Unreal Engine 5 isn't running any game at native 4K due to a major limitation

Unreal Engine 5, developed by Epic Games, is renowned as one of the most impressive game engines currently available, providing nearly unmatched visuals in an ever-growing number of titles.

However, the engine isn't capable of running games at native 4K, according to Infuse Studio co-founder Jacob Sutton, who sat down for an interview with Moore's Law is Dead and explained Unreal Engine 5 has a baked-in feature that restricts developers from running games at native 4K. Sutton said that upscaling technologies that are becoming ever more present in games, such as NVIDIA's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's XeSS, are being relied upon by developers to fix optimization issues with titles.

Throughout this explanation, Sutton used Unreal Engine 5 as an example, saying that Epic Games' impressive engine in-built default upscaling software called Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), and that developers are almost required to use the upscaling feature to achieve a desired framerate.

More specifically, Sutton said there is no Unreal Engine 5-powered game that can run native 4K with acceptable performance because developers are essentially forced to use these upscaling technologies to hit their desired framerates.