If anyone has seen the requirements for these new games that use UE5 and its whole feature set it's insane. In order to play 4K it needs at least a 5950x with a 4080 and in order to get that you have to enable DLSS or FSR which means if you want to play it at native you have to play it at 1440p or 1080p which is insane to me. That also means at the 1080p setting for that hardware you will have to play it sub 1080p, possibly standard res., to get native res.
So please, for your next game using Unreal, don't use Lumen unless you can set it up to where we can turn it off in the options menu. Please use Nanite and RT instead, I'm begging you here. I don't care how much better Lumen is, if it's such a resource hog and RT is 20% worse I'll take the 20% hit. Same reason why I won't use pathtracing.
The game was Immortals.

The recent UE 5.3 update added the option to use a hybrid of Lumen and lightmaps. Full Lumen is still indeed too demanding for the current hardware.

Is Lumen even going to be considered necessary when they keep dialing in RT on the RT Accelerators? If Epic really wants Lumen in they should bake it into the GPU's and figure out some revenue sharing deal with Intel and the rest.

Don't Day 1 or Pre-Order games. They're gonna be demanding. Stick to your backlogs.

Buy better hardware and taxing games when they're not-as-taxing or not-taxing-at-all.

And be prepared to upgrade at some point, given that so many games are requiring the moon here. It's only gonna get worse w/ Ray-Tracing, Path-Tracing, unoptimized Unreal Engine, and more.

And only gonna get worse w/ 16gb RAM in the XSX/PS5 pool for shared system-RAM & shared-VRAM. They can swing whatever wherever and however.

Least RT is baked into the hardware with RT acclerators. This is so lazy and wasteful. I already have high RAM in two setups but the card specs. are ridiculous and wasteful. I'm expected because devs. and more Unreal are too lazy to optimize their crap. And use fillers like DLSS is a lazy excuse.
Hopefully the smaller devs. aren't stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot here.

I don't think 4K displays are really for someone who is interested in bang for the buck. If you are targeting 4K I think you have to be prepared to be using premium graphics hardware.

I think 1440 is the limit of what's mainstream at the moment:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/steam-hardware-software-survey-welcome-to-steam

Yeah, if gamers want 4K and trying to maybe max stuff out, that's 24gb RTX 4090 turf. Who's got $1600+ to blow on that? [shrug] Nothing new. We've always had problems w/ Unreal engine - from texture popping in Gears of War 1, Singularity, Alpha Protocol and more. Now we also got stutters, area transition issues, shader stutter problems, and other non-sense - like say Deathloop and Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice.

Now you got Remnant 2 basically requiring Upscalers like XESS/DLSS/FSR just to run okay (60fps or so).

It ain't nothing new w/ issues w/ any Unreal Engine based games, is it?

Unreal's always been a SUV, not a Ferrari; it ain't Frostbite.

EDIT - They're (dev's, pub's, engine makers, and hardware makers) just gonna pass the buck & pushing the tech. Make everyone upgrade again at some point.

Skip 'em. Stick to backlogs. Got plenty of games, thanks to digital sales, Humble, Fanatical, etc etc. Ain't worth keeping up with the Joneses anymore w/ the way this crap's going.

I don't ever remember seeing texture popping or stutters in Unreal, UT'99 or Deus Ex. Loading and and saving in Deus Ex was a bit slow at the time. Deus Ex: IW had some stability issues but I don't know if that can be attributed to the engine.

I've had them all crash though. Could be bad scripting.

I'm mainly referring to Xbox era and on, not the Old Unreal Era. I'm talking about namely Gears of War 1 (Original PC version from 2007) and on, when all of these problems began.

EDIT - About Deus Ex: IW and Thief 3: Deadly Shadows being a mess performance-wise, that's b/c of the major overhaul of the lighting & shadowing system for those games by Ino Storm themselves. That killed performance back then.

I own a 7800X3D and a 3090 TI, yet i still do not feel "safe"... (not even a 4090 is fully sufficient, so my next upgrade need to be at least a 5000 series).

