More and more you hear something these days that I would have never expected to hear in my life… “Unreal Engine is slow”. Many high profile games have been released using Unreal Engine 5.x and several of them have had performance issues. These include titles like:
- Lords of the Fallen
- Remnant 2
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
- Mafia Old Country
- Oblivion Reboot
- Silent Hill 2 Remake
- Metal Gear Solid
Even Epic Games own Fortnite hasn’t been immune, with reported frame dropping, shader compilation stutters and other performance issues. The trend continues with the just released Borderlands 4 receiving many negative reviews and the vast majority are focused and performance issues in the game such as this review:
This isn’t a cherry-picked review, this is literally the topmost review of Borderlands 4 on Steam right now accompanied by hundreds or even thousands of similar reviews.
Key Links
Tim Sweeney on Lack of Optimizations
Epic Games Article on Shader Compilation Optimizations
Tim Sweeney on Unreal Engine 6 and UE 5.x Limitations
Borderlands 4 Built With Unreal Engine Article
Games are obviously very complicated systems and performance issues can come from many different causes. In the video below we explore exactly what these performance issues are, what may be causing them and what Epic Games are doing to address them.