Infuse Studio co-founder Jacob Sutton has claimed that Unreal Engine 5 enforces the use of Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) because games running natively at 4K in the engine can’t achieve a desirable frame rate.
Even if you have the best graphics card, it looks like Unreal Engine 5 games are better off running through resolution scaling tech as Epic, according to Sutton, requires the use of its built-in Nvidia DLSS-like scaling to achieve acceptable frame rates at such high resolutions.
In an interview with Moore’s Law Is Dead, Infuse Studio co-founder Jacob Sutton commented on a few different issues that Unreal Engine is encountering including shader compilation on PC. But one surprising topic that was raised is around resolution, and UE5’s apparent inability to run games at native 4K with acceptable performance.
Sutton specifically called this out after a brief discussion on the software-based AMD FSR and hardware-based Nvidia DLSS. He says “I can’t think of any game on UE5 that you can just play natively at 4K and expect to get a decent experience because it’s expected that you use that upscaling to achieve the desirable frame rate.”
Host Tom then clarifies that this appears to be a game-engine-driven decision, rather than something developers are calling out for, to which Sutton agrees.
While Unreal Engine 5 is still relatively new, it’s eye-opening to see that such practices are enforced and suggests that the standalone engine isn’t quite as powerful as Epic would have you believe. Granted, Sutton is talking from his own experiences and there may be games out there that can achieve acceptable performance at native 4K. A bigger issue is what frame rate is being deemed acceptable given that this number seems to change based on preference, and it isn’t clarified during this discussion.
The topic of discussion quickly changes to PlayStation’s rumored super resolution technology that may be revealed soon, but ultimately the comments on native 4K performance in Unreal Engine 5 aren’t addressed again.
The good news is that using Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, Intel XeSS, or TSR is a more than acceptable solution to achieving great, albeit non-native performance at 4K in Unreal Engine 5 games, although you will need serious hardware like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 to pull it off.
If you’re looking to assemble a rig to target 4K gaming, we can show you how to build a gaming PC with our step-by-step guide. You’ll also want one of the best 4K gaming monitors, many of which we have tested to give you a comprehensive look at which ones come out on top.