand the sentiment, but this wording was always a marketing ploy for people to spend more than they need and it was never useful.
When I was young, we were having so many innovations that there was no need to overpay, in two years you could get something twice as powerful for half the price. Even less if you could get used.
Then it took a halt, by the time I needed more memory. It was cheap to get a DDR3 + mobo + CPU than filling the empty slots on my DDR2 motherboard.
I failed for “future proofing” a few times. Extra memory slots, multicores and 64bits that windows and programs struggled to see, PSU with 4x that power I needed, when I needed it most of the plugs already changed.
I lived through a bunch of hardware shenanigans, some were shrugged, some were caught and received a slap on the wrist.
Now, more than ever, people should buy what they can afford and properly dimension their hardware for their current needs, not some future fantasy. There are communities over here that can help them with that.
There are no big innovations either, mostly exaggerated hardware usage for no apparent reason to force buy new hardware that does not do much either.
My rule of thumb for games early last year was if you cannot build something better than Steam Deck for cheaper, get the Deck, but now it is all crazy.
I finally had to replace mine because my CPU was, I think, x64 v2, but at least two games needed the v3 instruction set.
Wow almost 20 years! Kudos.
RHEL9 and forward require v3, and the numpy in pip as of a few versions back uses either v2 or v3 instructions, so v1 is silently broke for certain workloads. FreeBSD works on it just fine as do Debian based distributions as long as you don’t need recent versions of numpy, but there’s no telling what else out there just tries to run and fails with an illegal instruction.
I’ll be DEAD and BURIED before I play PC games that require a 1000W PSU-powered graphics card.
Linux gave extra life to so many computers. I still have a core 2 duo running Void.
Sadly, I can only open two tabs on Firefox. But it is great. For some games thought, I can only run stuff on hardware that came after 2012.
Yes, but it’s still not gonna help dramatically with the minimum requirements for games 😄
By the end of this summer, it’ll be a full year on Linux for me. It’s giving my old hardware some more life, and I have no reason to go back.
🍾 Cheers!
Been on Linux since 2015 as my daily driver, and since 2023 for my gaming PC. Pretty much zero issues, and in some cases, much better performance and compatibility than Windows.
Huh? Retro GPUs are like the 8800, right? The 1080ti is still pretty new, right?!
Yo guys have a GPU?
I run Linux on a 13 year old laptop. runs better than any windows bullshit.
Any company making games where they’re pushing graphics into top graphics card territory for no good gameplay reason can go straight to hell in 2026.
That seems to be the default for Unreal Engine 5.
Yeah FrameGen / DLSS is practically a requirement for UE5 games.
It’s gonna bite them in the ass shortly. $70 games that costs $200+ MM to make and despite selling millions of copies don’t even break even. If the minimum graphical requirements break the floor of what the average PC gamer owns, sales will plummet and kill the AAAA and AAA product line.
I’m curious what it’ll look like when games get to AAAAA and AAAAAA. What’s the floor for S tier games? Where do we go from there!?
Don’t worry, maybe china will flood the market with cheap ram soon or something.
Isn’t that what this is? Some trade war with China?
Kinda what happened to Japan?
I don’t know
In 3-4 years.
Time to check our backlogs.
But I don’t want cheap RAM, I want GoodRAM™
All part of the plan, so you subscribe to game streaming.
7900s, 4090s, and 5090s will become “forbidden technology” like you see in post apocalyptic fantasy where tech is magic. But also “idoocracy cyberpunk,” as human production is diverted to launching GPUs in space which engineers… awkwardly task with busywork.
You think I’m being hyperbolic. I am not.
***still ignores backlog
“Good” news is that AI companies killed the gaming upgrade market, so studios will need to target the same hardware for a while. We might even see the come back of the smart tricks to go beyond the hardware limits era.
Yeah. Console optimization used to be a real thing they should bring to PCs. Tomb Raider 2013 and Battlefield 3/4 on the Xbox 360 managed visuals and performance that an equivalently-speced PC from 2005 wouldn’t have been anywhere close to handling.
