EA Sports WRC: PC/PS5/Xbox Series X/S - DF Tech Review - An Engine Change for Better or Worse? 

How after several years and a generational upgrade developers manage to create a game that not only looks worse but runs way worse than their previous products is simply amazing. The "longer stages" were not worth it if the price is terrible performance and early last-gen visuals.

The 2019 game looks way more visually pleasing. Can't imagine anyone on the team thinking this was an absolute win. That engine transition must have been painful.

So… a next gen game with worse visuals than last gen. Impressive

The lack of shader pre-compilation in Unreal Engine games is inexcusable these days. This issue has persisted for years and other developers have been able to put in pre-compilation. This shouldn't be an thing anymore.

I always prefer when companies develop their own engine. It always has a unique feeling. In general I dont really like unreal engine games. Not all, but some.

I love the gameplay but the screen tearing on the ps is unforgivable. I’m shocked and saddened, I loved the ego engines superb visuals and lighting. It’s one car on a stage, hardly demanding. I hope they can improve it soon as it looks like an average ps4 game to be honest.

EA WRC is clearly not a finished game.

On PC, reducing the reflection quality setting makes a drastic difference in performance, and doesn't make much of a visual difference at all

13:30, the on screen racing instruction matches the frame-rate graph.

As I mentioned in another article related to this game, it is incredibly baffling that they spent so much time on Unreal for worse results instead of further refining the mastercraft that is the EGO Engine.

The stuttering on PC is really dismaying. From your footage we see like average 30% or less CPU utilization on the main core, then it's like 50-60 % GPU utilization and the stutters are massive. I loved Dirt Rally 2.0 and played like 200h, also played lots of WRC 8. I'm sad to say I'm staying off this one due to the stutter issues. Also, that camera judder thing is bizarre.

I'll wait to see if this game ever gets VR support. I absolutely loved the dirt rally games, they were the best possible thing you could play in VR

The shader compilation hitching, in a Rally game, is unforgivable. One hitch, at the wrong time, can ruin a whole stage times. What were Codemasters thinking ? Seriously, just give us a proper follow-up to Dirt Rally 2.0, that game is still your own benchmark for rally games.

I know there are a lot of hardcore rally fans, and i am also a rally fan myself, and i like a variety or short and long(er) stages. But trading so many advantages, or rather well working systems, for "just" longer stages without other meaningful improvements kind of results in just a net loss from my perspective. With the shader comp stutter problem..it was probably not worth it. As a testbead for future games though it might make more sense maybe. And why not just put a shader comp step in front of the game.. maybe even via the option menu? I dont understand modern game development.. and while thats ment slightly sarcastic, i really dont: Do Local develepment enviroments always have a shader cache so the devs dont realize how it looks after a fresh install?

Right, so Dirt 2.0 is still the better looking and performing game.

Codematers and EA also own the Madness engine. One that Reiza Studios made work exceptionally well with Automobilista 2.

Hi everyone! I was expecting someone to mention the fact that some periferals don't work as they used in Dirt 2.0 I.e., in Dirt 2.0 (and previous games) the thrustmaster TH8A can usually be directly connected as a stand-alone periferal to the Ps5 in order to be used as a handbrake! That's no longer the case! What it means for players with a similar setup to mine is that we need to buy the TSS sparco handbrake (~300€) or use a button on the wheel for the handbrake. This feels like they pushing sales of the TSS and forgetting that the TH8A was also sold as a handbrake!

1:20,we finally get to see samir's face.

On PS5 those "hitches" happen mostly on Clubs game mode. After patches other game modes are better than before.

Why aren't shaders pre-compiled and pre-loaded instead of being created and applied on the fly? I presume it's due to juggling system resources from moment to moment, but regardless, it (along with tearing) is something we really shouldn't have to put up with in 2023.

Another example, where a developer ditched their own sophisticated engine for Unreal Engine and all basic aesthetics and mechanics get lost.

Uf.. Hoped for a brief PC "High vs Ultra" preset comparison at some point, given that there are 2-3 settings that absolutely *SLAY the CPU.*

It is nice they have done this, i think lots of people were interested in performance/graphics analysis of this game on different platforms

it's impressive that even on pc this game looks like an early older generation game😂

Someone made a great point that many Dirt Rally 2.0 tracks have a tunnel vision aesthetic. Trees obscure most the surrounding locale which isn't the case in WRC, which has much grander vistas and open sightlines.

