OPTIMIZATION REQUESTS

[misty swift]

Yes this is how it is supposed to be

[tame junco]

But the game is still CPU bottlenecked because of single thread usage

[misty swift]

Most players are not

[tame junco]

Are you sure?
I have R5 5600x + 4070 Super
And I have less FPS now even on super Low settings

120fps with ultra low now vs 160fps stable on high on UE4

In FHD

I dont think it's 4070 super bottlenecked

[misty swift]

You have less fps because you are playing a completely different game now

[tame junco]

Cool, a new game with the same bugs, worse visual fidelity for FHD and increased amount of crashes and stutters

[frigid gale]

Hopefully they are working on optimization

That's why they upgraded to ue5

[tame junco]

They are working, but not reveal any information about it

[midnight crow]

FPS on goose bay / lashkar / anvil / kokan are awful, 150/200 in every map but 50max here

worst being goose bay

[hollow delta]

I'm going to change the game's audio and the game closes by itself. Are the devs fixing the game or are they just thinking about money?

@void valve@latent shoal

It's so annoying to play a game where the devs don't apologize for the state of the game, and they don't listen to the community and so they listen and only think about money.

we can make a donation to squad and its devs who don't listen to the community

[lapis whale]

Well have you seen War Thunder
OWI could definitely be handling things better but it could always be much, much worse.

[icy pulsar]

"Other games are worse thus the current state of squad is not that bad". Seriously? The game has gone to shit and it is because of many ACTIVELY made decisions from the management and developers over SEVERAL YEARS. And he has a point about apologizing for a shit build.
For those who remember witcher 3, this is how you do a proper apology (and this was only for a small bug after one patch)
"If something breaks, it must be fixed" meanwhile OWI just piles shit on top of their shit instead of fixing long-standing bugs....

[red echo]

Or also No Man Sky, that is the perfect example of redemption and learning from mistakes

And of course, it's also a game from an Indie company.

[hybrid plank]

Devs must quit fucking around and start listen to their community. People who played your game for thousands of hours tell you how to actually improve it for free and being ignored. That's what throws players off.

Like what's the point in having community manager who can't respond to people for more than a month.

[north hinge]

Every single update feels like it was made by a Fiverr dev team that was instructed to create content with existing assets. Unfortunately, their pay seems to get cut prior to release, resulting in an unfinished clusterfuck of old assets

[fluid frost]

Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 processor 285 (24-Core, 76MB Total Cache, 1.9Ghz to 5.6GHz) NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5080 16GB GDDR7
32GB Dual Channel DDR5 (2x 16GB - Green) 5200 MT, ** will this pc run 1440p on medium graphics at 100+ fps**

[misty swift]

Yes

[warped tartan]

Is this thread still beeing considered by the company as a feedback for suggestion or they just forget to delete this thread (in case of it is not beeing used at all)?

[north hinge]

OWI hasn't interacted with this thread since May. They don't give even an iota of a fuck

[limpid rivet]

play all ultra only blobal ilumination and shadow medium. get avg 90 fps. shadow medium its like ue 4 ultra.

[pastel harness]

120 FPS UE5
70 FPS UE4
Ryzen 5600 RTX 4070

1440P

[tame junco]

With or without FG?

[spark nexus]

excellent question

[austere tree]

[topaz blaze]

bois, just buy 9950x3d with an rtx 5080 and the problem is solved 😄

[red echo]

And it seems he never answered you if he uses FG or not.... Xd

[tribal fulcrum]

This. OWI does anything but optimize the game lmao.

[steady badge]

So it took three weeks to drop a "hotfix" to fix one single thing, and now this thread is unpinned?

Pretty sure no one from OWI was even checking this thread at this point

[tame junco]

Its not even fixed

[hybrid plank]

I love how they "fixed" muzzle gases, but the absence of grass on Yeho for more than a month is still ok

Feels like playing the very first ArmA 25 years ago

[spark nexus]

unpinned because you can only pin one thread in forums

[silk pilot]

Jokes on you, this thread has always been a red herring to keep poor optimization discussion out of the general channel

[steady badge]

Well that makes a lot of sense lol

[hybrid plank]

Also would be nice if vehicle's wheels "stucking" under the ground would be fixed. Like ffs, 50 bucks game - you start the round, all 3 of your logis cannot move because of that bug, you're rolled to the 1st point in 20 minutes. 10/10 gameplay. Wish I could get refund after 3.5k hours, until they pull their shit together and start do something about the current crap the game is.

