It’s a new day, and another badly-optimized AAA Unreal Engine 5 game has hit store shelves. A couple of YouTubers, including Daniel Owen, have discovered serious performance problems in The Outer Worlds 2 that almost mirror Borderlands 4’s atrocious launch day performance. One of the most problematic graphics settings is the game’s ray tracing mode, which prevents even AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming champ from achieving 60 FPS at resolutions well under 1080p.
It’s quite crazy how much performance you gain from using pre-calculated lighting instead of raytracing. I know it looks worse, but there’s gotta be a way to find a happy middle ground, maybe a “raytracing lite” lol.
Dynamic lighting already exists. Look at Phasmophobia, it’s probably one of the heaviest Unity games because it uses it everywhere. Basically every light in that game is able to cast shadows, and it’s got a lot of lights. Doesn’t have any of the RT noise or lag too.
edit: it doesn’t come cheap though, they had to do some downgrades to port it to consoles. Interior candles for example, they’re no longer interactive.
Yes, but it can be inefficient performance-wise, which is why precalculated lighting is often a mandatory performance setting in most games. The ideal goal is to use the dedicated RT hardware in a way that achieves similar graphical results but with minimal performance loss (to transfer the CPU-bound option to something that can comfortably run on most average consumer GPUs).
Traditional Dynamic Lighting is definitely a good option to have for the user, though.
Some day we will have a cpu, gpu and a rtu. Need me a dedicated add in ray tracing card!
I find raytracing adds very little to the look of the vast majority of games unless they are slow enough to focus on shadows or fine details.
Maybe I’m not playing the games that benefit significantly from raytracing.
The Finals (and Arc Raiders) might be good examples of fast-paced games that use raytracing to make their details pop. Although I think they intentionally stagger their settings so RT will not be enabled unless your card has enough grunt to push those graphics (Using my Ryzen 7 5800x3d and an RTX 3090, getting easily 140-150fps in game no matter the action with medium RT).
@1440p?
I get 70-80 @4k with a 3080, same processor. I think the RT is on high though.
The game runs incredibly well for how good it looks.
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in this case it doesn’t use baked lighting, it still uses lumen, just a software version of it with lower settings. I’ve tried a couple UE5 games with a hardware/software lumen toggle and every time hardware lumen is significantly slower. it’s one of the curses of unreal.
The curse of Lumen is also in it’s default settings, apparently. It has tons of noise and delay in every indie game I’ve tried