In March 2024, Bandai Namco released a PC demo for SAND LAND. As I’ve reported, that demo had major stuttering issues. And sadly, the final version of the game still suffers from both shader compilation and traversal stutters.
For our initial tests, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D with 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit and the NVIDIA GeForce 551.86 driver.
Despite some false reports, SAND LAND does not use Unreal Engine 5. Instead, the game uses Unreal Engine 4.27.2.0. You can easily see this for yourselves by right-clicking on the game’s executable file, selecting “Properties”, and switching to the “Details” tab.
When you initially launch the game, all CPU cores spike at 95% for a brief moment. This usually happens when a game compiles its shaders. However, it appears that there are still some shaders that will be compiled during gameplay. For instance, we got shader compilation stutters when we first used our Light and Heavy attacks, and when we first fired a rocket with our tank.
Now I have to be honest here. These shader compilation stutters are not THAT annoying. What’s really annoying in SAND LAND are its traversal stutters. These traversal stutters happen on both PC and consoles. It’s how the game was designed. So, before someone says “I’ll just buy the console version“, no. This won’t change anything. You’ll still get traversal stutters.
The reason why some gamers may find the traversal stutters more frequent on PC is because they’ll prefer using an uncapped framerate. And, when you run SAND LAND with an unlocked framerate, the traversal stutters do become distracting. By locking the framerate at 60fps, you will most likely be able to minimize them.
We’ll be sure to test this and share our results in our upcoming PC Performance Analysis. Nevertheless, I’m certain that a lot of people would like to play SAND LAND with an uncapped framerate. And, right now, the traversal stutters can be really annoying without any framerate cap. And that’s a shame because SAND LAND appears to be able to run with over 60fps on a wide range of PC configurations.
Our PC Performance Analysis will go live later this weekend. Until then, know that the game will stutter like crazy if you don’t cap your framerate.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Surprise surprise, it runs on Unreal Engine.
yeah well its devs that slack not the engine itself.
How can 95% of devs that use Unreal Engine on big maps be that incompetent ?
At this point this is definitely fundamental Unreal Engine problem.
No thats not it. I read yesterday on nexusmod that a modder said and i quote “i love unreal engine games, they’re so easy to mod”. So that must count for sth. It’s incompetence i tell you. Think of it as a fatman trying to leave early on a friday and that’s what u have 90% time with UE games. I won’t say it’s mere coincidence but UE really makes them slack a lot and it’s easy to see why. It’s pure eyecandy. See some footage on tiktok, it’s incredibly real and crisp.
whats the general solution on traversal stutters ?
The only solution for Unreal Engine 4 games is 30fps lock as shown by John in the past.
UE4 does not stream all assets in realtime, instead they are loading areas in chunks on a big grid.
When you cross one chunk the game loads all the logic and shaders of the next chunk resulting in a big frametime spike.
The general solution is to make a good asset streaming system designed for open world games like the one in Just Cause games or even the new Assassins Creed games.
But why make such stupid decisions when creating an engine ?
Still though, devs COULD work around this issue by optimizing the streaming part themselves, but they won’t, as it’s cheaper to not do it.