[gloomy flint]

we have a running thread around vehicles here: https://discord.com/channels/91294111071469568/1428850402346143846. We're very aware there's issues and we're working on a rolling solution that incrementally deals with the vehicle issues/bugs.

[red echo]

And when is something said about optimization?

[mellow swift]

on ue 6 dude, you should wait a bit

[frigid gale]

wonder if they have made any progress towards optimization

I highly doubt it but would be nice to get an update

when was the last time a dev/manager actually gave an update about optimization in this channel?

or even acknowledged a message in this channel

[vague mulch]

The framerate in Squad has never been as stable as it is now. If you want to get more frames I'd say it's most convinient to get better hardware or to have lower expectactions about the max framerate. Stable frames > high frames.

If you want to get smooth experience, cap frames with RTSS and use some motion blur, also set post processing to epic to get best motion blur.

I don't think the hardware requirements will get lower anytime soon.

[crystal chasm]

same, i have basically minimum specs and i've gotten the best frames ever

[vague mulch]

just any amd x3d cpu, and some dlss capable gpu and you should be able to run squad at 60fps at 2k

4k is a problematic though

haven't tested anything below 4070S, but the gpu load is not that high in my case now

[thorn lion]

This is true but lower end pcs definitely got speced out

[red echo]

Well... it depends, really. The lack of game optimization is mainly affecting players with low and mid-range devices... even though they were supposedly optimizing the game for mid-range systems.

In other words, if you don't have a mid-to-high-end or high-end GPU, you're screwed.

Or not even that, since cases have been reported with graphs like 3080 or 4070

[frigid gale]

My frame rate is fine, I'm speaking on behalf of people who do have issues with it

And you do realise not everybody can just suddenly buy a X3D CPU right

[pastel harness]

yes

in PT there is more FPS

[frigid gale]

nice

[vague mulch]

If anybody with x3d cpu has issues with frames it might be due to inproper configuration of eg. ram frequency - mine DDR4 3600 has to be set in BIOS because by default was 2333mhz

and I do think that many people could get better experience by properly set their hardware and use RTSS frame cap with some motion blur to get smooth experience like I wrote here:
#1230645447270465657 message

for 60Hz monitor I capped frames via RTSS to 63fps, and set the motion blur to 0.2-0.3, and epic settings for post-processing, no need to have more frames with thist setup

remember: eyes are very sensitive to framerate fluctuations, not the framerate itself, i.e. stable 60fps (capped by rtss) is way more smoother than 90fps but capped by in-game setting that fluctuates

so:
disable vsync - to get better latency
disable in-game frame limit - as it's not stable
use RTSS to cap framerate 2-4 fps above monitor refresh rate (instead of in-game limiter)
use motion blur - even a small amount helps
use epic post processing setting for better motion blur

[red echo]

Personally, I suffer from Memory Leak... It's nothing more than that.

Squad's fault

[frigid gale]

It has been 2 months since UE5 came out, over a year since this thread was made and over 2 years since performance complaints started to rise. A decent amount has been done in those 2 years, new factions, weapon skin packs, emote packs, new/updated maps, a complete overhaul to gunplay, numerous bug fixes (apparently?), vehicle handling overhaul and an engine upgrade, its good but with all those updates and hot fixes I fail to notice anything significant to help counter the consistent performance issues that this game has.

The first mention of UE5 was almost a year ago on November 26th 2024, in that post this was what was said about performance. "The first thing my team did was to have an Unreal Insights profile taken on our minimum spec machine and my team went over that for about 2 weeks, documenting all the issues we found, and what was costly. Once we had that list of problem items, we dug into each one briefly to get an understanding of the scope of fixing them. Once everything was said and done, we had around 43 pages of notes documenting the various performance issues with Squad." (read the full thing here https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/393380/view/4459221603601877515?l=english) obviously they had a plan on how to counter these issues and it was going to be complicated (I don't blame them).

Since the release of that devblog there has been 6 public play tests on UE5, The first playtest people gave mixed feedback about performance, some said it had improved, some said it was the same and some said it was worse. 3 weeks later the 2nd playtest, this time feedback seem to lean more towards the negative side, FPS drops and stuttering when ADSing. 3 weeks later the 3rd playtest, mixed feedback again, positive and negative. a week later the 4th playest, negative feedback about performance. another week later we are on the 5th playtest now, more positive feedback about performance. 1 month later the final playtest, feedback was mixed but was more negative

So after 6 playtests and 18 days of feedback from the community there still seems to be an issue involving performance and I'm sure many bug fixes are needed as well. A month and 19 days later we finally have the release of UE5 and a note regarding performance, alright they have had a few hiccups with optimizing maps and seem to at least acknowledge that performance seems to be an issue, alright no problem at least it has been noted, maybe these next 6 bug fixes might have something that will improve performance, nope alright that's fine its a bug fix after all.

