The pop in ubi games reminds me a little bit of memory issues with bethesda titles. There is a fix for it, which basically just involves changing an allocation, but it needs to be injected in at render level via ENB. It actually ends up coming down to RAM vs VRAM, which are then combined into one net allocation and if the math isn't right for your hardware (generally isn't,) performance suffers a little and you get tons of pop. Usually starts to happen when loading the engine down with higher-res textures, more objects, even just pushing the LOD tiers back to get more detail up in mid-detail distances. Start calling bigger textures sooner, you eventually hit that conflict where there will be stuff that should be in VRAM sitting in your RAM. Of course, when that happens there will be intermittent microstutter and texture pop corresponding.
Something like that. I haven't actually had to do that fix in a coupla years because it is set and forget. IIRC the allocation is actually too HIGH in many cases, leading to the RAM being used in cases where it shouldn't be. Kinda like the old page file trick. See... those games were made in a time when people generally didn't necessarily have 4-8gb on tap. The engine started off being 32-bit and it's the same one today, only brought into 64-bit times! It made sense to let the game run into RAM like that, people weren't expecting crazy frame rates from an open-world game of that scale, resolutions were generally lower, and people weren't piling up enough mods to actively eat 16gb of memory with ease. It didn't hurt, and for machines with less vram, actually made it much more runnable. Nowadays we bypass that with modern hardware, but the engine doesn't know how to use it on its own.
In that case, it's really not a failure of the engine. Within its stock parameters, the pop isn't an issue anymore, unless your hardware really isn't up to task, memory-wise (you can still benefit, but not nearly as much because it really is a hard wall of grunt.) But when you push it a little too far, it shows its cracks. All engines will and a big part of the technical challenge of a game is aligning the right capabilities. If you don't have them when you go to start putting it together, gotta make compromises, which is its own skill.
So I'm with you. I think they try to 'do the most' with it and are probably overtaxing what they really have to work with, basically ensuring that the game won't run 'perfectly' on any hardware. I use quotes because obviously no game does, but you know what I mean
