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.
because nvidia has somehow convinced the gaming world that hardware has become powerful enough for realtime path tracing. It has not. Not by a long shot. And not anytime soon.
Borderlands 4, its framerate low
It’s called breaking boundaries, just on the other end! Let’s see if we can reach 30 fps by 2026
Y’all member the time when hardware demanding games meant awesome graphics?
I was so excited when I finally had a machine that could run Crysis at full graphics settings.
As someone playing this on a 3080 with no major issues, just turn off ray tracing. The game really isn’t that bad once you turn it off.
Does raytracing even make the game look noticeably cooler, anyway?
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.
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
I’ve been playing on an RX 6600 @ 1440p with zero problems. I didn’t even bother turning it on, so terrible RT performance is news to me.
There’s actually a very easy fix for all poorly-performing AAA games: don’t be a fucking clown and buy shit games from shit publishers. They’re only pulling this shit today because they have been getting away with it for years, and they’ve been getting away with it for years because they have stupid idiot fucking customers who have been enabling them. If you bought this game and are upset that it runs like a snail with nerve damage, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
90% of players don’t even know which graphic option does what. source: pulled it out of my ass
I trust this source. Never pulled anything out of their ass that was false.
Many of us here aren’t buying them. A core audience of people who don’t know anything about hardware capabilities and aren’t a part of niche gaming communities will keep buying them because they don’t know better. Most people look at a game and say, “that looks fun” and they buy it without another thought. Your advice will never reach those people.
Are you two those wolves I’ve been told are inside me? Feels like it
I haven’t played the Outer Worlds, but isn’t a whole lot of it about making fun of companies doing this kind of stupid shit?
Based on a quick look at some videos showing off the max settings, it doesn’t even look like it’s doing much with all that demand. It looks like a completely normal big budget game
It’s more about companies getting people killed, less about companies doing a bad job at making video games.
Unreal Engine did some amazing things at a technical level but doesn’t really seem to be ready for consumers. I somewhat don’t even blame the developers for assuming that UE5 would be the right choice considering all the marketing Epic did to make it sound like a magical wand for free performance.
They also advertised some stuff wrong. Like their AA solution only having 2 static images as a comparison.
Did the editor not watch the video the entire article is based on? It does >70 in at 4k with DLSS Quality (so 1800p native).
Not to say the game doesn’t have bad issues. Hardware RT is broken (that’s what prompted the performance drop on Daniel Owen’s video. Digital Foundry measured only a 6% drop with it on when not CPU limited, but the RT Shadows are shimmery af and makes it actually look worse than regular Lumen) there’s the usual shader compilation woes and a lot of the higher settings have a lot of cost for very little gain; but the article is clickbait bullshit.
The title specifies “with raytracing” so even if it only performs this badly with ray tracing enabled, then its technically correct.
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Software Lumen is raytracing.
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Hardware RT did not have nearly that much of an impact when DF tested it, nor does it usually have such an impact compared to regular Lumen in other games. They even recommended setting it to on in the future if the shadows are fixed. So it’s very likely a bug he, and possibly others, experienced being reported as intended behavior.
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Good lord that is bad.
It won’t be many generations before they stop leaving it as an option that can be turned off, just to force upgrades…
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle requires a card with ray-tracing capability. No option to turn it off.