However, not just the new games can be demanding... my modded Morrowind using OpenMW is able to push my machine to the maximum as well. I even stopped considering getting a new Laptop, because to me Laptops still are not "up to the task"; i still use it for office-only.

Indeed, the game looks awesome nowadays, and it is kinda crazy how much of graphics i am able to get out of the aged "Morrowind" using new technology and new hardware. However, the hardware-demand, after all those years, has not become lower at all. As soon as there is better hardware... new technology will arise and ultimately... the software will always catch up to the newest hardware, or even surpassing its possibilities.

Ah yeah sure, if you use the maximum possibilities of the new UE5 engine, it will crack any hardware... this is certain.

The problem I noted is that even premium tier for 4K like 5950x and 4080 can't do native 4K under these requirements. Frankly I doubt the 4090 would do much better.

Lumen is to advanced for now, even on the most powerful hardware. We still have to make RT available on regular mainstream-hardware, which is still a tough nut to crack. I think RT is a viable option for any GPU at the "upper tier", comparable to 3090 TI, 7900 X + XT, 4070 TI or better... which are still pretty pricy cards at 800 or even more coins... which is comparable to the price of a PS5 including a 2 TB SSD (you may even get 1 game added as a bundle): This one, for a casual-gamer, might be the "better deal". Because if we add all the other components missing we can hit the 2000 coins-mark pretty quick for a PC with "upper tier-GPUs".

Of course, no need to put a 4090 into this "game"... else the price is more at the 2500 to 3000 mark; this card alone is already more than half of the cookie. Capable PC systems simply are "Premium"; this is absolutely true.

The only good thing: The SSD prices (and RAM in general) was coming down a huge deal... which may reduce the overall cost. However, because the size of new games are NOT decreasing, nowadays i recommend a 4 TB drive for true gamers already (and 2 TB for OS, OS should be dedicated)... as it will save you the hassle of "uninstalling/installing games" all the time... allowing for a library.

I was now even upgrading my PS5 with a 4 TB SSD, Firecuda 530 + sink, for a price of 327 coins... which was not affordable at all more than a half year ago, so i am finally happy. The limited space was becoming a big nuisance and the new drive is even 15% faster. I was even exchanging the white front plate with a purple one... so kinda my PS5 is now "special edition"... for real (not just fake). After installing all games (21 so far) still got about 2,6 TB space left but it was not to much space if i want to have it totally "future proof".

Surely, i think the current GPUs still have to tackle RT and Nanite too... Lumen is something for the "next generations, not released yet" and even then... high end only. I think for the next 5 years it will not make much sense as a technology.

Of course the PS5 was really a bargain compared to my gamer PC:

PS5 with 4 TB Firecuda 530 + sink and a new faceplate, all you ever may need:
500 + 320 + 70 = 890 (no need for archive, because the BDs are my archive).

My PC, at the CURRENT market price: 1 year ago it was at least 1000 coins higher than this (more at the 5000 range, not just nearly at the 4000 range... because of the crazy SDD and RAM prices... even CPU and GPU was no bargain at this time. SSD and RAM had by far the biggest price drops... GPU and CPU not that much, but efficiency was improved. Other stuff almost same price....
It can always be cheaper... sure... but the quality and cooling will suffer... it may become a issue for long term and hardcore gaming.

Yes it is "better" but the price is no match... it clearly is showing us "it is BETTER and MORE", end of story, no comment.

GPU: 900
CPU: 390
MB: 700 (this one, at high end... surely had a even bigger price boost than the GPUs and it will barely come down)
SSD 1: 140 (OS)
SSD 2: 160 (game install)
SSD 3: 280 (game install)
Archive HDD (internal): 300
PSU: 350
RAM: 215
OS: 140 (can get a key somewhere, if you enjoy... Steam users knows the deal)
Cooler: 200
KB: 130
Mouse: 60
Gamepad: 40
Cable: PSU (less stiff) GPU cable: 30
GPU holder: 15
PC case: 160

= 3860

TV/monitor not included of course, but peripherals have to be added, it will wear out way to quick at hardcore-gaming.