Dirt 2 all they way. That game silky smooth and at least on gravel is sublime to play. Even the small details like spectators camera flash going off as you drift round-the-corner elevates above this latest effort.

GRID has aged really, REALLY well.

As we've been saying, games nowadays are looking worse than last gen while demanding much more hardware power

No point in showing wires in games if it running at a low resolution, we will always see that fizzle issue.

I really like how dust and particles stay around longer. It makes it look much more realistic however everything else was downgraded which is unfortunate

Always so good to hear Tom doing a video. He's easy to listen to and leaves no stone unturned.

Big downgrade from the inhouse Codemasters engine. The engineers who came from evolution did so much nice work on that with the onrush engine. Now the rally game got that fake and too clean UE look where materials are too glowy unless Lumen or Raytracing is used. The codemasters engine were much better at creating a photorealism and flat realistic colour pallete. Edit: after watching the performance segment it's actually quite a terrible switch. Lower resolution with no visual gain as well as performance drops. The ego engine has always been well optimized but now performance is hampered by the infinite layers of UE boilerplate code and dependencies.

The ONE thing you need to get right in a racing/rally game is smooth, consistent performance. I for one will forgive a dated graphics engine for the sake of this - and an interesting career mode is a bonus. I still regularly play driving games that are knocking on two decades old for this reason.

Randomly up at 1AM Australian time sick and unable to sleep, then up pops a DF video, bless you guys haha ^_^

I can’t wait to pay another 70 bucks for UE5 update to 10 year old games

It’s a shame that not only did Kylotonn lose the licence for WRC games, but the people who took the torch didn’t seem to finish developing the game.

Gaming looked way better prior to FSR/DLSS, every developer putting out 720-1080p native games relying on image reconstruction to get them to “dynamic” 4k only to have a blurry mess complete with shimmering and artifacts all over the place and still runs like garbage. Games used to look so crisp now they all look soft

I just wanted a 120hz mode on Series X/Ps5 like with the F1 series using the EGO-engine. Very disappointing.

That render latency on pc @ 60fps is concerning, around 20ms?! Yikes

I know everyone at DF are big proponents of TAA, but TAA in a racing game is almost always an awful idea. Nothing wrong with the option, but it will always be a lot less detailed and artifact prone when every frame is completely different to the last.

Nothing like a review from Thomas to brighten my day : )

EA: "Here's a good idea boys, let's ditch our own engine and any plans to upgrade it and use a last gen engine to, wait for it, make our game worse than the last in the series" Codies: " But..." EA: "Shh, we own you and this is cheaper for us"

The hitches were there on Series X at launch, but went away after a patch

I think this shows, once again, that unreal engine is only "easy" to develop for to a point. After that point, it becomes a nightmare, near impossible, to optimize for any system. This happens on console and PC, and has been going on for over a decade. I'm kind of getting tired of these terrible Unreal engine games. There were issues from UE3 that bled into 4 and now 5.

hanks for the video, very insightful! Have you noticed that the game is only making use of a couple of those 5700X cores? It would be interesting to see some CPU analysis of this game as I feel like it is causing many problems and GPU bottlenecks in many scenarios and PC setups.

I really hope they fix this game and it will not end up broken and forgotten like most other UE4 titles. I deeply dislike the basic UE4 look but I will consider buying the game if and when they fix the performance issues.

Game runs well on my AMD PC and is quite fun, DR 2 still looks better though.

Is it only me or did you just forget to mention: - unrendered sky on series X 9:24 (center of the series X screen) - severe ghosting on consoles ???

This is an interesting one. As much as i prefer the physics of the Kylotonn's WRC series over Dirt Rally, i could never get their engine to run smoothly at above 60fps, or work with freesync/gsync. This problem seemingly persisted throughout all their titles including WRC Generations. I was curious about Codemasters potentially trying to replicate WRC gameplay using their better optimized engine, but it turns out we are getting something else entirely.

How are the DualSense haptics for this game? WRC 8/9/Generations had seriously incredible haptics.

