How 'ARC Raiders' Solved the UE5 Stutter Problem: They Cheated
The Digital Foundry analysis is in, and Embark Studios has a simple trick for making Unreal Engine 5 run well: just don't use the hard parts.
I've been waiting for the deep dive on ARC Raiders. After the technical magic of The Finals, I wanted to know if Embark could do it again. The answer is a resounding "yes," but with a massive, hilarious asterisk.
ARC Raiders runs better than almost any UE5 game I've played on PC. The frame-time charts are clean. And here's the one phrase that will make a PC gamer weep tears of joy:
"Shader compilation stutter simply doesn't exist."
The Monkey's Paw
So, how did they pull off this miracle? It's simple. They just... turned off all the shit that breaks Unreal Engine 5.
There's no Lumen. No Nanite. No virtual shadow maps.
Embark looked at the "UE5 trifecta" of performance-killing features, said "no thanks," and shipped a game that actually works. As a result, performance scales beautifully across CPU threads, and the game triples the frame rate of other recent UE5 releases (though, as DF notes, that's an apples-to-CUDAs comparison).
A game that doesn't turn your PC into a single-core-bound space heater? What a concept.
It's Not All Perfect
Now, this miracle doesn't come for free. The dreaded "#StutterStruggle" isn't totally gone, it's just changed masters.
The shader stutter is dead, but "traversal stutter" is still a thing. Digital Foundry found it shows up in two ways. When you're CPU-limited, you'll still get noticeable hitches as you move around.
If you cap your frame rate (which you should), that ugly hitch is replaced by a weird, but cleaner, "animation stutter." The frame-times are smooth, but the camera and character movement just get a little... jumpy. It's a much better problem to have.
The Price of Performance
The real price is in the visuals. Skipping all that UE5 tech means the game "suffers visually as a result."
And boy, does it. Shadows are the main pain point. They're low-res, plague-ridden, and sometimes just don't show up at all, leading to bizarre black holes where an indirect shadow should be.
The game's fancy-sounding "RTXGI" is probe-based and prone to errors, light leaks, and SSAO mishaps. And in a game this full of water and metal, the "dated-looking" screen-space reflections are a real bummer.
The Right Call
But here's the thing: it was absolutely the right call.
This is an online extraction shooter. I will take a stable, high-performance frame rate over a perfectly rendered, un-playable shadow any day of the week.
Digital Foundry seems to agree, even if they (and I) wish Embark would hide an "Insane" toggle in the menus for all that UE5 eye candy, just for future-proofing.
At least the optimization is simple. DF found that just dropping "dynamic RTXGI" and "GI resolution" from Ultra to High claws back a 24% boost in performance with almost no visual difference. Done.