Then we get an announcement from squad command, they are shifting their focus to a "community-first development" and "A big piece of that vision is a brand-new Community Development Team. Their entire purpose is to listen, engage, and deliver — to focus on the things you’ve been asking for: long-standing bugs, quality-of-life improvements, and community wishlist items." that sounds like a great idea I wonder what their first plan is,
oh, its vehicle handling, that's a bit disappointing but there is a mini roadmap which includes... 3 months of vehicle handling fixes.

Safe to say that was pretty disappointing but what's this, a new update for squad? maybe this includes something that will help fix the performance issues, its a new faction and a few more gun skins, oh and an emote pack, but at least they "Improved memory usage on foliage-heavy maps." I guess a step in the right direction, nevermind my performance has gotten worse again.

It has been really disappointing and frustrating that these performance issues that have plagued the game still seem to exist and whilst there has been many updates there have been none to counter this issue, there has been mere mention or acknowledgment of such a large issue. You mention that UE5 "is what will allow us to ensure Squad can thrive for the next decade." Unfortunately I don't see this game thriving for the next decade with a consistent decline of players.

@gloomy flint I would appreciate if you read this, I apologize for pinging you.

[split badge]

So many things to say, but bro chose to speak Facts!

[red echo]

You know what the worst part is? It's that OWI will take months, or even years, to actually optimize the game. OWI takes a long time to solve problems, for example, the ICO system took two years to perfect. And yet, despite the clear evidence of OWI's poor performance, Why the hell, the transition to UE5 was done with playtesting, with OWI QA testers, and with the green light from the game director who, by the way, Luckily he's already been fired, but there are still people defending OWI, defending his poor management of the game, his slowness in delivering fixes, Despite their poor communication and lack of responsiveness to their community, some people still defend everything bad about OWI.

[zinc wren]

Vehicles are one of the loudest and most painful issues that came with UE5 release. I would not take their roadmap literally, as "one focus" but as an example of how they'll tackle at least one issue. With a plan.

[pastel harness]

i think we are playing different games

[crystal chasm]

we must be, i have minimum specs (Ryzen 5500, RX580, 32GB RAM) and i have better frames than UE4 and i actually gain FPS when i scope in

[pastel harness]

same

same with my friend with 12400H and 3050

he have 60+ stable FPS

[crystal chasm]

i have friends that play on the same GPU but with an old xeon CPU, 16 GB ram and they get 60+ fps without frame gen

[frigid gale]

I understand that the vehicle handling was not ideal but in my opinion it shouldn't have been touch in the first place, they actually made it worse than it previously was but I guess learn from mistakes

You could also understand that this "roadmap" they have created may drive their attention else where

pun intended

[zinc wren]

They didn't have a choice, it was required for the new engine.

[frigid gale]

I understand, however that vehicle handling wasn't a major issue, it's not like it was a game breaking issue it was just frustrating. The performance issues have persisted for over 2 years and there has been little to no improvement to help players with the issue

[zinc wren]

It's a physics issue.

[frigid gale]

It's not game breaking

That vehicle handling was frustrating.

[zinc wren]

You don't know that - and you were not part of the testing where it was indeed game breaking

[zinc wren]

You couldn't just port old engine vehicle physics / handling (same thing) over to UE5. It was a complete disaster.

[frigid gale]

I think you are misunderstanding, I'm talking about the handling when we switched to UE5

the vehicle handling when UE5 was released was not game breaking

[zinc wren]

Handling is drawn from the physics engine.

It's pretty good now

[frigid gale]

Now its pretty good, when UE5 was first released it was frustrating

but not game breaking

[zinc wren]

in ue4 it was game breaking

when it ported over

[frigid gale]

I'm not talking about UE4

[zinc wren]

to ue5

I understand, however that vehicle handling wasn't a major issue, it's not like it was a game breaking issue it was just frustrating. The performance issues have persisted for over 2 years and there has been little to no improvement to help players with the issue

The vehicle handling at UE5 release to public was awful, and lead to alot of issues where it killed the game for alot of people. This was completely obvious in the feedback forums.

