- UE5 Games are going downhill. We see ghosting & artifacts upon camera movements, and see light smearing objects unnaturally.
- TSR should be the solution, but it does the opposite. It has a 3.5mm delay and makes particles appear muddy, which takes away the immersion.
- Compared to older games like Days Gone and NFS 2015, you can see how photorealistic these games are, with smoother particles and improved visual quality.
Unreal Engine 5 is always put on a pedestal, and people go crazy over its graphics. No doubt, the graphics of some of these games are praiseworthy, where the use of Nanite, Lumen, and high-fidelity textures shines through.
New Games, Poor Optimization
But when you sit down, you see that cracks start to appear in these modern games. Apart from performance issues, there are visual problems as well that break the immersion for me (even the most optimized ones). Let’s dive into why this is the case.
Terrible Performance
First, let’s take a look at Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the so-called masterpiece that has sold over 4.4M copies. Even on fairly optimized settings and based on the PS5 configuration, the game can’t even hit 60 FPS on a native 1080p on an RTX 3060.
And if you go ahead and max out the graphics settings, the frames drop down to 35FPS, but still, shadows are noisy, inconsistent, and sometimes nonexistent. Whereas older games like Days Gone, which is now getting a sequel, looked and ran better without issues due to caching or optimized geometry.
TSR To The Rescue? Maybe Not.
Epic’s TSR (Temporal Super Resolution) is the only optimized option that seems to be the solution that lets you run games at a lower resolution while maintaining sharp image quality.
But it costs 3.5mm to run and still has a hideous fizzling problem. When you look around in this game, you see noise in the background similar to that of TV static, which looks downright ugly.
The entire scene appears smudged when you move the camera, and details such as wires and grass appear muddy. For something that was designed to be a fix, TSR often ends up making the visuals look far uglier than before.
Folliage Alone Tells The Difference
If you take the new Oblivion, you can still see the crappy low low-quality foliage where the grass comes across as choppy and unsmoothed. This suggests that you’ve lowered the game’s quality too much, which isn’t the case. These details are hard to ignore for me, which pulls me out of the game’s immersion.
Compare that with the foliage we get in a 6-year-old game, Days Gone, and the difference is night and day. You can clearly see how each strand of glass and plant is extremely high quality, smooth, and looks good as it should.
Lumen Is Broken
Then there’s Lumen. While lumen makes lighting incredibly dynamic in certain scenarios, it is still broken in modern games, like in Expedition 33. Here, when you move your character, you can see the trailing artifacts in the background. Not only that, but you’ll also find that light is smeared unnaturally on your character’s face.
The pixels that are further away are loaded as you move, while it’s slightly smeared away with TSR, you can still see the objects popping in as you move closer to them. This looks very cheap, especially considering it’s a modern game.
Sharpening Filters & Motion Blurs
Sharpening has also become a go-to option for UE5 games. To counter the blurriness caused by TSR, devs ramp up the sharpening filters, which in turn makes the game look horrible than it was before.
But if you go without TSR, you’re left with visuals that look flat and aliased. So either you go the blurry route or you choose underwhelming visuals…both of which aren’t appealing options for most people.
The motion blur on UE5 games is also terrible. Even if we use a live console to max out the quality by applying post-motion blur, the image doesn’t get any better. But if you were to compare it with Frostbite’s engine (NFS 2015), you see a drastic difference.
Not only was the motion blur in Need For Speed 2015 cheaper, but it also looked far more natural. Still to this day, people praise that decade-old game for its photorealism, even if they are unaware of the technology that goes into making these games appear the way they do.
Verdict
All-in-all, I’m thoroughly disappointed with the current state of games, especially how they tend to look far worse than games that were released years ago. Instead of seeing an increase in the visual and performance quality, we sadly see the opposite.
