Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]
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Flappy Pannus
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All indications are it's standing at the top of the podium.
It's pretty shocking, even for UE4. If this was 3 years ago and UE4 was the new kid on the block and the shader stuttering wasn't talked about that much it would still be awful, but now to release a game like this is just staggering. Like I get that devs are busy making games and not watching every DF video, but come on man. This is not an esoteric issue, and at least at the helm, these are seasoned developers.
Their Twitter announcement thread is just full of replies yelling at them to fix the PC version (the SX version isn't too hot either, only the PS5 seems to have gotten the love). Incredibly short sighted to release it like this to hit the holiday season. Lots of warning signs, and although I'm not in the camp that it's inclusion is an automatic non-buy, also waiting until a week before release before dropping that it included Denuvo was pretty shitty too.
Word is btw that forcing it to run under DX11 remedies much of the stuttering, but hardly a solution as you lose ray tracing.
this is going to be a tough generation then, 'cos most games are going to run on UE.
Just now when I started to like UE..., sigh.
There can be some open-world traversal stutters in some games, but the frustrating thing is that outside of the shader compile issue, UE4 usually runs very well on PC. In terms of GPU/CPU performance, most UE4 games scale exactly as you would expect them to.
They just...happened to fuck up the implementation of the most fundamental aspect of a graphics engine running on an open architecture. It's like building an exceptional performant and scalable engine, but every PC version built with it crashes when you change resolution.
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I still feel the gaming community at large is unaware of this. For a bunch of nerds like us, this is glaring and has been for years but the average gamer barely knows what frame rate is. We also used to play Goldeneye and Perfect Dark at 10fps and not say anything. I'm thinking many people notice the stutters but just like low fps are simply "eh, nothing can be done about it and I'm enjoying the game".
Flappy Pannus
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Eh, not so sure of that. I think standards have raised quite a bit since then. Framerate is mentioned commonly in reviews, and with online, feedback is instantaneous. It's getting absolutely hammered on Steam right now:
Regardless what the average gamer thinks though, the point is the devs certainly could not have failed to notice this.
Oh for sure the standards are much higher now. 10fps wouldn't fly today obviously. My point is simply that such issues for the average gamer might as well not exist. The Goldeneye part was just to illustrate what we were accustomed to.
And good for the negative Steam reviews. Hopefully, it reflects in the sales. They need to stop this shit.
Can you please add context to avoid people guessing. I presume you mean the stutters? Without you spelling it out, we don't know if those are in game or the video capture/streaming.
Flappy Pannus
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He's so damn tired...
Sorry about that.
All of these games cache PSOs to avoid the issue, UE4 just seems especially bad, every other game ships like this on this engine. I’m sure it can be dealt with though.
arandomguy
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Just now when I started to like UE..., sigh.
I remember that getting regularly brought up, but was that actually a fault of the engine or just a prevailing art style in western console games at the time? I remember "gritty" in general being the in thing starting from the late 90s. Korean MMOs for instance using UE3 (or 2) in that era looked quite different, albeit you can argue they also tended to share an art style just a different one.
And that is what i dont understand. They are using all different engines and yet they have learned to cache PSOs. Warhammer is doing it every time Fatshark updated the game.
You have to do it every time you update the drivers as well.
Steam reviews of the game are really bad. Also people playing the XSX version have mentioned that the game stutters.
This means not all stutters are caused by shader compilation. Those are probably typical I/O stutters we have seen in many others UE games.
Doesnt surprise anyone?
Also, i dont see any reason for the ID buffer to exist on regular rdna gpus from amd.
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DavidGraham
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Gears 5 and Gears 4 stutter too, I play them regularly in multi-player, their stutter is much less intrusive, but it still happens especially in multi-player once you update the driver or when the game updates itself. You need to play a few matches covering all the maps to warm the shader cache up.
As an engine, UE adapts to multiple platforms, it creates too many shaders for too many permuations, much more than any other engine, these need to be compiled, even running the engine editor itself invokes a long period of shader warmup, the more complex your project is, and the more materials you have in that project, the longer that warmup process is.
Also UE4 in particular has a very bad memory management system.
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