this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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That's fair, and you really see that on games like Norse where they don't have the resources to make custom material and post-processing shaders, but they still want it to look like AAA photorealism (a bad strategy to begin with but that's their problem). Out of the box, though, UE5 still looks leagues better than anything else that isn't proprietary, and I'd argue that if you do have the time/staff to dedicate an entire team to technical art, the ceiling of how good UE5 can look, if you're going for photorealism, is higher than it is for Unity and Godot as well.
To the original context of the post, that ceiling is still way lower than what should be acceptable quality for big-budget movie CGI, but regarding games, I'm gonna stick to my original point and say that's still an issue on the developers' part for not putting in the effort to make it look good. Even accounting for optimization and visual tweaking, they're still saving enormous amounts of time and money by using UE5 instead of their own engine, and that effort should be expected, the lack thereof not excused.
That's a very fair point on the graphical quality! From my pov it seems like epic should needs to make it easier for developers to optimize their projects, given the number of games that haven't had a lot of that work done. I'm sure that's easier said than done though.
It really is strange to me that ue5 is being used for games given there are other raster rendering engines that are designed for better image quality. I'm assuming here that part of the benefit the studios are looking for is the speed increase from not having to prerender scenes on larger server farms, and the flexibilty they get from systems like Disney's "the volume" system.
AFAIK, the speed increase to allow technology like the volume is the whole pitch. Not every studio has an entire volume, so lower-budget filmmakers can set up a system with a green screen where the cinematographer can see the CGI environment in real-time through the camera, and with the asset store integration, indie filmmakers can have an insane set/backdrop for a tiny fraction of the normal price.
Now that I think of it, though, I think Mr. Verbinski here is placing undue blame on UE5 when Marvel's CGI has been getting worse and worse because they throw an army of slaves at the footage after the fact, rather than paying artists and working with them to set up shots to make the CGI as easy as possible, like he did.