Devs are to blame for Unreal Engine 5 performance issues, Epic Games CEO says

Unreal Engine 5's performance issues continue to cause debate as more and more developers move to Epic Games' platform. While the software's accessibility and powerful tools for 3D creation have seen it to the top of our pick of the best game development software, gamers complain about stutter, crashes and mangled graphics on lower-spec hardware (see our guide to the best games consoles).

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has addressed the topic in a recent interview. He says it's not all the software's fault but an issue with developers not optimising their games. It's an opinion that's provoked further fierce debate.

As quoted by This Is Game, Tim offered his stance on Unreal Engine 5 performance issues in a media interview after his keynote at Unreal Fest 2025 in Seoul. His take is that the problem lies in how many studios approach game development, leaving optimisation towards the end.

“Most developers begin by building for the highest-end hardware, then only in the final stages do they optimize and test for lower-spec devices,” he said. “That late-stage approach is the key reason players experience performance problems.”

Some devs might say that some platforms are more conducive to optimisation than others (see our Unreal Engine vs Unity comparison). Tim did go on to recognise that optimisation isn't easy, but suggested that ideally it “should be implemented early in development, before full-scale content building begins”.

He said Epic is now working on paring two main approaches to address the issue and to encourage better optimisation in Unreal Engine 5. "One is to strengthen support for Unreal Engine,” he said. ”Since optimization requires significant manual labor, we plan to provide automated optimization features for various devices, enabling developers to work faster and more easily"

"Another approach is to strengthen developer training,” he said. “In addition to providing training on the overall testing and optimization process, it's crucial to raise awareness that optimization should occur early. If necessary, our engineers can directly intervene to raise awareness of optimization techniques and provide technical assistance".

Tim's latest comments on Unreal Engine 5's performance issues have provoked mixed responses among developers and gamers alike. ”He's absolutely correct,” one person wrote on X. “Just because your studio has an array of 5090's doesn't mean that you should make the entire game based on the hardware you're working with.”

“Optimisation has been a mess in recent years, they forget that [the] majority of the gamers still use low-end to midrange PCs,” another person wrote in agreement. “Nvidia will send their highest end hardware just to get devs to use their tech, that's the most revealing factor,” another person suggested, while others suggested that indie games often run better than AAA titles because the devs are “forced to optimize from day one”.

But others disagreed. “Yet they didn't optimize Unreal Engine 5 itself early as the entire focus was slapping in resource-heavy features all while choking CPU efficiency by making the engine heavily single threaded,” one person claimed. “Not to mention the stability issue of the engine crashing during game development”.

“You can't blame all the devs using your engine,” another person argued. ”This shows your product has flaws....fix them, streamline and optimise”.

The debate isn't likely to go away soon, with the release of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater bringing up familiar issues. But even if it's sometimes unstable, Unreal Engine 5 is highly functional, and more and more developers are choosing to use the platform instead of spending time and money developing their own game engine.

What do you think? Is the issue with the platform itself, or do bigger studios perhaps need to remember that not all of their customers have the best graphics cards?