There’s no current Unreal Engine 5-powered game that can run at native 4K resolution with acceptable performance, but that has nothing to do with developers but rather with how the engine is built.
Speaking during the latest episode of Moore’s Law is Dead Broken Silicon podcast, Infuse Studio co-founder Jacob Sutton discussed the idea that some users have that upscaling solutions such as NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS are being used as a crutch for developers to fix optimization issues, saying that upscaling is sort of becoming a requirement, using the Unreal Engine 5 as an example. Epic’s engine comes with an upscaling software solution called TSR, Temporal Super Resolution, and a feature that is implemented by default is not a bonus but, essentially, a requirement. With upscaling built-in, there’s no current Unreal Engine 5-powered game that can run at native 4K with decent performance because it is expected that upscaling is used to achieve desirable framerates.
That current games powered by Unreal Engine 5 are rather demanding is no surprise, as there have been titles using the full range of features, such as Nanite and Lumen, that struggle to run smoothly, especially on consoles. Multiple tech demos are also pushing current powerful GPUs like NVIDIA RTX 4080 to the limit in terms of performance at 4K resolution, so it will be very interesting to see how the engine and upscaling solutions will improve to provide smooth gaming experiences even in highly demanding titles.
The latest version of Unreal Engine 5 is version 5.4. You can learn more about the changes introduced by it on the engine’s official website.
