Engine issues, or AMD issues? RDNA 4 GPUs stutter in Unreal Engine 4 games with RT
AMD’s RDNA 4 graphics cards are stuttering heavily in early Unreal Engine 4 games with ray tracing
Gamers on Reddit, as reported by Digital Foundry, have uncovered performance issues when using AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards with certain PC games. Specifically, gamers are experiencing problems with playing Unreal Engine 4 games that utilise ray tracing. Shader compilation stutters can take an incredibly long time to resolve, resulting in seconds-long pauses. These pauses can make affected games practically unplayable. However, simply disabling ray tracing will dramatically improve performance.
Digital Foundry has successfully replicated these performance issues. Games like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (which was updated with ray tracing in 2021) and Sackboy: A Big Adventure are known to be affected. Whether or not this is an AMD issue or an Unreal Engine 4 issue remains unknown. If it is the former, AMD could address these stutters with driver updates. If it is the latter, we are unlikely to see game updates that will address these problems.
Why are these RDNA 4 stutters happening in Unreal Engine 4 games with Ray Tracing?
Nvidia dominated the early days of ray tracing on PC. To say the least, games with ray tracing were made with Nvidia graphics cards in mind. Furthermore, Nvidia were the only GPU manufacturer to support DirectX Raytracing (DXR) during the DXR 1.0 era. AMD’s RDNA 2 GPUs delivered ray tracing after DXR 1.1 was released. This means that no DXR 1.0 software was made with non-NVIDIA hardware in mind, creating potential compatibility issues. This makes us wonder if Intel’s ARC GPUs suffer from similar problems. Unfortunately, we do not have any Intel ARC GPUs to test these scenarios.
Now that these issues are publicly known, we can hope that AMD can analyse this issue and potentially deliver driver fixes for affected games. If not, these older ray tracing games may be problematic titles for non-Nvidia graphics cards well into the future.
You can join the discussion on RDNA 4’s stuttering issues in Unreal Engine 4 games with ray tracing on the OC3D Forums.
