At this year's Unreal Fest in Orlando, not only did Epic showcase forthcoming features for Unreal Engine 5 via CD Projekt Red's Witcher 4 tech demo, but it also held numerous training sessions for developers on how best to use its software. Two of the most popular were those concerning shader compilation stutters and the main causes of performance hitches in UE games. However, a session led by a renowned game developer showed that optimisation problems are less about the engine being used and more about how games are made.
The event was packed with many such presentations, and although I only had the chance to sit through a small portion of them, I came away with a better understanding of why it seems that all Unreal Engine games have problems with performance optimisations, such as shader compilation or traversal stutters.
