Unreal Engine 5.4: Big Performance Improvements, New Features, But What About  

the stutter is fixed once your game devs can recognize the limits and work around them. there is no magic involved in 3d engines...everything is still having limits

@@krz9000 Yeah it’s silly to rely on game engines to do all the work for you, game devs still need to be competent programmers and find solutions to any type of stuttering that the engine can’t deal with on its own

@@krz9000 Not even Epic itself can get rid of the stutters in their own damn game, as it's shown in this very video.

Maybe... I bet we don't land on Mars for at least 15 years.

​@@Z3uS2when i see a game with unreal engine i know already that it's gonna stutter like crazy. If i see cryengine i know I'm in for a good time with great visuals. Sadly not many cryengine games

Been seeing that in Gray Zone Warfare, too. It's incredibly distracting.

@@SHABAD0O i'm watching this hoping they update to 5.4 so we get a few more fps in GZW 🤣

It’s either the upscaler being wonky (TSR isn’t very good atm), or Lumen using an extremely low sample count, or both. Could also being changes to Temporal values in the Lumen denoiser. You can see traditional upscalers destroy RTX lighting quality and reflections in basically every game in this way, especially at 50%. This is why Ray Reconstruction exists, allowing the denoiser to run on a full resolution image rather than the non upscaled lowered resolution. One would have to compare the Matrix demo using the NvRTX branch in order to test this as it uses its own systems.

I was noticing it was before he got to the subject. It's worse a far render distance it seems.

What did they change to make it look so much worse? Now better performance but worse visuals. I guess we just won't get both

💀RIP to the performance for all next gen games

I remember an epic engineer years ago saying on a DF video they are working hard on the fortnite shader stuttering.. few years later and its just as bad. Wtf are they doing

@@sven957 nothing, nothing all, naturally.

@@sven957making it more noticeable.

the epic store pc strugles when seach. store page frontend we talking about no graphics 3d.

Sigma

Fortnite could be shifting to Unreal Engine 5.4 soon

Such a shame they haven’t fix this stuttering, with ddr4, ddr5 and high bandwidth cards with direct storage support, stutters should be a thing of the past!

@@Multimeter1Seriously, at this point there’s no excuse.

Say what again!

I thought he was reading the bus stop time table lol

I'm dying.

Epic devs trying to find the instructions to fix shader stutter.

He likes those +500% zoom views.

I hope he finds what he's looking for

better question, where did the frames go? oh wait, they were never really there.

And still no games lol

​@@yc_030We have that crappy graphics tekken 8😂

damn, really? wtf 😅 feels like a year

3 years and we are getting there, almost usable! Closing in! Certainly good the performance optimization, but the shader compilation issue is taking too damn much time to get it fixed.

I like the Steam Deck solution to this, which is to crowdsource the shader cache. Steam keeps a constantly-updating shared blob of compiled shaders that get automatically uploaded and downloaded to and from Steam Deck users for each game. I'll bet this functionality could one day come to GFE if people were actually excited to use it.

/\ This guy lumens. |

Me too.

loved that game series

It's Foregone Destruction I believe !Such a good track!

You gotta remember your roots

Every time I see Forgone Destruction’s map image in Fortnite I smile. I’m sad I keep missing the track in the shop. It’s an all time classic

I love Unreal Tournament and the fact that EPIC removed the series from all storefronts still keeps me salty AF

Just found this channel and i know im in the right place when viewers are actually smart and not just leaving bot comments i dont think many people caught this because its complicated 😂

*ba dum tsss*

I'm still salty at Epic for abandoning the next Unreal Tournament game. (and Paragon, for that matter)

I always had rock solid 240fps? 🤔

Omg is this why my Fortnite stutters? I never play but when I do get on I get constant stutters despite having a good pc and no stutters in any other game

@@wanshurst2416 If you've been playing for a while its not an issue. If you do a cold boot it will stutter while it builds shaders. I tested how bad it an be with 10900k 4090 pc vs 7800x3d 4090 and while the amd cpu was noticely less worse in frametime and avg fps its still bad for the first 5+ games on fresh install.

