Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Dev Seemingly Disabled Native Render Resolution on Certain Hardware To Fix Performance Issues

[Cpt.Jank]

Last week, we reported on Wuchang: Fallen Feathers and its launch that was ruined by poor optimization and abysmal performance on even high-end PCs. In response to the plummeting Steam review score, 505 Games put out a patch that was supposed to improve performance by reducing RAM and VRAM usage, optimizing performance on low-end GPUs, and addressing performance and stability bugs. This patch was followed by Patch 1.4, which supposedly addressed performance on "certain hardware models." A recent analysis by Daniel Owen on YouTube has revealed that the Wuchang: Fallen Feathers 1.4 patch may have removed native rendering from the game entirely, effectively forcing players to use upscaling, even when the resolution scale is set to 100%.

As Owen demonstrates in his YouTube video, the only change in the patch notes that mentions sampling resolutions reads: "Supersampling resolution limits have been adjusted on select GPU models to prevent unintended performance degradation." This seems to imply that the option to enable higher resolution scaling options was removed for lower-end GPUs, but that may not be the case. As Owen demonstrates, before the 1.4 update, performance scales predictably with the oversampling resolution slider—if you drop the resolution below 100%, the performance increases, regardless of whether the game is using FSR, DLSS, or TSR. After updating the game to the 1.4 patch, there is a significant performance boost at the same 100% resolution scale, and the running theory is that the developers are simply capping the render resolution at somewhere below native, regardless of which settings the player enables in the graphics options. This is demonstrated when Owen drops the resolution scale to similar levels as he tested prior, and performance is just 2 FPS higher than what was observed before the update on TSR and FSR, with DLSS getting identical performance in one instance.



This becomes most obvious when Owen tests 100% resolution scaling with DLSS set to 100%, which previously enabled DLSS as DLAA, a high-quality antialiasing option. After the 1.4 patch, DLSS set to 100% generates the same performance as DLSS set to 67% did before the update. Despite this, the in-game menu screen still shows that DLSS 100% is acting as DLAA. The conclusion is confirmed when Owen enables 59% resolution scale using DLSS, and the performance is identical to the same DLSS scaling setting from before the 1.4 patch.

Ultimately, Owen's testing reveals that Leenzee and 505 Games simply pushed an update that limited low-end GPUs to what is essentially "DLSS Quality" render resolution and upscaling. These tests were all conducted on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, with the thought process behind the GPU selection being that the Patch 1.3 and 1.4 update notes suggest that optimization was applied to lower-end GPUs specifically. Whether the difference between native resolution and the forcibly upsampled image is noticeable will largely vary from person to person, but the bottom line to many fans is that the game's developers are seemingly trying to take shortcuts to quickly improve performance instead of actually optimizing the game in a meaningful way.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[ZoneDymo]

its happening

 

[Nostras]

I faintly remember another Chinese dev pulling something similar some time ago. Does anyone recall what game that was?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Gooner games gon goon.

Thing with UE5 is its made the bar for putting out a decent looking game low enough that the folks making these games are doing so with an out of the box distro of UE5 with no real understanding of what is going on beneath the hood so to speak.

So there really isn't any "true" optimization to be done here, no one that made the game knows what where why and how the game is struggling to perform nor do they have anyone who can work on the low level code to ease up these bottlenecks.

People trash UE5 but its not really the engine, its how the business of making videogames has changed from being very engineering oriented (think ID making engines to meet the needs of the games they want to make, one of the few studios remaining that actually continue to do so) to very software as a service oriented where no one in the Dev team really understands how the engine they're using works, but the design tools are all top notch and let you make a half-way decent game anyway.

 

[Crazybabe]

Didn't Ark devs also did similar things, enabling fsr by commands? Maybe i am dreaming...
edit: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/1058...-to-sneakily-turn-on-fsr-frame-gen/index.html

 

[081x]

Gooner games gon goon.

Thing with UE5 is its made the bar for putting out a decent looking game low enough that the folks making these games are doing so with an out of the box distro of UE5 with no real understanding of what is going on beneath the hood so to speak.

So there really isn't any "true" optimization to be done here, no one that made the game knows what where why and how the game is struggling to perform nor do they have anyone who can work on the low level code to ease up these bottlenecks.

