this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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It's a new day, and another badly-optimized AAA Unreal Engine 5 game has hit store shelves. A couple of YouTubers, including Daniel Owen, have discovered serious performance problems in The Outer Worlds 2 that almost mirror Borderlands 4's atrocious launch day performance. One of the most problematic graphics settings is the game's ray tracing mode, which prevents even AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming champ from achieving 60 FPS at resolutions well under 1080p.

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[–] Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 114 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Y'all member the time when hardware demanding games meant awesome graphics?

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 19 points 14 hours ago

I was so excited when I finally had a machine that could run Crysis at full graphics settings.

[–] Peruvian_Skies@sh.itjust.works 58 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

There's actually a very easy fix for all poorly-performing AAA games: don't be a fucking clown and buy shit games from shit publishers. They're only pulling this shit today because they have been getting away with it for years, and they've been getting away with it for years because they have stupid idiot fucking customers who have been enabling them. If you bought this game and are upset that it runs like a snail with nerve damage, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

[–] real_squids@sopuli.xyz 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

90% of players don't even know which graphic option does what. source: pulled it out of my ass

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I trust this source. Never pulled anything out of their ass that was false.

[–] Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 hours ago

It's a good ass, reliable if a bit stubborn. And man can it haul a load!

[–] ISolox@lemmy.world 41 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

As someone playing this on a 3080 with no major issues, just turn off ray tracing. The game really isn't that bad once you turn it off.

[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 25 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

It's quite crazy how much performance you gain from using pre-calculated lighting instead of raytracing. I know it looks worse, but there's gotta be a way to find a happy middle ground, maybe a "raytracing lite" lol.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 34 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I find raytracing adds very little to the look of the vast majority of games unless they are slow enough to focus on shadows or fine details.

Maybe I'm not playing the games that benefit significantly from raytracing.

[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

The Finals (and Arc Raiders) might be good examples of fast-paced games that use raytracing to make their details pop. Although I think they intentionally stagger their settings so RT will not be enabled unless your card has enough grunt to push those graphics (Using my Ryzen 7 5800x3d and an RTX 3090, getting easily 140-150fps in game no matter the action with medium RT).

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago

@1440p?

I get 70-80 @4k with a 3080, same processor. I think the RT is on high though.

The game runs incredibly well for how good it looks.

[–] real_squids@sopuli.xyz 10 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Dynamic lighting already exists. Look at Phasmophobia, it's probably one of the heaviest Unity games because it uses it everywhere. Basically every light in that game is able to cast shadows, and it's got a lot of lights. Doesn't have any of the RT noise or lag too.

edit: it doesn't come cheap though, they had to do some downgrades to port it to consoles. Interior candles for example, they're no longer interactive.

[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, but it can be inefficient performance-wise, which is why precalculated lighting is often a mandatory performance setting in most games. The ideal goal is to use the dedicated RT hardware in a way that achieves similar graphical results but with minimal performance loss (to transfer the CPU-bound option to something that can comfortably run on most average consumer GPUs).

Traditional Dynamic Lighting is definitely a good option to have for the user, though.

[–] Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 hours ago

Some day we will have a cpu, gpu and a rtu. Need me a dedicated add in ray tracing card!

[–] baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

in this case it doesn't use baked lighting, it still uses lumen, just a software version of it with lower settings. I've tried a couple UE5 games with a hardware/software lumen toggle and every time hardware lumen is significantly slower. it's one of the curses of unreal.

[–] real_squids@sopuli.xyz 2 points 13 hours ago

The curse of Lumen is also in it's default settings, apparently. It has tons of noise and delay in every indie game I've tried

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 7 points 9 hours ago

Does raytracing even make the game look noticeably cooler, anyway?

[–] SolSerkonos@piefed.social 3 points 16 hours ago

I've been playing on an RX 6600 @ 1440p with zero problems. I didn't even bother turning it on, so terrible RT performance is news to me.

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 hour ago

I have a 3080, too, and I have a feeling it's going to be a perfectly good card for a long, long time.

[–] recursive_recursion@piefed.ca 25 points 9 hours ago (2 children)
[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 9 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Because I don't like that game.

I kept dying from the same mistakes over and over and couldn't figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do or where to go. Supposely the ship log will update when you've made progress, but mine never did.

Got bored of playing what is basically a Game Over simulator after a day of frustration and never touched it again. I guess I'm just too stupid/ADHD for a game like this.

[–] thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Lmao game over simulator.

[–] tempest@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

It's great but I threw in the towel after a few hours if play. I've never played a game that so readily gave me car sickness.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 25 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

I haven't played the Outer Worlds, but isn't a whole lot of it about making fun of companies doing this kind of stupid shit?

Based on a quick look at some videos showing off the max settings, it doesn't even look like it's doing much with all that demand. It looks like a completely normal big budget game

[–] SteposVenzny@beehaw.org 8 points 17 hours ago

It’s more about companies getting people killed, less about companies doing a bad job at making video games.

[–] kilgore_trout@feddit.it 4 points 8 hours ago

It's a dumbed-down critic of corporatism. «Creative freedom» of Microsoft-owned developers is a joke.

[–] BurgerBaron@piefed.social 2 points 3 hours ago

It's very milquetoast critique in a safe corporate sort of way. Ironic.

[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 17 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Am I the only one who doesn't need real-time raytraced lighting? Show off the skills of your artists with some fancy pre-baked stuff instead.

[–] winkerjadams@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 hours ago

Or dare I say make a good game instead of just a shiny one

[–] thermal_shock@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

I don't need it, but not being able to do what it says with very recent hardware and shit resolutions is very telling of other major issues in the game.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 17 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Unreal Engine did some amazing things at a technical level but doesn’t really seem to be ready for consumers. I somewhat don’t even blame the developers for assuming that UE5 would be the right choice considering all the marketing Epic did to make it sound like a magical wand for free performance.

[–] real_squids@sopuli.xyz 2 points 13 hours ago

They also advertised some stuff wrong. Like their AA solution only having 2 static images as a comparison.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

because nvidia has somehow convinced the gaming world that hardware has become powerful enough for realtime path tracing. It has not. Not by a long shot. And not anytime soon.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 7 points 7 hours ago

It is…if you render the lighting at like 64x64 pixels and then “deep learning super scale” it to 4k and then AI generate 3 ~~fake~~super-sampled frames for every real frame.

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 2 hours ago

Another day, another unreal engine game with massive performance issues.

[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 6 points 19 hours ago

Good lord that is bad.

[–] Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 hours ago

To anyone who hasn’t seen it: The raytracing mode is actually broken and manages to look worse AND less realistic/accurate AMD run like complete ass. It’s not something turning on, and genuinely wild that they shipped something so broken instead of hide it from the options

[–] Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 10 hours ago

It's called breaking boundaries, just on the other end! Let's see if we can reach 30 fps by 2026

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

It won't be many generations before they stop leaving it as an option that can be turned off, just to force upgrades...

[–] Davel23@fedia.io 16 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle requires a card with ray-tracing capability. No option to turn it off.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 0 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

That’s…not true. I do have a fast card so I played with it on, but there were options to disable ray tracing and path tracing.

[–] phlegmy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 hours ago

That's...not true. There's no way to disable ray tracing in that game without modding it.

[–] Muffi@programming.dev 4 points 2 hours ago

Imagine if modern GPU's were actually designed with gaming in mind...

[–] dukemirage@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago

So what, looks completely fine without the option.

[–] psycotica0@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 hours ago

Borderlands 4, its framerate low