​​@@wanshurst2416 update your drivers and you're back to the stutterfest

Castlevania goated

Castlevania has stupidly good music. Symphony of the Night and IV are something truly amazing.

I think Alex is mixing up Frankenstein and Dracula :D

Agreed, SC4 had without a doubt the best music on the Super NES. Even today it sounds amazing coming from 8 sound channel's.​@@WH250398

Jesus Christ, I was trying to get Atmos working on 5.3 and in the end I just gave up

I'm an audio enthusiast much more than a graphics enthusiast, and I'm always afraid technology will forget us. Especially with so many people today using smart phones and portable consoles with headsets (or heaven forbid without them), and even home theaters moving towards "sound bars" and all sorts of other magic gimmicks. Which, on the other hand, I guess makes it easy to understand why it might be frustrating to develop audio for games. You'll spend your time carefully capturing all the foley sounds, recording crickets at night, composing and conducting symphony orchestras, mastering everything to a T, figuring out how to place everything correctly in a surround or atmos system etc etc., meanwhile knowing a large portion of your players will be playing those carefully crafted soundscapes through a "surround" bar made from soap box plastic in a giant, barren concrete room.

Just for info, every update the devs need to pay to sony/MS.

​@@Swisshostthat sucks

​@@Swisshost That was in the 7th gen, but it hasn't been a thing for at least a decade.

Since there are still several years until the release of these games (with further improvements to the game engine coming out in the meantime) and also because I trust in CPDR's abilities, I remain quite confident.

​@@Z3t487There's no guarantee that those developers are updating the engine in line with their game code, they usually pick one version of the engine and build from there. If they try to update the engine during development, many of the game's source files will break and it will be exceedingly hard to pin point bugs. This is why Unreal Engine 4 games are still being released because It took those projects that long to complete.

​@@AlexanTheManaccording to cdpr, it's implied that the engine will be improved throughout development of the game

@@aquaneon8012 Source?

@@Z3t487 shader stutter has been a thing in UE since like 2010, i doubt its going to be fixed in the next 10 years

The game is Bloodthief by @Blargis3d. The shader compilation trick is in the video "Optimizing my Game so it Runs on a Potato" and is indeed very cool!

@@HildingL Thank you so much for the video! I'll update my comment to reflect this info. Thanks again! :)

Not to mention you need to be well versed in overclocking. This was well said tho. I’m one of the few that will build a god rig just to run it at 1080p since I care about input lag

In my opinion, the reason they want raytracing to work so badly is because of how much time it saves in development. Without raytracing, lighting needs to be baked and requires lots of trial and error to get scene lighting to look right/good. With raytracing, the engine and GPU does it almost all of it for you in real-time. It reduces dev time and saves money.

Frrrankenstein. The German is strong in this. :D

Actually the correct pronunciation

That emoji doesn't mean what you think it means. :-)

@@colaboytje It means different things to people from different cultures.

@@andreasheinze9685 That is the Italian dead duck emoji, no?

The entire video used UT music except the Frankenstein part

Epic should bring back Unreal Tournament but inside Fortnite to advertise the capabilities of UEFN.

they've changed how lumen works but I doubt they went through the city project and tweaked things for 5.4. So things that were not problems in 5.0 will become issues in 5.4. zero surprise there really, it's just what happens

that being said it's known to not use strong emissive values with small sources with lumen for a while now, this would never be an issue with a real game (if the devs are competent). It's doing real time GI god damn it, it's insane it even works at all at reasonable performance. I feel like people quickly forget how impressive and truly next gen UE5 still is. It's not without problems for sure but holy hell which other free engine has a tool suite this impressive? spoilers there are none that compare at all

Yeah it looks blotchy

@@quackcharge Unity compares. In fact, their Screen Space Global Illumination has very stable emissives. Maybe Epic can take a look at it. And runtime animation rigging since 2019. And before you mention Lumen, Unity has had realtime GI since 2017, except the geometry positions are baked, so light won't spill through an open door. Gray Zone Warfare is a disaster so far. They are realising nobody can run these games.

coz they don't need to, people will still buy the game, ad paying devs to do something that does not increase profit makes no sense to them.

