alt Hacker News> If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected.
Recently I booted up Insurgency: Sandstorm. With a 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 at 1080p and high graphics, the game runs at around 200 FPS. Meanwhile, pretty much any modern UE5 title (with the exception of Ready or Not and Split Fiction, from what I've seen) runs horribly - the interesting thing is that no matter how much you tweak the .ini files or change the graphics settings you can't get something like STALKER 2 or The Forever Winter or Borderlands 4 to run as well as UE4 with the graphics similar to those old games. Instead you get something that runs at like 10% of the render resolution and still doesn't get 60 FPS (I'm not exaggerating, literally the performance I got in The Forever Winter).
There's no good technical reason for things to be that way (Unity still exists, and the games made in it struggle less) other than the devs or the higher ups choosing higher fidelity but more expensive rendering technologies and using upscaling and framegen not as something that helps laptops or when you need the spare GPU capacity (e.g. encoding a video recording of the game), but rather as something that's supposed to be used to even get to 60 FPS in the first place.
I don't know what needs to change for things to get better.
I also don't see anyone particularly caring about regular software, Electron et al are just too convenient to develop in (having to create per-platform UIs sucks in already-overworked teams).
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Yes, Lumen (and raytracing in general) has a performance overhead. If you don't want that you can skip that feature. Split Fiction and other games choose to do so.
I think certain games like Robocop are awesome on UE5.
> I don't know what needs to change for things to get better.
Studios need to start creating custom engines again, for one. We'll get better games with less unsatisfying jank, some of the projects will actually cost less (which is paradoxical to some) and performance is likely to jump significantly. Off-the-shelf engines have as many costs as they have benefits, but like a lot of technology people refuse to look at the choice as a trade-off, and to the extent that they acknowledge it's a trade-off the implicit admission is always that it's a trade-off that the user/player is paying the most for, so it's OK.
If companies start creating custom engines en masse again it will also help solve part of the competency crisis in the industry, because they'll be forced to actually learn and educate people on how things work.