We need to talk about UE4 Shader compilation issues

Cooking in UE's Frontend is an automated process and it's almost impossible to make it wrong. You would have to receive an uncooked, development build to trigger shader recompilation and believe me, the game would stutter with every camera move, making it unplayable for quite a long time.

 

Yet we so so many UE4 games with stutter.

 

As I said, the typical UE's stutter is not caused by shader compilation. UE has many flaws, but shader management is not one of them.

 

Then it's asset streaming?
I've seen several people claiming that it is shader compilation in DX12.
Just today, Digital Foundry released another video of an UE4 game, that has a lot of stutter. And they claim it's shader compilation.
They even managed to prove it, by simply reloading a previous level, where shaders had already been compiled. And stuttering was much reduced.
DF is far from perfect, but considering their connections in the industry, someone would have told them it's not shader compilation.

 

Assets caching does wonders. Their assumptions based on observation are pointless.

 

But that would mean that the UE4 streaming system is very bad.
It should be able to decide what assets to prioritize.

Wouldn't a system with a good amount of ram, just need r.Streaming.PoolSize=0, then all stutter would be eliminated?
Just load everything into ram and be done with stuttering and hitching.

 

That’s how it was for me with the “The Medium”. It’s unbelievable how seemingly no effort goes into ensuring titles don’t exhibit asset streaming and shader compilation stutter/hitching on PC. It’s so common in my experience that I wonder if they just don’t care (or maybe they don’t notice as perhaps their tools only report averages or something — devs need to use their eyes and actually play the game).

I would gladly even take an approach where textures/objects just load in as silhouettes til they’re able to retrieve the texture (mega texture style fade in) if it meant zero stuttering. Not saying that’s good, but it definitely beats stutters imo.

 

Nope, it's shader compile. Not even Epic themselves get it right in Fortnite. Once you delete the cache, it's back to sh*t.

 

God of War used DX11 but yes it does exhibit asset streaming stuttering at “trigger” points throughout the world. If it weren’t for that I would’ve thought it was a good port, but due to that I more think of it as an OK-ish port. When moving from the smith into the over world with the serpent horn it stutters very hard every time. Super annoying.

From what I gather DX12 can be an excellent API, but only if devs implement it well (which they often don’t). I will say anecdotally I’ve experienced less asset streaming/shader compilation stutter in Vulkan titles.

 

UE4 has great resource loading

should a studio choose to use it properly.

 

The Medium didn't just stutter, it had freezes, totally unplayable and i don"t know if its fixed now with patches.

And yes every UE game stutters except Gears which uses a heavily modified UE.

The stutter is a cancer that needs to be resolved asap, i hope that DirectStorage/RTX IO will do something.

Worst thing is that even the highest-end HW suffers from it and most games have stutters, some more, some less.

There are some games that don't stutter at all.. Tomb Raider titles, DOOM, Forza Horizon, RE 2/3 remakes, DMC, Call of Duty titles(They compile shades before playing)..

 

alex from df is right, sw3 stutters is just as bad as it takes two.. god awful and dont get me started with ff xv.. really despising ue4 on pc atm

 

RE2 has some pretty noticeable/bad stuttering as the game streams in the world in blocks depending on where you are at. (Shadow Cache or VRAM setting be damned) RE7 had even more horrendous stuttering all over the place. RE3 basically 0 in my 3+ consecutive playthroughs on the same system.
(All in DX11 too)
That's my experience at least.

I haven't had the time to go back and check the retail game recently, but running the benchmark on a new NVME drive that hits 3.5GB R/W ((Bottlenecked by PCI-E 3.0 on my Mobo at that number) actually seems to finally run without constant stuttering as it streams data in. There are still a few here and there. But compared to my old NVME and an old Mechanical drive it's a world of difference.

 

I also made a thread about this, it's a known issue with this engine: https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/is-unreal-engine-4-an-ill-pc-engine.441073/#post-5975260

It can be worked on, but in general, this engine has massive issues on this regard, is just the way it's done, the worst PC engine to me by far, I try to avoid most games on made on it.

 

Strangely, RE engine games have gotten a lot better to me, like A LOT since i updated to Windows 10 2009 or 20H2. Almost no stutter on RE2 Remake, only some minor drops when entering the police station (I guess is hard to load that one due to its size), but aside from that, flat frametime line, same for RE3R or DMC5, super smooth. As for RE: Village, I also don't get any hitching or stuttering except some fixed spots where it does drop, but always happens on the same locations, which means is the engine and not my computer, but at least it never stutters when exploring areas or anything like that, it just can happen when a new event triggers, but idc for that and that's nothing compared to the hell Unreal Engine 4 games can be and also, in these times, Elden Ring seems to be as screwed up as games in that engine.

 

God Of War is a bit lousy on this regard, but is nowhere near as bad as UE4 games. GoW has "fixed" stutter spots, but combat and exploring in general is fine, it's just that area change or switch that does trigger a small stutter, very annoying, but miles better than a lot of games, such as Elden Ring.

 

Doom is a dream just to boot it up and feel that snappiness, RDR2 on Vulkan has ZERO stutter too, incredible open world experience, indeed Tomb Raider games are awesome too, it is possible to get perfect games on PC optimization-wise, but it all comes down to dev talent and engine used. I don't think this is possible on UE4, at all. The engine is literally deformed when it comes to asset loading and it can't be solved by "optimizing" it. It is broken and I will always stand by these words, too many games with this problem for me to think otherwise.

 

Shadow Warrior 3 is way better with the new patch, almost zero stuttering.

RE engine games don't stutter, if you experience stutters in them check your HW.

It takes two doesn't stutter at all in XBOX SERIES X. It's super smooth.

 

We are talking PC issues here, not consoles, lol... Obviously most games on console won't stutter; closed hardware enviorement and there are no variables that will give issues. Also saying "RE engine games don't stutter, if you experience stutters in them check your HW" its pretty vague and generic, most RE Engine games used to stutter to me and horribly, they all got miles better once I updated to Windows 10 20H2, so no, in a lot of cases you simply can't say "check your hardware". Drivers, Windows version or BIOS settings can play a large role as well.

 

If it's game-engine related, consoles suffer from stutters as well, like in the Fallen Order.