It is not a secret that Unreal Engine 5 has issues running games on consoles and PCs even though it is quickly becoming the go-to for many development teams. There is plenty of criticism around how poorly UE5 games run on a wide range of machines.

So what does Tim Sweeney thinks about what’s happening with Unreal Engine? Well, according to Tim developer education is needed to change the way games are developed on UE5.

“The main cause is the order of development,” Sweeney said in a media interview after his Unreal Fest keynote in South Korea. “Many studios build for top-tier hardware first and leave optimization and low-spec testing for the end. Ideally, optimization should begin early—before full content build-out. We’re doing two things: strengthening engine support with more automated optimization across devices, and expanding developer education so ‘optimize early’ becomes standard practice. If needed, our engineers can step in.

Game complexity is much higher than 10 years ago, so it’s hard to solve purely at the engine level; engine makers and game teams need to collaborate. We’re also bringing Fortnite optimization learnings into Unreal Engine, so titles run better on low-spec PCs.”

It appears what Sweeney is saying is that developers can’t just tack on optimization at the end of when features like Lumen, VSM, and Nanite shift costs across CPU, GPU, memory, and streaming. Teams that profile early, set realistic scalability targets, and lock PSO caches/streaming plans tend to avoid the worst launch day hitches.

However, skeptics might see “optimize early” as Epic shifting blame. Sweeney’s statement puts the optimization responsibility squarely on the game studio rather the engine itself.

For a smaller team, however, this can become a big challenge because advanced UE5 features require specialized knowledge and additional development time.

If this whole automated optimization and education push materializes, and game developers adopt UE 5.6+ with its profiling upgrades then we may see UE5’s reputation go from “gorgeous but heavy” to gorgeous and predictable to ship.”

With massive projects like The Witcher 4 adopting Unreal Engine, Epic must focus its efforts in making sure developers get all the support they need to release the best product day one.

Source: This is Game (Translated by Clawsomegamer)