In what might be one of the biggest surprises of the year, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has responded to persistent criticism that Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) titles often perform poorly on PC, by basically saying it’s the developers’ fault. In all seriousness, Mr. Sweeney’s comments were a bit more nuanced and constructive than that, and do actually have merit, although they don’t account for the full story as you’d expect.

At Unreal Fest 2025 in Seoul, Mr. Sweeney said that the key problem lies with the order of the development workflow that most game studios follow, whereby they build their games around high-end hardware, only optimizing their game for lower-spec machines fairly late into development. Given the pressures of getting their product shipped out on time, this optimization is often not given the time or resources it deserves by developers, leading to poor performance on launch for more moderately powerful rigs. Sweeney said that this process is almost back-to-front, and stressed that ‘Ideally, optimization should begin early – before full content build-out’.

Improvements Epic Games intends to bring

In an effort to address the above, Epic plans to introduce automated optimization tools within UE5 and expand developer education, encouraging early performance tuning. They’re also offering direct technical support, where Epic engineers can assist studios with optimization techniques.

Besides this, Epic continues advancing UE5’s baseline performance. The most recent UE5.6 update, released in June 2025, brings significant strides in speed and efficiency: benchmarks suggest up to 30% faster performance, augmented graphical fidelity, and improved lighting systems, all of which promise smoother gameplay across the board

The response from developers

While some developers share Sweeney’s view, citing rushed schedules as definitely being a problem (one which has been discussed regarding the games industry for years now) it has also been mentioned by tech commentators that focusing on weaker hardware, in particular for consoles, can introduce limitations that affect higher-end PC builds, essentially leading to the same problem but in reverse.

Developers like Warhorse Studios have come to the decision to avoid UE5 entirely, favoring CryEngine for large open-world projects. They and others argue that UE5 still needs refinement to handle enormous, complex environments effectively.

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Aaron Ritchie

Aaron's laptop knowledge makes him the go-to guy on PC Guide. But he still finds time for features, deals and much more.