Unreal Engine 5 is becoming the game engine of choice for many studios. It has a host of benefits, as we note in our guide to the best game development software, and it allows developers to do things that weren't possible before. But it also has its downsides, particularly when it comes to performance.
While the big consoles can cope with Unreal Engine 5 games, it's a different story for PCs. Even the best laptops for game development can struggle with resource-hungry Nanite and Lumen, and PC gamers still often complain of hazier, unstable visuals. One developer suggests we might need to wait for the next generation of components before they catch up.
Bryan Heemskerk from the developer Massive Damage's discussed the issue of Unreal Engine 5 performance on Moore's Law is Dead's Broke Silicon podcast. He suggested said that at launch, Unreal Engine 5 was "two GPU generations off being performant".
He points out that consoles the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S have dedicated IO controllers to handle data compression and decompression, but PCs face data bottlenecks that prevent smooth performance.
"It might have been a bit too soon," Bryan says, before adding that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 6000 series "will probably run Unreal Engine 5 really well". So we have something to look forward to perhaps in 2026 or 2027. "At some point the latency will be so low and the interface speed so fast that it will be better until the next generation of consoles," Bryan says.
Unreal is meeting the demands of game developers, who want capabilities for more complex technical art and more believable character movement. But Bryan suggests there's an argument for using older versions of an engine if you're not going to use the full feature set of the latest version – in the case of Unreal, if you're not chasing the photorealism of Black Myth: Wukong (above).
"Unreal Engine 5 is doing a lot of new heavy stuff that gives game developers potential that they haven't had before, specifically in regards to time of day systems and the sheer amount of geometry they're allowed to put into their worlds," Bryan says. "There are unique systems that in theory will push games to the next level. The problem is that they're taking all our performance right away. Between Lumen and Nanite, there just isn't much performance left."
Epic is aware of performance issues in Unreal Engine 5 games. The latest versions have systems intended to prevent shader compilation issues, but they don't always work well out of the box without work from developers. In the meantime, there are gamers who will suggest games should be optimised to run on the hardware available today, not in two years' time.
