Unreal Engine has problems. Alongside cutting-edge graphics replete with incredible surface texture and stunning lighting are performance issues even the most top tier of PC rigs can’t avoid. Indeed, games made within UE5 and released to console aren’t immune to these issues either, but the problems are prevalent for PC players the most. With an increasing number of studios switching from their proprietary game engines to using Unreal Engine 5 – CD Projekt Red and their upcoming sequels to The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 included plus formerly 343 Industries now Halo Studios crafting Master Chief’s newest space shooting foray just two principal examples – worry is growing amongst gamers that these performance issues will become ubiquitous.
The problems amongst Unreal Engine 5 games released thus far centre on subpar frame rates and stuttering. Again, these problems dominate on PC, but we’ve seen issues of stuttering in the likes of Black Myth: Wukong, Silent Hill 2, Stalker 2, Tekken 8, Frostpunk 2, and ARK: Survival Ascended, alongside others.
There’s evidence the bulk of performance problems are patched out via post-release updates which points to studios perhaps not optimising their games thoroughly enough during development, instead relying on fixing issues prevalent at launch later. However, this problem has existed for some time, and is certainly an issue with games not made on Unreal Engine 5.
No, the issue is greater with Epic’s toolkit. Indeed, developers – solo and indie to AAA – are discussing issues on Epic’s forums that are more widespread than the stuttering just mentioned. Examples include struggles to attain frame rates beyond 20 fps even in low settings, unusually high GPU run times, again on low settings, overheating, blue screen crashes, laggy textures, slow loading, even in near-empty scenes – the list goes on. And, again, these are issues during development; we’re not even remotely talking about finished product here. If game makers are grappling with these issues during development, then it’s no wonder those games with publisher-imposed release dates are entering the world with performance problems. And that’s not to mention game developers that are small scale. As a result of these issues, their projects might never even see the light of day.
There must be solutions. Thankfully, Epic’s in-house engineers have posted to Unreal Engine’s official blog on February 4th, 2025, their thoughts relating to shader stuttering alongside upcoming ideas they’re iterating on as fixes. Given the length of this post, we’re to assume Epic believe this to be the principal cause behind the wealth of issues studios are experiencing during development, and gamers are suffering whilst playing.
To explain shaders as per the blog update, these programs execute on GPUs to perform the various steps in rendering a 3D image. Ostensibly, they’re pieces of code written to complete a specific task. Shaders can govern shadowing, deformation, transforming, even intricate processes such as the colour of individual pixels based on surface material, multiple light sources, various environmental effects, so on and so forth. As graphical fidelity increases, the process behind shader compilation becomes more complex and thus more time consuming for drivers to compile shader information and translate into code readable via GPU. The result: when a render engine realises it needs to compile a new shader the game stops functioning to complete this process. We’re talking milliseconds here but given the exorbitant amount of shader code in any given scene in-game the result is the on-screen stuttering that we’re seeing in those games listed earlier.
The blog dives deeper, outlining distinctions between CPU programs, approaches taken by different GPUs, the instruction sets defined by application programming interfaces (APIs) such as Direct3D or Vulkan, and is good reading for anyone tech-minded enough to make sense of it all. For the rest of us, the bottom line is this: Epic have thoroughly outlined these issues and are working hard to fix them.
Released within Unreal Engine 5.2 was the ability to precache PSOs, or pipeline state objects. PSOs describe the rendering of objects via several shaders working together alongside other GPU settings. The intricate detail of modern game worlds results in millions of PSOs needing to be compiled to render an image correctly based on numerous parameters: shaders rendering materials on different meshes together with various pipeline settings simultaneously, for instance. It’s technical reading again, but the need-to-know summarisation is that Epic’s solution is to determine PSOs during a game’s loading time by precaching a material’s likely mesh information together with video quality settings. It’ll produce subsets of possible PSOs, a smaller amount than the full range of possibilities but by-and-large enough to correctly render 3D objects in scene without performance related issues like stuttering. An API which provides hints to the system on what is likely going to be needed ahead of time is also in the works at Epic, as per the blog update.
Will precaching PSOs eradicate the performance issues we’re seeing? After all, a quick scour of Reddit yields players who’re still struggling with shader pre-cache following Unreal Engine 5.2’s release. Tekken 8 has suffered from numerous forms of input lag, Stalker 2 players experience inconsistent traversal stutter, Frostpunk 2 harbours shockingly low framerates, an issue certain users – again on Reddit – describe as simulation speed issues and not necessarily problems isolated to framerates. ARK: Survival Ascended is amongst the worst offenders, with players reporting frame rate drops, unplayable screen stuttering, and system crashes, even on high-end PC hardware, on PS5 and on Xbox Series X|S.
These performance issues greatly affect the joy of gameplay too, even when they’re not at their worst. Case in point is Black Myth: Wukong, a game with rapid-fire Soulslike combat where even the slightest mistimed button press can spell certain doom for your character.
The solutions for gamers as end-users are perhaps to lower resolutions, to disable ray tracing, to reduce texture quality, or to cap frame rates. And whilst these solutions might prove fruitful, they aren’t long term fixes, and they certainly appear counter-intuitive given Unreal Engine 5’s promise of glorious looking games. Taking steps to make games look worse for them to function correctly is backwards, so the hope that Epic’s solution to fix shader stuttering via precaching PSOs is great.
More solutions via Epic are likely coming, so hopefully these grave concerns will be ironed out en masse before this hardware generation’s culmination. Worth pointing out at this juncture are the handful of UE5 bright spots; games released via Unreal Engine 5 that haven’t exhibited anywhere near the level of performance problems experienced by other games. For an example: Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 features boundary pushing fidelity, most notably in its application of Unreal Engine 5’s Metahuman facial character rendering, and this all works fluidly to present one of the greatest visual spectacles ever committed to video games. RoboCop: Rogue City is another one, able to apply all UE5’s surface texture capability, global illumination, real-time reflections, and virtual shadow maps whilst still targeting a buttery smooth 60fps on current-gen consoles.
More UE5 games are coming and given Epic’s dedication to solving performance problems there’s hope that the number releasing without issues will increase. For teams like CD Projekt Red who’ve switched to developing in Unreal Engine 5 the concern for games like The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk Orion won’t dissipate unless the standard across the industry improves.
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