They’re prob going to try to push cloud hardware for everything. GeForce now, Windows 12? Online subscription!
I tried playing on Amazon Luna and it was a buggy laggy mess, even for a single player “offline” only game.
They seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that internet infrastructure in the US* is horrible and a lot of people outside of major urban areas have shitternet that makes streaming games laggy and unreliable. Unless they spend serious money upgrading infrastructure, it’s just going to be Stadia 2.0. Except even then people still really do not like gaming as a service so it’ll probably fail again anyway.
*I don’t know how good other countries’ internet is but I would include them if I did.
My internet is fine, good bandwith, good latency. But even then cloud gaming introduces delays i am a) not accostumed to and b) not tolerant of.
I do not want to have 100ms delay between my action and seeing the reaction. I do not want to be dependent on perfect connectivity to achieve even this delay, making every small issue which would only annoy me while browsing make my gaming hell. Even Bluetooth for my controller is too much delay for me when playing stuff like Dead Cells - it’s either a dedicated receiver or cable-bound. Everyone who actually wants to play something fast paced can’t be happy with cloud gaming. Well, the turn based strategy crowd might be tolerant of that, but i will never be until my body is too broken to play anything faster than solitaire.
I don’t normally play fast paced or competitive multiplayer games so I didn’t keep that in mind, but that is a very good point.
They being the handful AAA publishers that we already know produce games for shareholders not gamers.
the gaming upgrade market was kinda ridiculous anyway.
We dont need new, more powerful GPUs every 12/16 months
GPUs should, like, a new GPU every 5 years at a bare minium. New Cards being churned out every year is why gaming is shit, because theres no time for devs to learn, to optimize…instead they just target apis and get it out, and tell us use DLSS/FSR3 if performance is shit, even at 1080p there are still games they expect us to use stupid ass scaling to make playable.
APIs are… how you tell the GPU to do things. Nobody’s doing low level hardware access like it’s 1990 and you’re running MS-DOS.
Yes, summer child.
They also used to optimize for cards, too, to get the most performance for players. They don’t do that anymore, hence they only target the APIs and shit it out regardless of performance.
Only for terrible AAA games. Actual fun games I am fine.
Seriously, I barely play any new games, and pretty much no AAA that have come out the last few years. This year I’ve finished:
- Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Conviction, and Blacklist
- Super Mario World
- Grim Dawn (co-op)
- 999 (9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors)
- Across the Obelisk (multiple times, wife and I play this co-op)
- Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin
- Stella Glow
- Ball x Pit
- Rainbow Six Vegas 2
- ChainStaff
- 9 Years of Shadows
- Ace Combat X
- Live A Live remake
And currently I’m playing Megacopter: Blades of the Goddess solo, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 with my wife.
I’m having a blast tearing through the backlog this year, and I’ve barely bought any games compared to previous years. My Steam Deck alone has like 150+ games on it I’m looking to play through, and that doesn’t even account for all the retro games I’m looking to play via emulation.
ride on!
Gamers who speedrun NES games briefly poke their head out of the cave, see that life is more than shadows on a cave wall, reject that reality and return to the task at hand.
They got a sword for going into the cave. That’s more than I got out of any cave IRL.
Who do you think returned to the cave to lead us all as philosopher kings?
yeah… just dont buy unreal engine 5 games and you are fine
I have never hated an engine before UE5. But god it is just a steaming pile of unoptimized, bloated dogshit.
The engine isn’t bad itself. The problem is it has some really cool tools that are expensive to run, but developers just turn them all on instead of optimizing. See: ARC Raiders for how it should be done. It’s UE5, but they aren’t using Nanite or Lumen. UE5 can run very well. Game developers thinking the only thing that matters is having the most photorealistic games is what’s causes the issue.
UE 5.8 is supposed to include a “Lumen Lite” and some other improvements so that “games that rely on global illumination for artistic purposes can run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps”. That’ll probably provide a big boost on other platforms, but I dunno if anyone will patch their existing games to the new version.