[frigid gale]

what do you mean by "killed the game"

[zinc wren]

Killed the game to people means they close it, and do not return.

That is what that means.

[frigid gale]

Oh so similar to the performance issues?

[zinc wren]

One of the many issues that they're working on.

[frigid gale]

I feel like you are trying to downplay the whole performance thing which I hope you aren't

[zinc wren]

No i'm just clearly stating what's happening

[frigid gale]

So am I

https://tenor.com/view/guy-arguing-guy-talking-to-wall-talking-brick-wall-gif-18667615

[steady badge]

Performance issues affect more people than driving physics

[split badge]

Thats just not true mate. I run the recommended pc build, 5600x, 3060, 32 gb ram and i barely touch 70 on low settings. Drops to 50 on maps like harju & goosebay and dont even get me started on saxian islands.

[split badge]

Realshit, id rather drive a little slower than have my fps go to 45 when i ads. We all know how much easier it is to kill an opponent if u have higher fps than them. Also the faster ads bug is back, people already abusing it.

[misty wind]

Return to UE3 texture pop-in

[crystal chasm]

same thing as was posted on reddit recently, someone getting good FPS on hardware worse than mine
as op stated in a comment, clearing cache and tuning his GPU helped him achieve this.
by the way, just because you have better specs it doesn't mean what i'm saying is not true.

[split badge]

Clearing cache does absolutely nothing, at least for me. And expecting your players to overclock their hardware, that ultimately results in a lower lifespan of said hardware should not be something that is supported. OWI just needs to wake up and focus on PERFORMANCE, not another reskinned faction while simultaneously baiting us with a map in the 10.0 trailer that wont even be included. UE5 was suppose to increase performance, not lower it 40%. My system ran UE4 on 100-120 fps, now im down to 60-70 on low settings. Even "Streets of Tarkov" runs better on my system than "NARVA" which is just crazy in my opinion.

[crystal chasm]

you have to understand that the same people who work on factions aren't the same people who work on performance matters.
you wouldnt expect a chef to work in a construction site? also you aren't expected to overclock to get good performance, because i don't. performance is all around the place currently because you are also getting more performance than people with way higher specs than any of us. speaking of streets of tarkov, it runs considerably worse than any map on squad on my system.
it's not as black and white as you think it is.

[split badge]

I understand your point of view, however this isn't a new issue, not by any means. Its something that has been going on for years and years and people are fed up with it. Constant broken promises and basically gaslighting the community into "everything's fine, we're working on it". You would think after so many people complained, resources would be put into performance more than content. Siege did it, why cant OWI. I remember a Reel they posted a while back on Instagram were they were reading some of the complaints people had and in that Reel they were making fun of the people complaining. Its unprofessional and honestly sad to see, especially for people that have supported this game and studio for a long time. They're basically stuffing a spoiled piece of meat in our mouths and telling us to keep eating it cuz it will get better with time, while not trying to get a new piece of meat. In my honest opinion UE5 was a mistake and it would have been better to just make a squad 2 in UE5. This would have given us a smoother product without spaghetti code for the devs, ultimately resulting in a better game not only for the community, but the developers themselves. Take for example Arc Raiders, it runs flawlessly proving that its not UE5 that is the problem. Its the way the game it setup.

[crystal chasm]

this i can absolutely agree with but just keep in mind, arc raiders is 36gb~ with around 24~ players max on the map and no vehicles. this by no means excuses OWI's negligence, but apparently as of recently, performance is being taken ever so slightly more seriously...

[spark nexus]

Of course you can, it just takes lots of time to port it, somehow Assetto Corsa Rally uses UE5.4.3 and their own physics from Assetto Corsa Evo, OWI clearly doesn't handle development management well (reminds me of MindsEye lmao)

It's been years and not much really changed in terms of performance, it still feels the same with all those hitches and low FPS because lots of stuff is not multithreaded, idk why OWI thrown away PhysX as it was a good physics engine and was well multithreaded (as seen in Vite fork of NvRTX UE 5.0.3)

[dapper leaf]

my only complain rn is forrested areas, devs need to use some technic or something to optimize it better. like som things dont render behind some trees

[frigid gale]

black coast and harju is where I have really noticed a significant dip in performance

and on gorodok just west of bunkers

[frigid gale]

still nothing

no response

no acknowledgment

this is beyond silly

you could ping these guys and write a somewhat decent complaint about the game and they dont have the time to respond

but responding to people in gen chat, sure no problem

https://tenor.com/view/facepalm-really-stressed-mad-angry-gif-16109475

Hey dude, its been a year and a half, we are all kinda fed up any update?

