The game could be considered the proper debut of Unreal Engine 5, as it is the first AAA title to use Epic Games’ latest engine.

Even though Coffee Stain Studios upgraded Satisfactory to Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite and optional Lumen support, neither this nor the Anshar/Bloober duo’s Layers of Fear with Lumen support are up to the level of an AAA game that Immortals of Aveum represents. Initially scheduled for release on July 20, Ascendant Studios’ product needed a month of polishing, but it seems that even that wasn’t enough.

The developers of the game, which uses Unreal Engine 5.1 (Niagara, Streaming Virtual Texturing, World Partition, One File Per Actor), recently praised Epic Games’ technology in a blog post: “The thing about all these different tools, though, is that no single one of them is responsible for making Immortals of Aveum look as good as it does while running as well as it does. The magic isn’t just in any single part of Unreal Engine 5.1 but in how these tools all work together and how the whole engine provides a degree of flexibility and modularity that hasn’t been possible. It’s given us the ability to create a huge game in a vast world with a relatively small team and make it all look great and run well on various platforms.”

But the game won’t run well on a high-end PC. The Lumen lighting is excellent in places, but the sharpness isn’t ideal, and post-processing shaders are the experts’ way of getting around it; some textures don’t look nice from a distance, and performance is questionable, even with AMD’s FSR 2.2 and Nvidia’s DLSS 2 and 3 as options. DLSS 3 is useless: according to WCCFTech, with it on, it ghosts with minimal movement of the crosshair, which is a pain in a first-person shooter, but the developers will fix this and have already released a 1.1 GB patch, but DLSS 3 is even worse, and in the second video below, you can see how some frames are dropped.

Using DLSS 2 remains only an option, but Performance mode doesn’t help when scaling up from 1080p to 4K: an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, 32GB DDR5 RAM, NVMe SSD setup also has significant choppiness here and there. According to the CapFrameX benchmark, the frame rate has dropped below 30 FPS on the 0.2% percentile.

There is an extra tool (Performance Budget Tool), but it also seems flawed. If performance is this bad on a high-end machine, how can it be on a low-end one? Immortals of Aveum will be released on August 22 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC.

Source: WCCFTech