I just hope CDPR's efforts in CPU multithreading actually gets properly added to UE5, UE5 cannot continue with it's pathetic CPU usage.

Man i just love seeing the railroad and stone in Robocop, all the shadow and geo detail. Before ray tracing was a thing when i was younger this was the kind of graphics advancement visually i really thought about, just that pure detail

I don't understand why shader pre-compilation is not just a built-in feature on Unreal at this point. The plague of shader stutter on that engine is widespread and it's infuriating that it's up to the devs to implement their own pre-compilation system, which most just don't bother with.

I think time and budget will continue to be a big factor in visual quality. Its going to be interesting to see how AAA UE5 games fair.

I love these videos where we come back to games some time down the road.

Can’t wait to see what the Coalition does with UE5!

Even though Immortals of Aveum uses the latest UE5 tech, when all of the colourful specular effect representing magic is on-screen it just reminds me of an artificial looking early 2000's arena shooter. Or is it just me?

The fact Cyberpunk looks better than any of these games and runs 10x better. Same goes for TLOU2 and RDR2, both which looked incredible running on a freaking PS4 Pro. Still two of the best looking games on the market to this day:

I'm surely taking that Upscaling comparison as gospel. Its been exercised that Devs should use TSR, why is FSR even an option. they can look similar in some scenarios but I'm betting on TSR in these challenging 720p moments everytime.

I was surprised at how good the environment looks on Robocop. Good destruction too.

I mean, Unreal had a great year. Their competitor Unity shot themselves in the foot 😂

The biggest problem with UE5 games now are how they lean heavily on hyper-realism instead of better performance and frame rate

Jusant was a magical game and deserves more exposure

Really wish more Unreal 5 games would use TSR. Jedi Survivor for instance would look wildly better without all of FSR2's artifacting.

What is more baffling is that games like Ghost of tsushima or God of War ragnarok run and look better than some of these U5 games.

Anyone else feel like UE5 is too early given the power of current consoles and the average pc according to the Valve Hardware Survey? I mean, remember how Rocksteady made magic with UE 3 in AK? Maybe ue4 deserved a few more yers before a switch.

UE5 was clearly designed for 30fps on console, but the cross gen period made it a very unpopular target so they've been rushing to cut back ever since

TSR looked quite good, all things considered. Could be good to start to get the word out for the AMD GPU users out there.

I honestly think Gears Of War 6 will fully utilize everything UE5 and I can not wait to see what it will look like

The Talos Principle 2 is a great use of UE5. On top of having an awesome story and gameplay it runs at 1440p 90-120fps range with ray traced global illumination (software lumen) and nanite both in use. DLSS quality mode of course. 5800X/4070. Loving it so far.

I have no idea if this is something that possible, but i think it would be cool if there was some way that hardware RT could be use to supplement software lumen instead of replace it. I think this would be a huge win for AMD, and lower end Nvidia cards. The lower end or older Nvidia cards are in a tough spot because their raster performance is a bit weak, and they don't have enough RT cores to make running hardware RT practical. For AMD, their cards excel in raster, but don't have much dedicated RT hardware. Depending on the card and the games if the RT workload could be variable distributed between software and hardware, there are probably situations where you could increase performance and quality.

I'm totally confused about UE5. I'm a casual geek, but I thought the whole point was to provide advanced features at a lower cost. If that's the case, then why is UE5 so expensive on the hardware?

the sad thing is that the games are not a "generational leap" that justify how heavy they are... there are games from 2015 ( arkham knights, the witcher 3 base, etc) that look similar or ever way better than any unreal 5 games and are not demanding even half the hardware they do

GREAT INFORMATIVE VIDEO. Hope Developers are Watching

It's wild how bad FSR is compared to basically any other option.

RoboCop is such a good game, pretty much every texture and material looks so good.

Reminds me of the state of Unreal Engine 3 on the 360 and PS3. Those consoles were just too underpowered to do it justice in many games, for example Enslaved with its terrible framerate on PS3

Those traversal stutters need to be gone. TAAU need works. It need to be as good as DLSS. Shader precompilation need to just work. HDR need to just work as well, with every games releasing with peak brightness, perfect blacks and paper white luminance settings exposed.

