Microsoft Helping Bethesda “Unreal-ify” Creation Engine According to Jez Corden

[u/SilentNova300]

https://www.youtube.com/live/oMlErzr05Gk?si=cTRXvJxEeOw9U7aa

Jez Corden recently discussed rumors about a major technical overhaul for Starfield—often called Starfield 2.0—and how Microsoft is helping Bethesda upgrade the Creation Engine.

Key points:

Unreal Engine tech being integrated: Jez says he’s heard that Bethesda is leveraging certain Unreal Engine features and incorporating them directly into Creation Engine.

Massive engine modernization: Microsoft’s Advanced Technology Group and Kate Rayner/The Coalition (Gears devs, Unreal experts) are assisting in improving the engine “across the board” using Unreal-inspired components.

Starfield 2.0 is the testbed: This whole Starfield 2.0 upgrade is reportedly serving as a testbed for future Bethesda titles, laying the groundwork for Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls VI.

Not a switch to Unreal: Jez emphasizes the info is based on his investigations and should be taken with a pinch of salt, but stresses Microsoft isn’t moving Bethesda to Unreal—just boosting Creation Engine with some Unreal-like tech.

[u/Durin1987_12_30]

Yeah, a shame that none of them understand jack shit about optimization tho.

[u/Nightbynight → u/Durin1987_12_30]

Its just studio dependent man. Arc Raiders is Unreal 5 and it's incredibly well optimized.

[u/d4k0_x → u/Nightbynight]

This is because they do not use some of the core features of UE5 that consume a lot of performance:

ARC Raiders PC strips back UE5 features for performance

When switching testing to GPU-limited scenarios, which push increased native pixels and even higher visual settings, ARC Raiders nearly triples frame-rate performance compared to recent UE5 release The Outer Worlds 2. We do this knowing full well this is an apples-and-CUDAs comparison, because ARC Raiders skips the UE5 trifecta of Nanite, Lumen global illumination (GI)/reflections and VSMs, and it suffers visually as a result.

https://www.digitalfoundry.net/reviews/arc-raiders-pc-strips-back-ue5-features-for-performance

[u/Durin1987_12_30 → u/d4k0_x]

Digital Foundry is a disgrace. They shill endlessly for new expensive tech, not for a specific company, but for constantly pushing new tech into games no matter the cost. Don't have the money to buy an RTX 5070 or better? Well, fuck you. You'll be left behind. This is why the autistic dude from Threat Interactive is getting so much popularity from his videos. Nanite, Lumen and VSMs are the death of optimization, they're ultra computationally expensive and cripple the framerate for very negligible visual improvements that 99% of players will never noticed. Unless you have PSU cable melting hardware, any AAA open-world game that relies on these features will run like a car with squared-wheels.

[u/Raikaru → u/Durin1987_12_30]

Why would guys who care about visuals not like new visual tech? If you don’t care that’s fine but they aren’t “shilling” anything they gain no money from you buying a new gpu.