[thorn lion]

They made perf better in 10.0

You failed to notice

[frigid gale]

Nothing changed for me lol

FPS took a hit when we switched to UE5 which is somewhat understandable until you realize the amount of negative reviews about optimization during those playtests

Maybe they did optimize the game and I didn't notice, but this is a continuous problem that plagues this game and there still has not been anything significant to fix the issue

its so inconsistent

[thorn lion]

Have you cleared cache after updating to UE5, untill then you get crap perf

[frigid gale]

I have cleared cache when UE5 released, I also cleared it after updating to 10.0

when I cleared it during the UE5 update it did improve but I definitely felt a massive drop in performance compared to UE4

[slow pendant]

There have been like 4 minor/patch releases that specifically addressed points on optimization.Just because it wasn't enough for you or didn't solve your specific issues doesn't mean they are ignoring it. 🙄

[frigid gale]

So what are they doing if they aren't ignoring it

I just want to know what you think

[slow pendant]

From 9.0 patch:

We've also made extensive updates to our existing maps to ensure compatibility with UE5 and improve performance. These changes include asset and material adjustments, as well as reworking foliage on several maps.

Performance has been a major focus for us. Unfortunately, some of our older maps don’t fully align with these practices, as they were originally optimized for what worked best in the previous version of UE4.

While we've worked hard to bring performance to an acceptable level across all maps, further improvements are planned in upcoming updates. Our goal is to deliver both higher visual quality and smooth gameplay, while maintaining enjoyable performance even on older or lower-end hardware.

From 9.0.3 patch:

Reduced memory usage on foliage-heavy maps.

From 10.0.0 patch (and subsequent hotfix):

Improved memory usage on foliage-heavy maps.
Performance optimizations to reduce hitching during gameplay for systems with 8GB or less of VRAM.a

You are welcome to make the argument that their fixes aren't enough or they should be focusing on more holistic updates that improve the performance across the board, but I find it disingenuous for people to harp on about the devs "ignoring" the problem - They are aware of it and are seemingly making small improvements between each patch, and patch notes specifically call out optimizations. I suppose you want some kind of longwinded apology from OWI leadership because it's taken them so long?

[frigid gale]

I didn't specifically say they are ignoring the issue, but they definitely aren't paying enough attention to it as they should be, and no I don't expect a longwinded apology from OWI.

[frigid gale]

Fair enough they have had 3 patches that have included something to do with performance, but please look at it from this perspective, UE5 had 6 public playtests and they each lasted around 4 days, thats almost a month of playtests and something that was consistently bought up in the feedback was the performance of the game.

And before UE5 was released how many updates included something that significantly boosted performance.

I don't have a weak PC but I know there is plenty of people that do

even with my current build I still have the occasional stutter and FPS drops on certain maps

Ryzen 7 7800X3D
9070 XT
32GB Ram

Game is on an SSD

depends on the map, on fallujah around 70-80, black coast or harju it drops to 60

Of course thats playable but not everybody has a good build

Other maps like yeho, al basrah, gorodok etc Its 80-110 but as soon as you hit the heavy foliage the fps just drops

[late valley]

Can you please get rid of volumetric clouds or make the option to disable them? It's useless laborious calculations (how often most of the players will look at the sky?) of lighting

It can be changed into pre-rendered clouds and script that tracks clouds and changes light on the ground.

And also get rid or make option to disable most of the volumetric objects (smoke, etc.)

[silk pilot]

Clouds have basically zero impact on performance. Same for most smoke fx. Obviously you cannot make smoke fx render differently with options since that becomes a gameplay issue.

[late valley]

On powerful systems (computers), this is unnoticeable, but on less powerful machines it's a laborious process.

Yes, you can't change render in settings, but you can change in settings type of smoke (volumetric object or empty object with picture and alpha-channel)

[misty swift]

How do you know they have a performance impact on your system?

[late valley]

Because on my old system I used to set global illumination and shadow quality on "low" for better performance.

And by math, if we set as one action the processing of one collision of a light beam if we would use empty object as "cloud" it would be calculated in O(1) = (constant * 1) "ticks", but if we use volumetric object it will be O(n) = (constant * n) "ticks", where n is number of voxels

[misty swift]

And how do you know the real performance impact?

it could be 1 FPS. Or 20. No way to test that.

