The owner of a powerful computer who launched the new game Phantom Blade Zero ran into an unexpected problem. He noticed a rock wall with a texture of very low resolution, reminiscent of PlayStation 2-era graphics. Meanwhile, the game was running at maximum settings with path tracing, a technology that creates realistic lighting, and was using more than eight gigabytes of video memory on a modern graphics card.
The case has prompted discussion about the efficiency of the Unreal Engine 5 engine on which the game is built. Some players consider it poorly optimised and point to delays during shader compilation, which is responsible for rendering materials, and image "stuttering" when moving through the world. Others object that modern engines tend to fill all available video memory in order to preload assets and reduce trips to the slower storage drive. In their view, a large amount of occupied memory does not always mean that the game actually needs it at that moment.
As one developer who has worked with game engines explained, video memory is a resource with a fixed budget, and the engine's job is to use it. Consumption can be reduced, but that would mean lowering texture resolution and loading textures from disk more often.
The players' complaint, however, was not about the amount of memory in use but about how it is spent. With path tracing turned off, the game at maximum settings takes up about 7–8 gigabytes, and at optimised settings about 6.5 gigabytes, with almost no visible loss in quality. Even so, certain surfaces still look flat next to sharp neighbouring objects. The likely cause is the uneven distribution of texture pixels across the surfaces of the game's models.
For the Chinese studio S-Game, this is its first game of such scale. The developers have already released an update that addresses performance with path tracing enabled, and advised owners of GeForce graphics cards to temporarily revert to an older driver version to avoid problems.
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