Unreal Engine 5

I downloaded Unreal Engine 5 which is still in early access. The Engine is quite large and is still getting ready for production. During the Playstation 5 release Epic revealed their new engine and its capabilities. Unreal Engine 5 will allow high quality ‘film-like’ art to be directly imported in to the Unreal Engine. Powerful models from programs such Zbrush will be supported as well as large polygon counts will be supported as well and was showed in the UE5 gameplay trailer. Unreal Engine 5 has a ton of other new features that will assist creators and I was able to get my hands on UE5 and the Valley of the Ashes files.

UE5 is a 35GB download and Ashes of the Valley was a 100GB download. However, once you begin to load and unpack Ashes of the Valley within the Unreal Engine (model\textures\compiling\shaders) it expands to a whopping 206GBs! This is very large, however I go above and beyond when I’m gathering data for you enthusiast to read and enjoy. In this particular benchmark suite I decided to benchmark both the Viewport (Unreal Engine 5) Frames Per Second and the standalone “In-game” FPS benchmark, but the different is that when I was in the viewport I was moving around the scene and editing models etc.

Unreal Engine 5 – Loading Performance

When loading the Ancient World Map into the UE5 app the UE editor skips to 55% nearly instantly and afterwards it takes roughly 1 minute to load the entire level. After loading the level you are free to edit and look around the large scale world. You float around the world or load the game and use a drone to fly around the area.

To compile and run the game within the Unreal Engine 5 editor it took about 20 seconds on my X58 platform. There are two game worlds in the Ashes of the Valley Demo: the Ancient World & Dark Ancient World. Once you leave the Ancient World to enter the Dark World it took me roughly 1 minute and 3 seconds while in the UE5 editor. This is mostly due to loading the assets, textures, dark world map and so on.

Unreal Engine 5 – Frames Per Second Performance

Now let’s take a look at the FPS while using the Unreal Engine 5 editor Viewport and Standalone Game benchmarks. Within the U5 editor the FPS are a bit higher in -game due to some areas of the screen being used for editing purpose. Obviously the “Standalone Game” uses “all” of the screen space (1080p for the highest refresh rates). The RTX 3080 isn’t breaking a sweat coming in at only 51% average GPU Usage while working within the UE5 Editor and 72% on average while playing the Standalone Game. It is also worth noting that “Ashes of the Valley” isn’t necessarily the most optimized game either. It uses a ton of large assets and expands to 200GBs as I explained earlier.

The FPS Minimum Caliber is normally the most important FPS category when it comes to minimums for me and the X58 (& RTX 3080) does decently well while being 13 years old.