Review High on Life 2 reignites the Unreal Engine 5 image quality/performance debate

Yesterday, Digital Foundry's High on Life 2 video review went live on YouTube and it's interesting to see how the established shortcomings of Unreal Engine 5 are dominating reaction to the review, as opposed to our commentary on the game itself - where we found the game to be a substantial improvement over its predecessor, rich in creativity and innovative ideas.

Let's get to the bottom of the criticism. High on Life 2 has one graphics mode only, targeting 60 frames per second while rolling out all of Unreal Engine 5's core visuals features: Nanite micro-geometry, Lumen global illumination and virtual shadow maps. The more any given developer sinks into the quality of the pixels on-screen, the fewer of those pixels can be natively rendered and that's where upscaling comes in to "make up the difference".

PlayStation 5 renders internally at circa 720p, while Xbox Series X comes in with a relatively modest boost to around 792p. PS5 Pro disappoints: while there are options for the UE5 standard TSR upscaler and Sony's own PSSR, neither of them feel like much of an upgrade over the standard consoles, with similar resolution to PS5 and Series X, albeit with slightly smoother performance. Xbox Series S? Resolution is slightly lower but more to the point, Lumen GI is stripped out while shadow quality and texture quality are reduced. The game loses much of its visual identity.

While High on Life 2 targets 60 frames per second, none of the consoles successfully achieve it on a consistent basis - and while a VRR display helps, what may well be CPU limits see frame-times move outside of the variable refresh rate window, so the game still stutters.

What we're looking at here is a developer looking to deliver all things to all people: the visual finery of Unreal Engine 5, paired with the 60fps gaming that users crave. However, certainly with the existing builds of UE5 used for the current crop of titles, something has to give - there's no such thing as a free lunch in rendering. Going into the generation, Epic's own demos for UE5 saw circa 1080p internal resolutions upscaling to 4K with a 30fps target.

At this point, the trades with UE5 are a given - but we still had a lot of fun with the game. It's a rare shooter where its influences are obvious but still feels fresh. You can sense the echoes of Sunset Overdrive, the modern Doom games, Halo and even BioShock Infinite. The combat is free-flowing, the traversal is wild but elegant. The headline addition is the skateboard - basically a first-person "sprint" mechanic tied to pressing down the left stick, with slick environment interaction that works without distracting from the shooting.

All of this is wrapped in a stylised, CG-like presentation that is a massive improvement over its predecessor. characters and props look almost perfectly rounded, polygon edges are basically gone and Lumen’s global illumination helps integrate characters and environments into a cohesive aesthetic.

And image quality and performance controversies apart, it's a good-looking game - albeit with some issues. The developers lean heavily into very clean, mirror-like reflective surfaces while using software Lumen, which exposes its limitations. The SDF-based Lumen scene is largely static and low detail, producing “blobby” reflected approximations rather than the crisp, fully geometric reflections you might expect. It's a far cry from the reflections seen in, say, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart or Insomniac's Spider-Man games. Reflections look messy, while the PC version has no hardware Lumen option to improve the situation.

The extensive use of screen-space contact shadows is another curious decision. While these can look good on fine detail, High on Life 2 pushes them onto larger elements like trees, bridges and even characters. When a character or object leaves the camera’s view, its shadow should remain, but disappears instead. The artefact is obvious, compromising an otherwise strong lighting setup.

But it's the image quality and performance issues that are dominating the discussion - and you have to wonder whether one graphics mode alone was the best option. It keeps things simpler for the user, but you can't help but wonder whether a 40fps balanced mode for those with 120Hz screens could have delivered a consistent experience - eliminating CPU bottlenecks and perhaps even increasing the dynamic resolution window. A 30fps quality mode is another option, but the stats from Sony in its PS5 Pro reveal suggest that 75 percent of users go for 60fps performance modes instead - and it's perhaps not the best way to experience a shooting game.

PC allows users to power past the issues but while John had only minor issues with a high-end rig, subsequent testing with a Ryzen 5 3600 paired with an RTX 4060 was a pretty miserable experience. Even on medium settings with DLSS performance mode at 1440p, bad stutter and depressed frame-rates suggested that this game may not be friendly to 8GB GPUs.

Moving up from a 4060 8GB to a 4060 Ti 16GB improved matters significantly, allowing us to return to high settings without as much stutter - only now the background streaming systems can hit the limits of the Ryzen 5 3600 causing frame-rate drops into the 40s at points. And even then, GPU limits at 1440p DLSS performance mode see us in the 50s in heavier scenes - and all of this testing is just from the intro areas.

Put simply, this is a heavy game that's going to require a decent PC to run well - but when you deploy massive horsepower on the PC side, the results are simply beautiful. On the flip side, however, broadly console-equivalent hardware doesn't deliver console-equivalent performance based on my testing. In that respect at least, the consoles - bar Series S - are delivering more, but not enough to solve the perennial challenge of running challenging UE5 fare at high frame-rates with good image quality with all the engine's bells and whistles. That'll likely require a more modern iteration of the engine (High on Life 2 seems to use UE5 5.5.4.0) and perhaps better budgeting to the limitations of the consoles.