People trash UE5 but its not really the engine, its how the business of making videogames has changed from being very engineering oriented (think ID making engines to meet the needs of the games they want to make, one of the few studios remaining that actually continue to do so) to very software as a service oriented where no one in the Dev team really understands how the engine they're using works, but the design tools are all top notch and let you make a half-way decent game anyway.

The games industry has embraced convenience to an absurd degree as well, it's not necessarily a bad thing because it can let the artists execute their vision more effectively to make better games but the convenience has caused engineers, designers and artists to forget about what they're standing on. That convenience also enables the managerial types to pump out game after game without a care in the world. Unreal has lowered the bar of convenience so far with disastrous consequences.

 

[Tam 212]

Dev Notes:
Your GPU tier needs to be level up. No native resolution for you...

 

[Hecate91]

This is the exact thing people were concerned with in regards to upscaling, not surprised it's happening.

 

[ZoneDymo]

This is the exact thing people were concerned with in regards to upscaling, not surprised it's happening.

The first concern was that devs were going to be lazy with optimising, we have seen that happen a while back as well.

Remember how digital game sales should be cheaper? well it was predicted that would just not happen, moar profit for the companies yo...and that has also come to pass, heck prices are going up....but then people keep buying it as well so.....yeah hard to even blame the companies.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

The first concern was that devs were going to be lazy with optimising, we have seen that happen a while back as well.

Remember how digital game sales should be cheaper? well it was predicted that would just not happen, moar profit for the companies yo...and that has also come to pass, heck prices are going up....but then people keep buying it as well so.....yeah hard to even blame the companies.

I expect the game will go on sale rather early to make up for the loss of normal sales with the failed launch.

 

[Darc Requiem]

I was actually considering this game but after hearing about the poor optimization and now the "native" resolution shenanigans, it's a hard pass. I really miss when mutltiple game engines were readily used. UE5 is just a performance boat anchor at this point.

 

[NSR]

ARK Survival Ascended uses hidden FG to mask performance issues
Wuchang uses hidden upscaling to mask performance issues

2025 is here.

 

[PCL]

I was actually considering this game but after hearing about the poor optimization and now the "native" resolution shenanigans, it's a hard pass. I really miss when mutltiple game engines were readily used. UE5 is just a performance boat anchor at this point.

Lazy development and optimization has always been the boat anchor, not the engine.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Didn't Ark devs also did similar things, enabling fsr by commands? Maybe i am dreaming...
edit: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/1058...-to-sneakily-turn-on-fsr-frame-gen/index.html

Not only Frame Gen but Ark SA's internal resolution runs at about 80%, similar to this game's new settings. Funny thing is it's FSR Framegen but doesn't work on my Nvidia GPUs, though it works properly on my AMD GPUs. As I'm currently using mostly Nvidia, when starting Ark I:

Set upscaling to native/UE in settings
Open map of choice
Console command to set res scale to 100%
Set DLSS to Quality (5070) or Performance (3070)
Ignore warning that this will cause imminent black hole collapse

You need to ignore that warning (OK which really says it'll be unstable if you don't restart first) because:

I have experienced zero crashes
After restart DLSS is not applied, even though it's marked as 'on' in settings

I like the game in general but the graphics (and optimization and bugs and management and meshing problems and...) are a crapfest.

 

[Darc Requiem]

Lazy development and optimization has always been the boat anchor, not the engine.

Not every UE5 game with issues is from a lazy development studio. UE5 games have often have similar problems no matter the developer. Which is an indication that there are inherent problems within the engine itself.

 

[QuietBob]

Once again I'm reminded that my decision to kick modern AAA gaming long time ago was right

 

[jnv11]

I was actually considering this game but after hearing about the poor optimization and now the "native" resolution shenanigans, it's a hard pass. I really miss when mutltiple game engines were readily used. UE5 is just a performance boat anchor at this point.

Tekken 8 is a counter-example that proves that UE5 is not always a boat anchor by being a well-optimized UE5 game.

I will admit that its game balance was messed up to be way too offensive by its season 2 patch which was developed by the successor team because the original team is full of old people who are looking to retire, and the original team is now working on fixing that messed up balance. However, that is a game developer problem, not a graphics optimization problem.

 

[blacksea76]

UE5 is simply crap.

 

[happytohear]

UE5 is simply crap.

