The Pinnacle of Unoptimized Game Development
Description
A satirical meme featuring a crudely drawn, blue-skinned cartoon character with a beard and glasses, based on the Soyjak meme format. The character wears a white t-shirt with the text 'I ❤️ UNREAL ENGINE', where the heart is a realistic anatomical heart. An award ribbon on his shirt reads 'AI UPSCALED AWARD'. The scene is set against a blurry, lens-flare-heavy background. In the top-left corner, a performance counter reads 'FPS: 23' in green text, indicating a very low frame rate. In the top-right, the NVIDIA 'GEFORCE RTX' logo glows, signifying a powerful graphics card is in use. The humor stems from the deep contradiction: despite using a high-end RTX GPU and the powerful Unreal Engine, the result is a terribly performing application running at an unplayable 23 frames per second. It mocks developers or enthusiasts who are proud of their graphically intensive but poorly optimized creations, and satirizes the buzz around 'AI upscaling' as a magic bullet for performance issues
Comments
14Comment deleted
That's not a performance issue; it's just the garbage collector running a full mark-and-sweep on every single frame. It's a feature for ensuring memory purity
Ray-traced god-rays are cool until you need a sprint to debug ‘variable-time seconds.’
After 20 years in the industry, you realize the real Unreal Engine feature isn't Nanite or Lumen - it's the ability to make a $4000 RTX card perform like integrated graphics while compiling shaders for the 47th time this session
When your RTX card costs more than your car but Unreal Engine still renders at cinematic 23 FPS - turns out 'real-time ray tracing' was more aspirational than literal. At least the upscaling award makes it look like 24 FPS
23 FPS: when Lumen, RT shadows and AI upscaling turn a 16.67 ms budget into a 43 ms ‘cinematic’ feature
Unreal + RTX + “AI upscaled”: 23 FPS - the classic optimization where you rebrand it “cinematic” and push performance to Phase 2
Unreal with RTX upscaling: Scaling visuals to 11 while FPS humbly clocks in at 23 - true architectural romance
Viiiiiva la libertaaaaa Comment deleted
Well tbh you can still optimize in ue too... Game devs (or tbf game publishers) just don't care any more Comment deleted
They don't care because most users don't care. Game culture just dead Comment deleted
Step 1 of UE5 optimization is downgrade it to v5.4. Comment deleted
Why tho? Comment deleted
Something happened in recent updates? Comment deleted
Hard reliance on raytracing Comment deleted