I think Gears 6 will be well optimized. So three years from now we'll really see what it can do 😅

The biggest problem with UE5 titles on consoles is the extremely low resolution. You can literally see image breakup, noisy lighting and all kinds of artifacts on screen, no matter the display. Console games struggling to hit anything higher than 1080p in 2023 is a bit of joke territory, and even so performance is unstable as well. It's great that we have 60 fps targets but it can't be achieved without sacrificing image quality or stability, or both. Restricting these games to 30 fps would be even worse. I'm curious if UE 5.4 will help this, as it will offer meaningful CPU multithreading improvements.

Can't wait for a full console generation of 480p games upscaled to 4k

Playing Robocop in performance mode on Series X and it is really really bad and inconsistent, some mission was like 35 fps the whole time 😂

It seems the feature that has the worst performance impact is Lumen. But what about Nanite? And virtual shadow maps? It would be nice to see which feature is the main cause of bad UE5 performance.

Any time I hear Unreal 5 on console I think crappy image quality and performance. Graphics have gotten so good at this point I'd take better image quality and rock solid performance over new graphical techniques you can't even appreciate cause the trade off isn't there yet. I wish developers would just wait for the Pro versions or just next Gen all together for these new graphical techniques that don't pay off.

Jusant and Talos Principle 2 can have some significant frame drops on my RTX 3080 though (they usually take ~80% GPU usage running at a stable 60 FPS at 1440p maximum settings + DLSS). For Jusant it's in the Chapter 5 and it drops to ~40fps, and for Talos Principle 2 it is whenever I run into a lot of trees that can pull slow the game to as low as ~35 FPS.

I think they only need to update the games to FSR3, that way it would solve all of the stutter issues and or frame drops, enhancing the games to FSR3 is the best option for all UE5 games.

I think the biggest problem is the unmanaged shader compilation and other issues that cause issues even on high end hardware.

Talking about Immortals of Aveum again eh?’ You guys really love this game over at DF. 😂

Excellent vid topic

I am halfway through Jusant, PC gamepass with a i7/1070ti. The game looks great at 1080p everything turned up with FSR. It's a interesting relax game to play.

To be fair the moment that matrix demo dropped I knew these consoles wouldn’t be enough

What Oliver really wanted to say at the start. It has been years but UE5 is finally here, and it has been a shit show.

I had no idea Talos Principle 2 used UE5. I’m buying it! Loved the first one.

Thanks Oliver! Great analysis as always...Robocop is outstanding on both the S and X - those guys are working some miracles

POINT : Movie's and TV shows cheat with their lighting all the time they use reflector and refractors and defusers to move light to places it shouldn't be so actor's faces are visible and the like or they place lights to make dramatic pools of darkness. So I think the things like overly dark shadows under plants really doesn't bother me in the slightest and in some cases looks way better than when it is rendered accurately when can make something look a bit plastic. Its like shiny wet tarmac it might actually look like a shiny surface in reality too but in a game it looks fake AF and is actually more real feeling if slick tarmac isn't rendered accurate as the lack of something is always much less noticeable that something being implemented poorly is. I have said this before ; but I massively prefer the look of the baked shadows in Hogwarts Legacy over the appearance of the RT as the RT sucks out all the shadows from a scene and often makes a game look like a doll's house. I'd rather have some artistic shadows over to much bounce light and the end result looking sterile and boring by being over lit. You can see this in Metro Exudus when the shadows removed from door ways are artistically less impressive as there is way to much light in the scene near door ways and so the transition to the bright exterior looses all artistic vision. Metro Exodus is to me the thing to NOT DO that is the boring plan looking way to eat up all your system resources and end up with something that looks barely any better in some places and actually worse in others. If the videogame industry is still so deluded as to want to be Hollywood then they can at least take that one good lesson from them when it comes to faking your lighting for artistic effect. Art design and design in general should include your lighting. The dullest thing in the world in videogame terms is the look of a game with dynamic weather / day night cycle that is done poorly & RT & related technologies is like the lazy developers way of automating something to the degree they don't have to even HAVE an artistic vision for their games anymore. That would be a shame.

The problem is the console version of all these UE5 games, look so low resolution and blurry that it’s hard to even tell they’re using UE5.

Have you guys played Snowrunner? It's a beautiful engine with some of the best god rays I've ever seen.

Talos principle 2 looks insane. Immortals looks like garbage. Looking forward to more UE5 games next year

Can you break walls? Interact with the scenery? Can you pick objects? Can you bend vegetation? Can enemies make surprising and complex decisions to attack you, or to defend themselves? No? Then I think it's just silly to waste cpu resources on single-threaded visuals to make old tired gameplay look shiny.