Such populistic generalizations show a lack understanding for game development. I dare say that you don't use the UE5 SDK, but only consume games built with it, if at all..
Studios and industry veterans use the software for reasons beyond your understanding. But you know it better, huh?

UE5 is just an engine and therefore more like a tool to create games. Call a hammer crap and see how accurate that is.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

UE5 is simply crap.

- It's just a one size fits all game engine that is intended to make AAA game development easier.

If devs know how to optimize the engine/game code then they can do it. Plenty of UE5 games out there run just fine, many that people don't even know are running on UE5.

A lot of OOB game engines are tailored to be user friendly nowadays and help "democratize" game development. Thing is unlike something like "RPG Maker" UE5 allows someone with the same skill level to make a AAA looking game.

 

[sLowEnd]

People trash UE5 but its not really the engine

Can't be that great if there's this much room for improvement this fast

Unreal Engine 5.6 Delivers Up to 35% Performance Improvement Over v5.4

Thanks to a new comparison video from the YouTube channel MxBenchmarkPC, the Paris Tech Demo by Scans Factory is put through its paces on an RTX 5080, running side by side in Unreal Engine 5.6 and version 5.4 with hardware Lumen enabled. That way, we get to see what Epic Games has done with the...

www.techpowerup.com

All this tells me is UE5 really was dogwater up until this point

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Can't be that great if there's this much room for improvement this fast

Unreal Engine 5.6 Delivers Up to 35% Performance Improvement Over v5.4

Thanks to a new comparison video from the YouTube channel MxBenchmarkPC, the Paris Tech Demo by Scans Factory is put through its paces on an RTX 5080, running side by side in Unreal Engine 5.6 and version 5.4 with hardware Lumen enabled. That way, we get to see what Epic Games has done with the...

www.techpowerup.com

All this tells me is UE5 really was dogwater up until this point

- That just means that the people who actually make Unreal Engine 5 found some general bottlenecks that potentially improve performance on some hardware. This is the kind of thing the dev's would historically do, but now the UE5 SaaS team handles that.

It doesn't mean UE5 is dogwater, it just means its a generalist and the Unreal team has to wait until they get sufficient end user data before they can implement optimizations and improvements for everyone.

In ye olde days, a game dev who coded their own engine would be able to collect, analyze, solve for, and deploy optimizations without all the marketing and fanfare because they weren't trying to sell their solution to other people.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Can't be that great if there's this much room for improvement this fast

Unreal Engine 5.6 Delivers Up to 35% Performance Improvement Over v5.4

Thanks to a new comparison video from the YouTube channel MxBenchmarkPC, the Paris Tech Demo by Scans Factory is put through its paces on an RTX 5080, running side by side in Unreal Engine 5.6 and version 5.4 with hardware Lumen enabled. That way, we get to see what Epic Games has done with the...

www.techpowerup.com

All this tells me is UE5 really was dogwater up until this point

We should expect them to make optimizations and performance improvements, actually. Complex software is not perfect, and such gains suggest the developer is working.

 

[tpa-pr]

I watched the video and found it didn't make the point that clearly, but I have also seen some screenshots on reddit with DLSS debug mode turned on that shows 100% scaling is not 100% scaling. Which is a bit of a slam dunk.

Absolutely unacceptable. It doesn't matter if they're a small studio lacking the resources for a prompt and proper optimization patch, you can't just massage numbers to trick your customer base like this. Especially when your game is quite expensive. I would consider this a massive breach of trust and would be demanding a refund.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Such populistic generalizations show a lack understanding for game development. I dare say that you don't use the UE5 SDK, but only consume games built with it, if at all..
Studios and industry veterans use the software for reasons beyond your understanding. But you know it better, huh?

This response sounds like it's straight off of Reddit, smugness and all. I highly doubt you know any more about UE5 then he does.

UE5 is just an engine and therefore more like a tool to create games. Call a hammer crap and see how accurate that is.

If I have to re forge my hammer to keep it from snapping in half when I use it, then yeah, that hammer is crap.

Even experienced developers have trouble making UE5 run smoothly. I dont know why this is a surprise, UE3 had never ending texture issues and UE4 was loaded with performance problems. The UE games are like Chrysler cars, they run like absolute crap and break constantly but people just keep buying them and swear anyone who thinks they are bad just never owned one....