Great work, Tom! 🙂👍

As a Codemasters rally game fan since the old McRae games, and many many hours in on Rally 2.0, the game looks significantly better. It's hard to see in these videos, and yeah it's not a huge jump, but it feels a lot more immersive and grand, the longer courses are fantastic. The game needs more tweaking, I'm annoyed my old 1080 RTX doesn't run it as well as I'd like, but I love it. I mainly play on PS5, since my PC is outdated.

Most of Codemasters's offerings have been stellar, but I guess that streak couldn't last forever.

Nice work guys! But man, youtube compression in this one is egregiously bad.

It's a freaking rally game and doesn't use any form of RT, everything in the world but your own car is static and there's even dynamic resolution. Yet it still drops frames....something went really wrong in development.

Look at all that red and green, just in time for the holidays!

Using UE 4.0 aka stutter engine for a racing game...genius...

I think changing engines part way through production hurt them. Personally on my xbox series s, on a 22 inch 1080p screen, it looks fine, after the big update before xmas the frame drops are gone, theres still occasional screen tearing. It plays really well though. I loved dirt rally 2.0 but it had a stylised look from the ego engine that covered some sins. EA WRC has a more realistic look. Honestly though I went in with expectations that the series s version wouldnt look like the promo videos and im happy with how it handles and performs.

One of the benefits of the engine switch is that restarting stage now takes milliseconds, though.

It's really odd to watch a DF video singing the praises of native rendering. Good on Tom! 👍👍

Okay, I understand the desire to change the engine to better achieve larger tracks, and I understand that Unreal is a very attractive option, but why on earth did they decide on the now decade-old Unreal 4 engine? Why would you ever do that when UE5 is available, and its Nanite and Lumen features would make everything look so much better?

VRR for the consoles not mentioned? Well within even the PS5 VRR window. Would be nice to know how much that helps the feel of the game in those moments as well.

Why don't you make now a x400 Zoom to the shadows like in the previous generation so that we can observe it and give own opinion?

Unreal stutter is... Unreal

This is truly sad...can't help but to think this is the EA effect and pushing them to be more efficient with UE4. Efficiency is the kryptonite of artistry.

Is that music that you use from worms ? I have always thought about that but I have never been sure 😅 I remember you used to use it very frequently in your old videos.

Oddly ive managed to fix the camera judder issue by forcing vsync in Nvidia control panel to Adaptive (not full - that still judders for whatever reason, whereas adaptive fixes the issue)

At what point do we stop calling games new gen? The consoles came out in 2020, its almost 2024

All they have to do is to make a DR2.0 with Oficial Cars and Tracks ... How hard is this ? UE4 what are they thinking?

Xbox series x user here been gutted since I ore ordered still suffering screen tear and frame drops weeks later A big step down from dirt rally 2.0 and even dirt rally

Excellent analysis and well worth doing!

nice ghosting on those windshields lol

Unreal Engine and his famous stutter compilation!!

For those who didn't bought dirt rally 2.0 yet (me included) do buy it before EA remove it from stores in the near future

Playing EA WRC makes me appreciate what Kylotonn* with WRC Generations. I really thought they would nail it and they dropped the ball.

I'm willing to bet the switch to UE4 had far more to do with the fact that Unreal Engine would make it a lot easier to do yearly releases of the WRC game, while also probably making those yearly releases much cheaper to develop. Their stated justification for switching to Unreal Engine was too simplistic and didnt really make sense for the reason that they claimed. It would 100% have been possible to add in basic environmental/world streaming tech into the EGO engine if they really wanted to add longer stages into the game while still using the engine the other Dirt Rally games were based on. Also, if that was the only reason were going to do that, you would have thought they would at least do the necessary programming and implement proper shader compilation to remove the shader compilation and traversal stutters which still plague the game. The stuttering isn't a guaranteed issue with unreal engine. It's the result of them implementing larger environments in UE4 in the most low effort way possible. The real reason that they likely went with UE engine is that most developers already know how to use it, it would be easier to on-board new staff. Most importantly, it would make it much easier/cheaper to turn the EA WRC game into videogame that they can release a new version of every single year. While not having to spend anywhere near the same money and time on doing the engine upgrades in the future. As those would be handled by Epic Games and the tools/engine upgrades for the EGO engine are probably all focused on the F1 games. Meaning the devs would have to do a whole separate branch of the EGO engine for the Dirt Rally games. Which at that point ends up being about as much work as just treating it like a brand new project under EA, porting what they can from Dirt Rally 2.0 and building a platform which they can develop from more sustainably in the long-run. With the EGO engine they would need to maintain a whole other branch of the EGO engine specifically for Rally games that has different tools and everything to the one for the F1 games. And they would basically be stuck with it from them on. Because they would never have the time to switch engines between yearly releases. While with Unreal Engine, all the implementation of major graphical upgrades and new engine tech is handled by Epic Games, and they could fairly easily make a sequel to this game that looks much better, and adds new graphical features by just upgrading to Unreal Engine 5 and implementing some of the graphical features which UE5 has already added on an engine level.