Because it's not that easy to do it properly and a lot of studios who are using a ready made engine do this because they lack the technical know-how and/or financial resources to either develop an own engine, or to dive deep into the quirks of a complex monster like UE. They import their art, design their levels, write their game logic in Lua or UnrealScript, click the "build project" button, and hope for the best. Many devs aren't even aware of the typical issues, which is why DF does such an important job in explaining it over and over again.

The work involved isn't just a checkbox and a screen or something: the way shaders work in Unreal (and every other engine, really) is that you dynamically stitch them together and with potentially dynamic external parameters: think weather systems, characters getting wet or dirty, blending between different ground materials, adding effects for power ups, that sort of thing (and those are just the most obvious ones) Unreal has a big list of these snippets, but not how they will be combined or with what values until you actually tell it to use them. Doing a shader compile is basically the developer finding all the final shader combinations they use in a game (easily thousands nowadays), often through just running through it and trying everything, and telling the engine to use them all in order. Unreal can't easily fix this without breaking the entire workflow that pretty much every artist has used for about 20 years now. Developers need to perform a huge amount of work for what they might not see as being high value, since "it's only the first time"

have u played last of us part 1 remake? i had to wait 40-45mins just in loading for the shader cache imagine waiting that long haha no one would wait that long and either play with stutter or refund and delete the game

@@ChillieGaming I would genuinely rather wait 48 hours for a game to load than it be shipped unfinished, this is why they get away with it, coz y’all bit it regardless

I mean it is drum and bass but the difference between breakcore and dnb is minute. It's not exactly wrong to call it breakcore.

@@coffin7904 It's extremely wrong and you are very mitsaken. It's like calling Skrillex "house music." Or Aphex Twin "techno". Or Lynyrd Skynyrd "country". "Breakcore" and "drum and bass" are distinct genres and saying the difference is minute shows that you really don't know much about this type of music. You could say that both are part of the same super-genre of Jungle, but that's not what we're talking about. If you're going to claim that breakcore and D&D have a "minute" difference, what's the point of even using distinct genre terms at all? Let's just call it all "electronic music" and skip the specificity altogether! Christ.

@@azazelleblack can you explain what the difference is?

@@azazelleblack It turns me into the Hulk whenever I hear kids put the word 'core' at the end of any arbitrary word. Like calling frutiger aero 'cleancore' or something.

@@coffin7904 Absolutely! Before we get started, it's important to understand that these genre terms are sort of poorly-defined and used pretty loosely. With that said, there ARE definitions to these terms, and in particular "Breakcore" is a distinct subgenre under the heading of "Drum & Bass" or "Jungle" music. People disagree over whether Jungle or D&B came first (and thus deserves to be the super-genre), but both evolved from earlier Breakbeat and Rave Hardcore music. Jungle music had heavy influence from Dancehall and usually was lower tempo, with an MC and party vibe, while Drum & Bass was focused on literally just rumbling basslines and breakbeat drum loops. Drum & Bass as a genre typically refers to the early works of artists like Technical Itch, Q Project, Grooverider, and many, many others. This style originated in the early-to-mid 1990s and was still very much party music. It's danceable, and while it has a much darker vibe than something like Rave Hardcore (or especially that genre's successor, Happy Hardcore), it's still chill enough that you can zone out and relax to it. Breakcore, meanwhile, is an evolution at least three stages removed from the original Drum & Bass sound. Around the same time people were coming up with D&B, other artists were experimenting with new sounds and creating what was then called the very stupid name "Intelligent Dance Music," or "IDM". IDM is often harsh, atonal, and challenging to listen to, and despite the name, it's almost entirely undanceable. The early crossover efforts between D&B's successors (known commonly as "Darkcore", see: Dieselboy) and IDM were mockingly called "Drill & Bass", but this style became somewhat popular within its niche and has numerous artists. You get crossover from both D&B guys and IDM guys in this genre. Drill & Bass eventually gave way to Breakcore, the successor genre that takes the relatively technical and stripped-down Drill & Bass and turns it up to 11 with influences from Hardcore (both EDM and Punk), industrial music, and even avant-garde noise music. True Breakcore is a brutal and harsh genre that's hard to enjoy for most people. It features gruesomely mutilated breakbeats with little rhythmic coherence and sharp, distorted sounds that can be like audio jumpscares or just constant stressors. Even if you say "Drum & Bass" is the super-genre, nobody is thinking about Breakcore when they say "Drum & Bass". They're thinking about Aphrodite, about LTJ Bukem, about Dieselboy, about Evol Intent, and so on. Breakcore artists are guys like Venetian Snares, Bogdan Raczynski, Sh!tmat, Rotator, and so on. Foregone Destruction is absolutely not Breakcore, lol.

