Immortals of Aveum is out now, roughly a month after its original release date of July 20th. Developer Ascendant Studios, which debuts in the industry with this first-person sci-fantasy shooter game, had cited the need to polish it further when it delayed the product to August 22nd. I'm afraid the game would have needed much more than that, at least on a technical level.
Immortals of Aveum can be considered to be the true debut in a triple-A game of Epic's Unreal Engine 5 technology. Sure, Coffee Stain Studios updated its factory simulation game Satisfactory to UE5 with Nanite and optional Lumen support, and Anshar/Bloober released the Layers of Fear remake with Lumen support.
However, Ascendant's game is the first one to make abundant use of both Nanite and Lumen, not to mention other Unreal Engine 5.1 technologies like Niagara, Streaming Virtual Texturing, World Partition, and One File Per Actor. In a recent blog post, the studio praised how all these features helped them while creating Immortals of Aveum:
The thing about all these different tools, though, is that no single one of them is responsible for making Immortals of Aveum look as good as it does while running as well as it does. The magic isn’t just in any single part of Unreal Engine 5.1, but in how these tools all work together, and how the whole engine provides a degree of flexibility and modularity that hasn’t been possible before now. It’s given us the ability to create a huge game in a vast world with a relatively small team, and make it all look great and run well—on a wide variety of platforms.
The thing is, the game doesn't run well at all, even on a high-end PC. On top of that, it doesn't always look great enough to justify that somehow. Lumen's lighting does steal the scene at times, but image sharpness is far from ideal and will likely have to be offset with post-processing sharpening shaders by advanced users. Moreover, several textures look grainy even when viewed from some distance.
But the main thorn in Immortals of Aveum's is undoubtedly the disappointing performance. While AMD FSR 2.2 and DLSS 2 and 3 are available, they're simply not enough to make this game a smooth experience. To tell you the truth, DLSS 3 (Frame Generation) is currently outright unusable in this game. Right away, I noticed a massive amount of ghosting just from moving the crosshair a bit; you can see how that would make it impossible to keep in a first-person shooter game. I've informed the developers of the issue and was told a fix would be coming.
A new 1.1GB patch dropped a few hours ago, presumably adding various day-one update improvements, but DLSS 3 actually got even worse with a weird frame skipping that I've captured in the brief footage below.
There is currently no choice but to use only DLSS 2 (Super Resolution), then. However, as I mentioned earlier in the article, it's not nearly enough to make this a smooth experience even when set on Performance mode, which upscales from 1080P to 4K. With my AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, GeForce RTX 4090, 32GB DDR5, and NVMe SSD, I experienced severe frame drops that negatively impacted the gameplay. As you can see in the CapFrameX benchmark, the frame rate dropped lower than 30 frames per second for the 0.2% percentile FPS.
There's not much more to say here other than to reiterate the need for improved optimization. I suggest holding off on playing Immortals of Aveum until the performance receives some much-needed boosts.
I've captured the graphics settings in the gallery above. Immortals of Aveum does introduce a neat concept with the Performance Budget Tool, but it's clear that something is off with it. First of all, it is mindboggling that a new and powerful CPU like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D would be considered too weak for the Ultra preset. It would have been even more so if I hadn't removed Anisotropic Filtering (which I forced through the NVIDIA Control Panel instead). Anisotropic Filtering is well known to be nearly cost-free for any modern GPU even at its highest setting of 16x, and yet the Performance Budget Tool reckons it costs both CPU and GPU 25 points per setting at 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x, so that the highest Anisotropic Filtering setting alone would cost nearly half of the CPU budget for a Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
Clearly, that doesn't make any sense. It's likely not just the performance that needs fixing in this game but the budget tool as well.
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