[late valley]

You can calculate it only by analysis, for example by using Monte-Carlo methods

But there should be an option for not enough strong computers to calculate that type of lighting, that couldn't be checked by devs

[lofty lotus]

There is. Eg. Nvidia frame debugger. It has an impact (measured in ms btw). A small(er) impact, but thats literally how game optimization works, normally its not about a few high impact expensive calculations. That's rare (outside of squad I guess...) it's about a bunch of small impact changes that add up quickly.

On another note, volumetrics having an impact is kind of an obvious one to be frank. They're insanely expensive calculations compared to their alternatives and normally used very sparingly. Squad has literally no benefit from them.

Although it does seem so laughable to have them in squad I'm actually doubting they are in use.

[misty swift]

okay, and what exactly is the performance impact of volumetric clouds in squad then?

[misty swift]

They are used for dynamic cloud lighting on some maps.

[late valley]

Name some (exept Scorpo) and I'll test it

[misty swift]

yeho, and gorodok as well

[lofty lotus]

I'm so tired of some of these guys in here 24/7 fighting tooth and nail that the sky is pink and water is dry 🤣

[misty swift]

SDK?

How is performance when you watch in the same direction?

[late valley]

Yehorivka, no clouds
avg. FPS ~ 200

[misty swift]

how is performance with clouds?

[late valley]

I finally caught them ~180 FPS

[late valley]

No need to, I just need not to have anything on the screen (to not render it), except sky and clouds to test it

[misty swift]

10% would indeed be a significant performance impact when it scales to low graphics settings like that.

[late valley]

Yep, on low power systems it can be even 50% or more, due to fact that computation usually takes fixed amount of resources

[lofty lotus]

"... you can only go so far in optimizing squad, it is what it is, it's a taxing game by design ..."
~ 70% of people on this discord
Meanwhile physically simulated clouds be like: 🤷🏻‍♂️

[severe glacier]

lmao I love every time someone tries to use this argument as a crutch.

Planetside 2 can have thousands of active players on an open world map with combined arms warfare with hundreds of vehicles and dynamic assets. and has done since 2012
but squad with 100 players is simply too hard to simulate, it just isn't possible with current technology 🥺

[frigid gale]

holy fuck guys https://youtu.be/LQb9sUeeoOM?t=51

only took around 2 years, over 8000 messages and a few other complaints to finally get something

[glad quest]

tbf planetside 2 will lag af if too many people in one hex

[steady badge]

BUCKO, its a bunch of nothingwords.

[frigid gale]

yea no shit, I'm not getting my hopes up

[steady badge]

That means fuck all.

[frigid gale]

but its something

[steady badge]

Review bomb time

[thorn lion]

Its really not

[steady badge]

Oh cmon man, they said they are looking into it. You know OWI nothing is going to come of it.

[latent shoal]

When there's been lapses in community communications, or keeping a little too strictly to internal design goals in the past - Sgt Ross is the guy who steps in and makes sure changes are done. He's been trying to get the ball rolling for a few months now on this(takes a while to facilitate restructuring and planning ahead).

The issue is over a period of a 1 - 2 years, the lapses in these areas slowly return after shifts in design teams etc occur. But, this is probably the most serious I've seen Ross in over half a decade, and with the new Community Design Lead role that was specifically created for things like this, he is intending to make sure it sticks this time. He's an action over words guy.

[frigid gale]

You know I just don't understand the way they go about issues with this game, they ask for feedback we give them feedback and then it seems nothing ever happens.

ICO was obviously an issue when it released and after 2 years you're telling me that's at the top of the list? It's not even that bad at the moment it's probably the best it's been.

I have no clue why optimization isn't at the top of the list, it's been one of the biggest issues with this game and it's one of the biggest if not largest threads in this discord and it feels like it's been abandoned

And when I say optimization I'm not talking about vehicle handling and bug fixes, I'm talking about the shitty FPS and stutters.

[silk pilot]

Honestly, and people are not gonna like this, I don't think optimization will get better for a while. The engine update fundamentally changed so many aspects of the game that it was a monumental effort just to get it to where it is now. More optimization at this point means a lot of engine-level tweaking that OWI probably does not have the expertise to do.