The Matrix tech demo settings were similar but seemingly something changed under the hood in UE 5.4. Most likely this artifacting is somehow connected to the render parallelization improvement. Kinda seems like something is out of order/not synched in the pipeline.

I thought the same but he explains why this is the case at the end of the video.

@@Cheynanigans__ It is the same, but it kind of invalidates performance comparisons when there's such a difference.

@@Waffle4569 I kind of agree. We're comparing performance between UE5 iterations though so if the way lighting is processed helps performance while also making things prettier/uglier, that's what we're seeing. The *Matrix* game/demo settings are the same, just the engine changed. Apparently those lighting artifacts/fizzles are from MORE rays being processed into the scene and weren't there before due to those lights casting nearly no raytraced light before.

It's because of lumen using variable rate shading i would say

Doubt it will ever happen. Been saying this for years now

@@SPG8989 Alan wake 2 did a pretty good job with it though hey, unless you mean unreal engine specifically.

I'm holding out hope that we can have some kind of machine learning model to handle shader compilation and that can run on the GPU. A model trained specifically to do shader compilation could be infinitely more efficient than the dumb "on demand" way it's done now.

the historical trend says that by UE 7.4 the stutter will be a constant up and down between 16ms and 100+ ms and the entire industry will pretend it isn't happening or if it is happening it's not a big deal or if it is a big deal it's impossible to solve and we just have to accept it any way. no version of Unreal has ever stuttered LESS than its predecessor.

Careful, the PC fanboys will attack u

If it was the easiest thing it wouldn't have been an issue to begin with.

You play games because they're fun. If this is your concern, then you're robbing yourself of good experiences.

That would be incredible.

I doubt they could even if they wanted to, and for all we know the de-listing might have something to do with Tencent. And never forget that the original series of Unreal games were co-developed and directed by Digital Extremes. The only Unreal games made entirely by Epic Games were UT3 and UC2.

Yeah, Epic wants nothing to do with Unreal anymore. Shows the kind of company they are.

@@sulphurous2656 This is why I hope Blizzard never follows up on D2R.

@@AlexanTheMan 99% of large companies like epic are after 1 thing. Money, don't know what else you would expect. An Unreal game would only get the boomers interested and they're less likely to spend money on fomo and battlepasses and dumps 100s hours into a game unlike the kids that play fortnite.

Play on consoles.

@@user-qg7oq6qw5c Consoles aren't exempt from these issues.

you need to overclock lol, no other way around it

@@silfrido1768 lol. Nope. That is not the issue at all.

You can manually fix it, as Alex says. You need to force pre-compilation of all the shaders.

It wont probably it will be minimized if well developed but still be present

gear up, the performance is gonna be worse than you can possibly imagine.

The Hitcher

We're going back to Witcher 1 levels of stutter baby lets go

This could be an issue with the setup. He literally just ported the demo to the new version. Some confog tweaks could be necessary to fix this.

You can download the shaders for fortnite

Last time i played the game it worked just fine?

It's literally just a few games and then you shouldn't have issues for at least the rest of the season

​@@timodeurbroeck9957even when downloading the shaders doesn't help. You need to compile them for your specific PC configuration.