Isn't every Unreal Engine iteration a letdown in the first few years and then kinda settles at average+

8:29 It's probably a KZfaq audio library track or something, but I GOTTA know what this jam is

You didn't mention the insane shimmer and ghosting in most of these titles. Especially in Talos Principle?

RE engine is the king, nice looking graphics, scalable and 60 fps

Really feels like a trainwreck happening in slowmo atm thinking about cp77-2 on this engine

UE5 still needs more time to cook. Reminds me of UE3 when it launched, visuals and performance were inconsistent from title to title but engine updates made a significant difference over time.

Why doesnt the series s version of some of these games use lumen tech to bake the gi into lightmaps than use ao and ssr to clean them up?

In house engines will reign supreme for some time. Just look at what Sony Santa Monica and Insomniac can do with the PS5. Just seems like UE5 needs more polish and the consoles need more grunt than what’s available

Not really sold on a lot of the future graphics tech tbh, like in some of the gi examples yeah it definitely looks more aesthetically pleasing, but when im playing games i prefer to actually be able to see things and a lot of indoor/nighttime examples are just too dark for me

Haven’t really been impressed so far honestly. They always put out those great tech demos and then the games themselves look nothing like that. Dreams vs reality.

Robocop Rogue City is the best showcase of UE5 for me this year, graphics, gameplay, heck even the look and feel of , its capture all the eyecandy and atmosphere of the Original 80's cinema masterpiece. Teyon did superb job utilizing UE5 capability, hopefully next year more AAA games will properly follow suit(not just half a$$$edly putting UE5 template like certain Triple A publisher)

Someone needs to give Digital foundry a Talos Principles 2 save file further into the game. So far both videos covering the game never got past the tutorial intro, which is the least visually interesting level.

Is Digital Foundry going to look at Ark Survival Ascended? Not necessarily on console.

Are you guys gonna make a video on the new Star Engine demonstration?

Stutter engine 5 43 fps engine 5 720p engine 5

I remember when we first heard of the current gen consoles almost 4 years ago now. They were claiming 4k, 120, RT technology... what they didn't tell us was that's not 4k and 120hz with RT.... it's 4k or 120hz (sometimes) or RT at 30hz 1440p lol

Thanks for your excellent and very informative content, DF. 👍🏽

Its so sad to see the massive amount of stuttering even on console, UE engine be like that has never changed.

The best looking unreal engine game wasnt even on 5, it was on 4 and that was the Callisto Protocol

I love great graphics in games but it doesn't mean gameplay and story doesn't matter . just graphic cant sell your game.

I have one question what is the mod that make fort solis to supoort/have harware raytracing? I would rally like to use it

I'm quite confused by some of the footage of Talos Principle 2. In one shot you can see Elohim talking, and in another you can see a floating Tetronimo. I've played through Talos Principle 1 several times and I am actively playing and have almost completed Talos Principle 2, and TL2 does not feature Elohim in any significant way, and there is no collection of Tetronimoes in the way shown in the footage. It's almost as if the footage is from the original Talos Principle.

UE5 doesn’t really shine because its very demanding nature ends up with consoles using low base resolutions and the graphical fidelity takes a huge hit Note: Immortals of aveum used to run mostly 60 fps but with blurry picture before. They increased the resolution of the game on series x and ps5 and the game is a lot sharper now, but the performance suffers. Thats probably why series s runs the game better

I remember when I upgraded to a 3080 and felt such a huge difference in performance in games. This year I've upgraded to a i9, 4090 and yay, I get like 10 more FPS in games than before. This is insanely a bad example of moving forward, we are no longer caring about performance anymore. Games running at 30FPS on consoles is beyond what I would have expected years ago. Games requiring my 1200 dollar GPU just to have to upscale them.. wow.