I wish it was possible to disable lumen. I have a feeling that alone is whats robbing FPS, and that alone is why a lot of ue5 games have resolution scaling forced enabled and cant be turned off
I bet things would look better, too.
The developers can, or they can add a toggle. It isn’t fundamental to UE5. ARC Raiders and Squad are both on UE5 and don’t use Lumen.
The issue is supporting Lumen and another lighting solution requires them to make sure both work. For multiplayer games especially, having both isn’t an option, because then it gives an advantage to some people. Squad, for example, looked into it, but they ended up going with a different GI system that’s more performant so everyone can (and must) use it.
For single-player games, it’s possible to have Lumen and another option. It’s just extra cost to development. They’d rather go with the option that creates better trailers and not worry about people struggling to run it. They can run at an upscale 240p for all the executives care.
For multiplayer games especially, having both isn’t an option, because then it gives an advantage to some people.
Not if the option is configurable. This is akin to how Rocket League has all kinds of stylistic options, but most pros disable them all. I’m sure that will hold true for their UE6 migration, too.
No, I mean they can give you more information. Shadows can tell you where players are before you can see them, for example. You can also get information from reflections. Players who have hardware that can’t support these features are disadvantaged. Lumen is not equivalent to, for example, texture resolution.
I thought UE4 was bad… But then UE5 came along.
I’m getting like that for Unity games.
No idea what it is but just about every unity game makes my CPU run hot and starts pumping 40 degrees C air into the room.
What? Which ones? Escape from Tarkov is the most expensive Unity game to run that I know of, and it doesn’t have this issue.
The issues with UE5 aren’t the base engine. It’s Nanite and Lumen, and how easy they make them to just toggle on. Unity doesn’t have any features like this. You can get things like them on the store, but they aren’t baked in. They do have ECS, which is designed to have a ridiculous number of entities operating at once. I could see how that could cause this issue if unoptimized, but not many games are using it yet so it’s not what you’re talking about.
Raft, Software Inc, Tinberborn, Big Ambitions. None of those are heavy games, but all of them make cook my i7-9700K
Guess when I launched Raft and it hit high 50 degrees and when I exited the game.
High 50s isn’t actually an issue for any modern CPU I know of
Problem is it then pumps 40 degrees temps into the room which sucks when the temp is already in the 30s.
Yeah high 50s is actually excellent for a CPU under load…
Yeah, that’s almost certainly not because of Unity. At most, it could be blamed on C#, if we’re blaming the technology. This is an issue with their simulation I would assume. For example, Timberborn is simulating liquids and a population of workers. The liquids are probably the biggest culprit, and there’s a reason you don’t see many games doing it.
All the games you listed are simulation games though. They are going to be the largest CPU hogs you can get, especially when you use the highest simulation speed possible. At that point, they’re usually literally maxing out your CPU and running it as fast as it can process. As another example of this, Paradox games can not reach their highest speeds on weaker systems or later into the games. They run as fast as the CPU can process, which means nearly 100% utilization. It’s not because they aren’t efficient. It’s because you’re telling it to go all out on processing.
The CPU isn’t anywhere near maxing out though.
I think it’s limited on the cores it runs on or something - mine chugs on big maps with lots of water without going over 30%, which would be 4 cores running at full.
As a kid I used to basically only play emulator games because I didn’t have money for a real gpu. As an adult I basically only play indie games cause AAA games are all soulless trash.
Yeah, I reached my limit years ago for games that spend a bazillion $ on graphics, but their gameplay is just running from cutscene to cutscene with barely engaging combat in between.
Indie games tend to be actually fun.
Fr. I was playing corekeeper with a friend and randomly found a really pretty oasis mini biome, it had no ‘use’ but it was a chill safe area I found by accident, you could tell the devs just wanted you to enjoy their game. It feels so nice to play something that isnt trying to milk you for money at every corner!
How can AAA games all be soulless if they’re all Soulslikes?
Because they all died, and then again on the corpse run.
