Epic CEO Tim Sweeny holds Unreal Engine game developers liable for performance issues

Unreal Engine 5’s performance issues may be overwhelmingly centric to a lack of optimization over the past year, with developers reportedly leaving lower-end hardware for last, according to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.

According to Clawsome Gamer, Sweeney spoke to Korean outlet “This is Game” during the annual Unreal Fest held at CODEX Seoul and discussed the engine’s controversial optimization and performance challenges, noting that the main problem lies in how developers structure their workflows. He elaborated, 

“The main cause is the order of development. Many studios build for top-tier hardware first and leave optimization and low-spec testing for the end.”

This top-down approach to development explains the myriad of games struggling on a wide range of PC configurations, particularly on lower-end hardware, and recently even on consoles like the PS5 and PS5 Pro, as exemplified by Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater.

Sweeney further stressed the importance of changing this approach and commented, “Ideally, optimization should begin early- before full content build-out.” This is because optimization is not an easy feat to achieve and becomes exponentially harder to pull through, especially when deferred to the tail end of a project’s development cycle.

To address these optimization issues, Epic is implementing measures in both engine and education levels as stated by Sweeney, “We’re doing two things, strengthening engine support with more automated optimization across devices, and expanding developer education so ‘optimize early’ becomes standard practice. If needed, our engineers can step in.”

Sweeney also mentioned that game complexity is vastly more complicated than it was a decade ago, which makes it difficult to solve the issue of optimization at an engine level, further adding, “Engine makers and game teams need to collaborate.”

The initiatives come amid Epic’s recent Unreal Engine 5.6 update, which was released a few months ago and touts GPU performance boosts by up to 25% and CPU performance by 35%.

A Remaster’s Disappointing Performance Cap

Recent releases like Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater have accentuated Unreal’s optimization hurdles. According to Digital Foundry, the game's performance mode on the PS5 targets 60 frames per second at a dynamic resolution from 720p to 1080p, while Quality mode targets 1080p to 1584p at 30 frames per second. But in real-world scenarios, the base PS5’s Performance mode achieves 30-50 FPS while Quality mode hovers between 24 to 30 FPS.

To potentially make matters worse, the PS5 Pro has only one graphical configuration, which targets 60 FPS, but on average fails to match the base PS5’s average frame rate, as it hovers between 30-60 FPS, and is, on average, 7 FPS lower than the base PS5.