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- Unreal Engine 5 is notorious for the stutter struggle.
- Whether it be shader compilation or traversal stutter, practically every game is impacted by these hiccups.
- Industry-wide adoption could lead to fixes in the future as developers collaborate to develop a definitive solution.
Unreal Engine 5 has emerged as the technology of choice for studios aiming to deliver truly ground-breaking and next-generation experiences with their games. Dubbed the most advanced and rapidly adopted engine of this age, Epic’s technology has quickly caught on.
However, one major problem remains unaddressed. The dreadful Unreal Engine 5 stutter has plagued many a title over the years, and it continues to be a thorn in PC gaming’s side several years later.
Why it matters: PC gaming is bigger than ever today, making it unacceptable that the industry’s most popular game development platform performs so poorly on the most capable of PCs.
Industry-Wide Adoption
It would not be wrong to say that Unreal Engine 5 is the most widely adopted technology today. In many ways, this engine has become the poster boy of the current generation, giving it an edge over existing proprietary solutions.
Though Unreal Engine has always been popular, its latest iteration gives developers more than a few reasons to abandon years of research on in-house engines in the pursuit of streamlined development and a new bar of quality.
For instance, CD Projekt RED has abandoned its RED Engine despite setting new benchmarks for ray-tracing and open-world gaming with Cyberpunk 2077. Elsewhere, a team like EA Motive has made the switch after achieving stellar results with Frostbite in Dead Space Remake.
Because streamlined development is a key theme and one of the biggest advantages of this technology, indie developers have flocked to Epic’s platform all the same. A massive franchise like Halo is also betting big on Unreal Engine 5 for its future, signifying a trend in the industry.
This unified platform is clearly the future, but is the industry truly fine with a future that can’t go a few seconds without hitching or suffering from hiccups?
The Stutter Struggle
You need not look any further than two of the biggest recent releases, Silent Hill 2 and Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, to see why the stuttering is such a big handicap for Unreal Engine 5.
Silent Hill 2 Remake is nothing short of remarkable, yet for everything the game does right, it is held back by a persistent sense of hitching. As Digital Foundry puts it, the stutter struggle is unavoidable here.
Instead of the typical shader compilation stutter, this remake suffers from traversal stutter, a travesty that continues to plague Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi titles to this day. Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy fix.
Dragon Ball Sparking Zero’s problem is less severe, by comparison, highlighting the typical case of missing shader compilation. For a game that hit over 100K players on Steam at release, I can’t help but find this omission extremely disappointing.
Even a critically acclaimed title like Ninja Theory’s Hellblade 2 exhibits traversal stutter, albeit at a much smaller scale. Looking at these examples, it’s clear that something needs to change at the very core of this technology.
As Digital Trends explains, these stutters can also originate from Pipeline State Objects (PSOs). Generating one can take as much as 100ms when rendering large amounts of graphical data into PSOs.
This can then lead to recurring stutters as the game relies on generating new PSOs. Ultimately, whatever the source of this problem, Unreal Engine 5’s reputation has taken a severe hit because of the situation.
What About The Future?
Fortunately, there’s some good news. Epic is aware that this issue is widespread, so the company is taking steps to ensure that a fix is found sooner rather than later.
For instance, PSO caching already exists in recent versions of Unreal Engine 5, and the team attempted to automate this process as early as 2022. Though these efforts may not have solved the dilemma altogether, the company is clearly on the right track.
CD Projekt RED’s focus on the engine has also given audiences cause for celebration. Many are hoping that the team will be able to use its technical knowledge and work with Epic to squash the stutter struggle once and for all.
Here’s hoping that the industry’s best minds coming together will be the solution we needed all along, ridding us of PC gaming’s biggest nightmare.
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[News Reporter]
Avinash is currently pursuing a Business degree in Australia. For more than three years, he has been working as a gaming journalist, utilizing his writing skills and love for gaming to report on the latest updates in the industry. Avinash loves to play action games like Devil May Cry and has also been mentioned on highly regarded websites, such as IGN, GamesRadar, GameRant, Dualshockers, CBR, and Gamespot.
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