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Steam to add hardware specs to reviews — optional feature could help you dodge poorly optimized games
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Avoid all AAA and UE5 games and youve dodged 90% of poorly optimized games.
I've seen some terrible Unity crimes
Which is one of my favorite games, although that's only partially due to mods but even vanilla Battletech will chug
MGS 3 remake is just awfully optimized. It's insane.
Even unreal engine 4 can be rough on mid-range specs.
Playing an 8GB UE4 game on my steam deck I’d get drops to 17 FPS in some spots.
Epic’s had a rough go for the last decade+ at this point.
i swear as soon as they stopped releasing new unreal tournaments the engine itself started getting more bloated and unoptimized with every new version.
Its more of a movie engine now than a game engine.
i wanna make a slop farming simulator game on ue2 or some shit, but finding old dev resources is a unique challenge. maybe i’m just looking in the wrong places.
You'd be hard pressed to find solid, user-friendly documentation for UE2 as the engine wasn't publicly available back then. There's official docs, but they're lacking compared to later editions.
If you really want to play around with old Unreal for some reason, the UDK (their first "free" release, based on Unreal Engine 3) might be your best bet if you can find a working download.
yeah it’ll probably be easier to stylize a comparatively modern engine than it would be to deliver a modern feel with an old one.
thanks for the advice! ^^
My theory:
I think it used to be that the customers for Unreal Engine oftentimes weren't all these big studios at all. The only AAA games I personally remember from late 2000s and early 2010s that used UE, other than Epic's own games of course, were the Mass Effect games.
Now they've got investors to please (Tencent) so they keep pushing new features that look great in showcase trailers, for big studio execs to pick Unreal. And it seems to be working. Downside is that these things need to be used really carefully or sometimes not at all, but they're advertised as the end-all-be-all solution to make things pretty and easier to build. I'm talking about Lumen, Megalights, Nanite, etc.
E.g Nanite makes little to no sense for games where all your scenes are low complexity. You'll just lose a bunch of performance. It starts making sense when you have a lot of complex geometry and then it boosts how much you can actually do at the top end. Not every game needs it.
this is a good theory!
I played elden ring and cyberpunk on my steamdeck and it was fine.
Cant speak for Elden Ring, havent even watched any, but Cyberpunk is a good example of a poorly made game.
I can play comfortably at locked 50fps at high settings on my GTX 1660ti Laptop just fine, even if I enable raytracing to medium I still get 25-30fps and my GPU doesn't even support raytracing.
Cyberpunk never gave me issues, but Elden Ring has a ton of random things that cause the framerate to drop, especially in the DLC map.
Look, I know Croteam had good reasons to do Talos Principle 2 in UE5 instead of the Serious Sam Engine but ouch owie oof my rx 580 🥲