[frigid gale]

I had a bit of hope when they switched to UE5 but it has quickly faded so yea I have no doubt we're gonna have to wait longer for something significant

[verbal pawn]

In my opinion, the biggest drops in the game now occur due to foliage and double rendering (pip scope), maybe some other elements cause microfreezes but I haven't noticed any. You can try to fix foliages performance without degrading its quality or reducing density through new technologies that were added in version 5.7 of the Unreal Engine, namely Nanite Foliage + Nanite Voxels. According to the tests that I have seen, this can help, but it is not certain, since a large number of factors in the game itself that I do not know about can affect this (for example, lighting calculations).... Do you have any plans for this?

[frigid gale]

the stutters I get are really inconsistent, they happen quite a lot in fallujah, black coast and harju but I'm assuming thats just because of the enviroment

[spark nexus]

They should have sticked to UE 4.27 and improve it from there.

UE5 marketing sounds all great and fun but when it comes to reality it's pretty terrible, lots of visual artifacts, terrible performance and blueprints are something else...

[red echo]

Honestly, they would have waited for a more stable version of UE5 for open worlds

[pastel harness]

if UE5 is so bad then why a game with 200k players rn will update to it

[red echo]

Technically, UE5 has been a poor graphics engine for open worlds; now, supposedly with UE5.6 and 5.7, they are finally optimizing it for that type of game.

[pastel harness]

https://tenor.com/view/ishowspeed-try-not-to-laugh-gif-7682731162751353849

[red echo]

But that doesn't change the fact that the previous development team also gave the green light to a project that, despite not being stable for what Squad is, they did anyway.

[pastel harness]

not an engine fault

[red echo]

And anyway, many people were defending the devs. 🤷

[frigid gale]

i dont wanna be that guy but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nthv4xF_zHU&t=254s

im just sayin it aint the worst graphics engine

[red echo]

is the same thing was i am saying about UE5.6 and the optimization in open worlds xd

When they started working on Squad UE5, version UE5.6 didn't exist yet.

[spark nexus]

Because of marketing, the game does just fine and gameplay is fun.

They know there's a bigger audience when it comes to "UE5" as it sounds current Gen while it isn't...

[lofty lotus]

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/cd-projekt-red-clarifies-unreal-showcase-of-witcher-4-was-tech-demo-not-gameplay

Im just saying.... every single open world game that came out on UE5 has major performance issues and all of them failed financially.

https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/kingdom-come-deliverance-2-dev-witcher-4-has-a-long-road-ahead-on-unreal-engine-5

[lofty lotus]

That tech demo was basically pre-rendered. Not exactly, but its so close to it everyone should consider it pre-rendered. Epic has been scamming the industry for years....

Its also why CD projekt needs to be working "in close collaboration with Epic's engineers" because its so unwieldy.

[latent shoal]

UE5 is optimized for 4x4km - 8x8km scale landscapes, with nanite use. UE4 had the same sweet spots(just no nanite).

The issue is beyond 8x8km landscapes, is you start having to consider optimizations at a much significant scale when using nanite and vsm, especially if you are using very high detailed textures(4k - 8k) on a huge portion of assets, then you end up with Vram and Ram overload if not doing things in a smart way. If your landscape has a lot of nanite based trees and foliage, then you have overdraw considerations to take into account too, which is one of the more heavier performance hits when it comes to UE5. Which is why UE5 launched with the world partition system, to support larger landscapes(open worlds). World partition essentially splits your map into a grid, and each cell loads in and out, based on player location. Stalker 2 uses this system, and is why you'll see parts of the map load in and out, it's because you passed the level streaming threshold for that map cell. It doesn't fix the problem, but helps reduce it significantly. The same can happen on 2x2km or 4x4km maps, without world partition, if you jam pack your landscape with a tone of assets without optimization considerations, you'll hit the same Vram and overdraw issues.

It's also why CD Projekt Red helped Epic develop the voxelized nanite foliage system for UE5.7, to significantly lessen the Tree/foliage overdraw that occurs with nanite, while still retaining nanite visuals and advantages, at a much lower Vram cost.

[spark nexus]

UE5 has more singlethreaded Chaos, slow and frame accumulation heavily dependant Lumen, terrible GI artifacts from Lumen when not utilizing HW acceleration, etc. etc.

[spark nexus]

World Partition System is very prone to stuttering tho, UE 5.6 got a beta plugin called Fast Geo that fixes streaming speeds that happen when you travel fast while the game tries to load new grid but Squad isn't suffering from traversal stutters, at least that's what I noticed.