The benefits are subtle unless you can do a side by side comparison, but the artifacts are extremely distracting. So many areas are flickery or grainy now, after my eyes are adjusted to rasterization artifacts lol

Oh boy, in The Talos Principle 2, you only tested the tutorial area. Once you get out of this area, the game become a technical disaster. Constant stutters, *hardcore* TSR ghosting, glitches reflection on water. I bought the game on PC, and I stopped after few hours because it was just not possible. I bought it on PS5 and it's even more catastrophic with the forced TSR and the hardcore ghosting. You should definitely talk much about this game. 😢

Arkham Knight was UE3. Nuff said... Actually no. I bet the artists aged tremendously getting the game to look the way it does. UE5 *should* reduce time artists spend time creating assets and finnessing LODs. But i think by enabling that, it's picked up performance compromises. UE5 is so far from the metal that even with ridiculous modern hardware the bloat kills performance.

How does Remnant 2 keep getting forgotten about and overlooked?

RT may be quiet taxing on console hardware, but for me, right now, its more taxing on the wallet

There’s also Tekken 8 coming this January.

god i hope upscaling on consoles improves soon. i'm genuinely considering switching to PC this gen because FSR looks egregiously bad and is never an optional feature

In my opinion, UE5 has been in a weird space where we have seen excellent demos but those features never made into real games. It could be that the adoption is difficult, or game development has lost its motivation in general. We are seeing so many repetitive game concepts, and devs don’t have enough time to adopt UE5. They have to push things ASAP. or run out of money.

I wonder how many development studios are jumping for joy while watching this video right now. Feedback I'm sure will go a long way

Why visual matters if optimization don't take place?

I'm curious, did UE5 add or improve on things that isn't just visual? Like new and better ways to interact with objects and the environment, new possibilities for game mechanics, better AI, etc. I wish they focused more on those instead of these "good looking" effects. I also hate the techniques that makes it look good but only in some angles and if you move, it'll be very noticeable that something changed that doesn't make sense. The one I saw here is the reflection in the water that goes away when you look down. Breaks inmersion! 😄

Would've liked the scope of this to have included UE5 on PC, given the history of UE's issues there.

I've played the talos principle 2 and layers of fear which are on Unreal Engine 5, both look amazing. You guys not including layers of fear on this video as a huge omission, it looks phenomenal.

Unreal Engine + the focus on graphics is the biggest plague of this consoles' generation. PC Gaming is suffering too because of this which makes it less accessible than ever before. Push the graphics, says Digital Foundry, then complain when DLSS/FSR, heck even Frame Generation, is a necessity for playable framerates.

The Callisto Protocol has been the best looking Unreal Engine game ever made in my opinion and that was just Unreal Engine 4.

Why doesn't Oliver get a new mic/audio setup I love his videos but the audio is always such a turn off it can make it a slog to sit through.

RedEngine > UE5 Havok > UE5 Rage 9> UE5 Naughty Dog Engine > UE5 RE Engine > UE5 Fox Engine > UE5 Decima > UE5 Snowdrop > UE5 Dunia > UE5 Frostbite > UE5 etc...

7:10 what's the game name he says here?

I just don't see how all those advanced graphical features will get properly utilised for as long as a GPU alone to render them at decent quality will set you back a $1000+.

UE3 Arkham Knight looks better than UE5 games The only games I can think to be good is Jusant and Robocop aside from Epic's in house games.

It would be interesting to hear the DF team’s thoughts on the state of UE5 on the Switch.

Wait how do you modify Fort Solis to use hardware lumen?! Can that be done with other games that 'only' support software lumen?

I think we're seeing a period of time in game development where independent in-house game engines start to become the preferred method rather than third-party premier ones like Unreal.

The problem with UE5 is that it doesn't "gurantee" better visuals, but when you tick the most marketed features on (Lumen and Nanite) you guarantee a performance drop. A big one too. Something like Remnant 2 doesn't look nearly good enough to justify having to enable DLSS even at 1080p to run "properly" (and there are still drops) and if I remember correctly, it uses only Nanite. I feel like both Lumen and Nanite make developing games FASTER but not easier and many publishers (and some developers) will take advantage of that, without putting the extra work to make sure the game runs properly. It's why I don't see the industry switching more often to UE5 as a good thing.

These consoles just came out about 3 years too early. Yes I’ve enjoyed my series x since day 1 but damn I wish they would of just waited a few years and released consoles that are actually powerful more compared to the 40 series graphics cards instead of the extremely old 2080 card. I mean “next gen” games aren’t even really out yet expect a very few of them so yeah they came out way way too early.

It's funny but games with FSR look like the Matrix on the Series S @15:23. It also has the same artifacts and picture instability.

Tim Engine 5 Console Health Check: It’s Terminal