The real reason many of these games run like shit is over reliance on real time lighting systems. RT lights are easy. It's easy to throw a bunch of artists into a box and hope for the best. A complete idiot can make a scene mostly look good without much thinking. Baked lights require a lot of anticipation and planning. It impacts iteration time, etc. The tradeoff being that this is orders of magnitude more performant than RT lights. Imagine watching Toy Story after the offline render vs attempting to do it live. This is literally the same scaling problem.
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...
If you want performance on everyday hardware, there is no way (and I'd say this holds true for any engine, not just UE5!) that you dig down into the engine an the libraries and invest the money in testing to tune the performance appropriately.
And don’t get me wrong, those features are great, but they’re not intended for low-end hardware or where fps is a priority.
This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing.
Just because an engine offers you a way to shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun, you can't blame the engine maker when you do shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun and end up with a bleeding ugly stump.
The thing is, of course game studios will go for "we want to use ALLLLLL the newest features, we want to show off with Nanite and god knows what else". Who wouldn't? But game studios aren't willing to put in the effort surrounding such an implementation to properly tune it.
And it's not just tuning engine components for what it's worth - often enough the culprit ends up being ridiculously oversized textures, there's nothing else that could cause dozens of gigabytes worth of patches [1], and it's not a new complaint either [2].
[1] https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-with-the-r...
[2] https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-sizes-becom...
One of the reasons that a lot of studios struggle with bad performance on UE5, is because a lot of studios, fired their most experienced devs and hired bunch of cheaper new programmers, because they bought into the whole make game with blueprints idea. I have several friends (I know just one datapoint ), that were in games industry from 6 to 12 years that got fired, just for the studio to replace them with cheaper more inexperienced devs.
Baicly UE5 overpromised how easy it was. You still get some great working games that use UE5, but this are from studios that have experienced devs.