[latent shoal]

World partition causes stutters, when it's loading 10,000s of high quality assets while attempting to make it as seamless as possible, while also considering native nanite occlusion and cluster culling for objects within the cell your player is in. It's why Stalker 2 has those noticeable stutters, due to how densely detailed each grid is. A lot of loading and unloading of Vram/Ram, while trying to dictate what the players should be seeing and not seeing, while also managing all the CPU side things at the same time etc Voxelized foliage will significantly help with the GPU side of things, and to a much lesser degree the CPU side of things, since it lessens the load across the board. WP is not perfect, but significantly better than the old level streaming solution within UE4.

Squad doesn't use WP, it's kind of pointless for any project or landscape that isn't going beyond 8km scale. - Which is why there's no traversal stutters for Squad.
Squads performance issues are multifaceted; Some are tied to current nanite restrictions with heavy foliage and trees use and the overdraw that comes with it. Some are tied to old maps not following the UE5 level/environmental design principles like the reworked Al Basrah is(though they are planned to over time), which causes inconsistent performance across the board, especially with the issue of a lot of players not falling in-line with new minimal requirements, especially in regards to Vram.

[spark nexus]

Yeah I figured it out, Fast Geo plugin is supposed to help in cases like Stalker 2's.

GPU performance side is fixable with this Nanite Voxelized Foliage and such but I wouldn't be so sure about CPU side tho as it's not well multithreaded everywhere itself in engine and also the way UE5 version of game is handling netcode is pretty worrying as far away vehicles still teleport (there's like no interpolation when it comes to their current location) and pretty degraded performance of servers (no idea if it's been already fixed as not many people talk about it)

[frigid gale]

Should have done a bit more research, my bad lol

[steel walrus]

To be fair this is also a PS5, prerendered gameplay footage on a PS5 that upscales from 720p lol

If it didnt hit 60FPS I'd be very mad cause even cyberpunk can do that im pretty sure

[verbal pawn]

Hey, thanks for the interesting information. If you don't mind and can talk about it, I would also like to know what made the developers abandon the Belaya map when switching to UE5?

[lofty lotus]

Another very good question... completely forgot about Belaya. Was one of my favorite maps....... I think they might have been struggling to set it up with the same weather conditions and athmosphere in the new lighting system while remaining visually somewhat pleasing and not hurting visibility.... but thats just educated guessing.

[latent shoal]

Belaya had a lot of art related issues. Specific models unique to the map, weren't able to be converted within new UE5 pipeline standards, on top of various material & textures problems that weren't able to be resolved for UE5 release.

Belaya might return in the future, still TBD.

[frigid gale]

I rarely look at the squad twitter but this was posted 2 days ago https://x.com/JoinSquad/status/1993761639158419698?s=20

Squad (@JoinSquad)

'What about Optimization?' We hunted down Squad's Executive Producer for answers. Meet PMO 🙌

🔍What’s the number one question you want the dev team to answer next?

#Optimization #SquadIntel

X · Nov 26, 2025, 7:19 PM

a good insight i guess

[lofty lotus]

damn, this should've been posted here on discord...... THIS is the communication I want

[lofty lotus]

Can we get a mirror channel for Squad's twitter comms?

[frigid gale]

thats what I was thinking

[latent shoal]

You can find all twitter posts in #squad-socials as they're posted. Ceeg is working on improving the consolidation of information across all social media platforms. He has to work with marketing on it to get things more uniform across the board, as somethings have been intended to be one social platform specific to draw in more people to that specific social platform.

[fluid frost]

Ulta 9 285k 5080 16gb 32gb ram ddr5 good enough for 1440p?

For high settings possibly ultra

[frigid gale]

should be alright, some maps with heavy foliage you might wanna turn it down to medium

so harju, black coast, sometimes gorodok

[misty swift]

There is no noticable performance difference between high and ultra.

or low and medium

[frigid gale]

what do you mean?

I have always noticed a difference between all of them

visual wise is debatable, performance wise I always seem have increased FPS when I switch to medium graphics on harju

[misty swift]

From what do you switch?

from high?

[frigid gale]

I switched from high to medium on harju and got more fps

I mean that map has so many trees now its bound to cause performance issues

[misty swift]

Yes because there is a noticable difference between medium and high, but not between low and medium or high and ultra. And that only for shadows and GI, for all other settings you can set everything on max because it does not really matter.

Unless you have minimum spec hardware, then there could be a difference.

[frigid gale]

nevermind I see what you mean now

I thought you meant no noticeable difference across all 4 of them

[fluid frost]

So would u say steady fps

Around 100