Unreal Engine 5 games on PC showcase the promised eye candy with Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps, but also exhibit poor CPU utilization and stutters. A roundup of the first generation of UE5 releases reveals the good, great, and not-so-great aspects of these titles, providing insights into how developers are adapting to the engine on PC and its future on the platform.
Unreal Engine 5 was announced more than three years ago and we're only now seeing the first wave of third-party UE5 games on PC and consoles. For the audience on PC, these launches are both exciting and terrifying - we're finally seeing all of the eye candy promised by Epic with Lumen, Nanite and Virtual Shadow Maps, but we've also had an array of UE4 titles that have exhibited poor CPU utilisation and instrusive stutters.
Starting with Lumen, one thing I've noticed is that you can adjust this feature directly with the global illumination setting in the options menu; this is a global quality parameter in UE5 so I expect to see it in many game releases.
Therefore, just because a game uses Lumen, it doesn't mean every scene has the level of lighting fidelity we saw in the initial reveal - it really is down to the developer to leverage the technology in a good high-fidelity way that also serves gameplay. These traversal stutters negatively affect the gameplay experience and happen repeatedly, unlike shader compilation stutters, and the only way to minimise their impact is to use a faster CPU supported with fast RAM. Lords of the Fallen and Fort Solis are both incredibly gorgeous games, but their atmosphere and fluidity is undermined by traversal stutter in the former and both traversal and shader compilation stutter in the latter.
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