Such a shame to see a decline in quality like this. I remember when games from the same developer got better and better looking throughout a generation of consoles.

Patch 1.3 helped PS5 quite a bit, it was really rough at release. It's a blast to play with a good wheel and rig despite it's visual issues.

is this cpu usage correct? it seems only one thread is being loaded at any given time

12:56 LOL. This CPU utilisation. Single thread bound.

Codemasters need to fix this game on ps5. Update 1.3 didnt fix the game! Getting fed up of devs releasing games in a broken mess

Once upon a time , back in the days, in the cracking scene, when a random guy asked "why is _Clive Barker's Jericho_ not cracked by now?" That one dude that couldn't resist: "That's the reason why they got called *CODEMASTERS*"

@digitalfoundry Will you be doing a TEKKEN 8 final release comparison among PS5, XBOX Series S and X?

Is there still hitching issues on PC these days then? Is it a certain graphic setting? Id get the game but if its stuttering while driving thats kinda huge...

1:46 cinematic 5 blade wipers, only on nextgen. Nice looking when u drive using helmet cam, taa motion blur super reso. Can get rid off it using aa normal but the pixellation is amazing using native 4k. 1 more year fixes or fixed next year 24 because of ea

The switch to UE4 is a mistake, if going to go through the trouble of switching why not work towards the future and go with UE5?

Perhaps they fired engine team, seeing as they switched two games series away from Ego engine. I wonder how/whether EA was involved in engine decision.

I can't believe that there are racing games with lower than 60fps, stutter and screen tearing in 2023. In currentgen consoles. Unbelievable really...

WRC generations had the same issues for me where the physics engine was locked to fps, so a locked 60 fps didn't work right, had to turn off vsync or it felt laggy... but then screen tearing. What a mess. Unreal engine stutters are garbage, what a crap engine.

DLSS at Quality with sharpnes at 50-80 looks better than at Native resolution with enabled AA, because this AA make picture very blurry. Sadly there's no DLAA mode yet. At ultra settings graphics is very good. Sadly many people don't know that you can change track degradation option for custom chapionships. Without track degradation surfaces look too flat. 4070Ti at 1440p, DLSS at Quality, almost all settings at ultra (except car reflections. shadows, mirrors) - 100-130 fps, almost no stutters after 1.3 patch

It moved to UE4 when UE5 is already three years ago?

No reason why developers are not using unreal engine 5. More they use it the more gets unlock within that engine.

I don't really care, cause we're halfway of getting Codemasters "EA Sportsified", with the F1 already having been an annual affair, which EA surely liked the look of and thus purchased Codemasters, which probably made them put Codemasters on the WRC-franchise, which will likely become an annual thing as well. - And the fact that they moved to Unreal Engine just adds to the homogenization of this industry.

Please revisit this title after the latest patches. They have really seemed to reduced the stuttering quite a bit.

The TAA ghosting is easily the biggest deal breaker for me.

Would have been nice to see some coverage of the situation above 60FPS.

We're at a point where games are looking worse then last gen, running worse then last gen, playing worse then last gen, and costing more then last gen. When does it end?

It's a real step backwards, the Ego engine is really good. I do think Ego could do longer stages, but EA/Codemasters does not want to spend extra money developing the engine further, when they can just slap it on UE4 for fraction of the time and money.

Are these tests done after the 1.3 patch? And it's still that bad??

PS3 game LOD with modern UE TAA blur, wew.