How bad is the Wuthering Waves optimization problem?

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]So this is why Weathering Ways feels unoptimized >> and we be playing the game and that game is dropping mad for La Hairoy.

[00:00:08]>> You dropping mad frames, bro.

[00:00:10]>> That's crazy, man. I'm not going to lie.

[00:00:11]Like I mean, I'm not going to lie. You know, I got my [ __ ] on frame gen, you know. I GOT BUT IT'S KIND OF still lagging.

[00:00:18]>> You got THAT GRAPHICS CARD.

[00:00:19]>> YEAH, I'M SUPPOSED TO HAVE 200,000 FPS.

[00:00:21]That's what it was described as. But I don't know, man. Maybe uh Ryoku Sensei could uh you know, bless us on why.

[00:00:27]>> Yeah, let's find out. So, a little while back, I made a video about how genuinely stunning weather waves look. Even industry professionals were impressed with what Kura was doing within Unreal Engine. The lighting, the environments, the character effects, and from the looks of things, the response was great.

[00:00:43]You guys loved that video, too. But as I was reading through the comments, alongside all the hype, every now and then, I'd see something like, "Looks incredible. Can't say the same about the optimization." or it's all good and cool, but Star Touch Academy is a nightmare in terms of optimization.

[00:00:58]>> That's That's what I was saying, bro.

[00:01:00]>> Now that Yep. Cuz I was what I was going to segue is that's how our comments were, too. When we reacted to the video, it was the same thing. So, >> yeah, this guy has a 3090 Ryzen 9 5900, 32 big gigs of RAM, >> and it's still, it don't matter what specs you got on your computer. You you can have a quantum computer. That shit's still going to drop frames in.

[00:01:22]>> This is a strong computer, by the way.

[00:01:24]Yeah, it is.

[00:01:24]>> Yes. It's a very strong Better than mine.

[00:01:26]>> Exactly. That's what I was going to say.

[00:01:28]The only thing you got more of is RAM cuz you edit. This is a really strong computer. And the fact that in Star Wars Academy you're getting 4560.

[00:01:36]>> It's wild.

[00:01:37]>> It is. I get it.

[00:01:38]>> And look, those comments are completely fair. But what I also noticed in those threads was either Kuru is lazy and doesn't care about optimization or just upgrade your PC. So I got curious and went digging into the technical side of this. And here's the thing. According to this breakdown I found on github.io, both of those are wrong. It was a very deep technical analysis. And so I'm going to try to translate the important parts into plain English so we can all actually understand what's going on. So, in this video, we're going to break down what's actually causing the stutter in waves, why it's not as simple as just optimize it, and what Kuro is actually doing about it. So, with that being said, my name is Luca Sensei, and this is what's going on with weathering waves optimization.

[00:02:26]>> That was a good >> first.

[00:02:28]When people say WA runs badly, they're actually talking >> pause, >> bro. about at least two completely different problems that often get lumped together. The first problem is what we'll call the city stutter. That constant annoying microjitter you get where just by walking around Star Touch Academy or Septimont for example, your FPS won't stay stable.

[00:02:51]>> I was about to say that [ __ ] don't happen in Septimon. Yeah, >> that don't happen like anywhere else. In our Discord, someone said something like it might jitter because >> uh maybe all the models are like active at the exact same time no matter if you're in the city. So even like a part of the city on the third floor, it could be active even though you're not there.

[00:03:11]>> Yeah, kind of. I don't know, but you know, maybe he'll explain it off. And here's the weird part. Your GPU is barely even sweating. You can have an RTX 4090 and still get this problem.

[00:03:23]More on why that is in a second. And the second problem is what we'll call the exit freeze. That hard zero FPS drop you get when you leave a city. You cross the boundary and the game just stops for one or two seconds, then it's totally fine.

[00:03:38]Longtime players from version 1.0 will remember when this was particularly brutal. It's gotten better with patches, but it hasn't gone away completely.

[00:03:47]>> Yeah. The optimation the optimization of the game, which you missed, was hot garbage when the game dropped.

[00:03:53]>> Really?

[00:03:54]>> Yeah. for like the first for like the first at the very least four to five months there was mad issues. The first month or two there was ultra issues >> and then they upped everything whenever the soft relaunch of the game happened in 2.0.

[00:04:09]>> Wow.

[00:04:10]>> So everything got a lot better as soon as Reena came to be. But it was brutal when the game first dropped.

[00:04:17]>> Wow. I got blessed.

[00:04:19]>> Yeah. There was a point where I stopped playing.

[00:04:21]>> Damn.

[00:04:21]>> Too bad.

[00:04:23]>> Yeah. I started right before the anniversary patch actually >> when Camelli got reran and let me >> let me say I I caught up to you in like three weeks. I was zooming.

[00:04:33]>> It was less than 3 weeks.

[00:04:34]>> I was zooming. That's all I know. I loved it. I was like, "Hell yeah." These two problems look the same because they both happen near cities, but they have completely different causes and they need to be addressed in completely different ways. There's also a third problem which is specific to mobile which is a graphical lag when lots of visual effects are on screen. But the main PC problems are these two and >> good cuz I don't play on mobile.

[00:04:58]>> I'm a PC gamer.

[00:05:00]>> Yeah, I'm not going to lie. I I much prefer play on PC than mobile. But I get it.

[00:05:04]>> I definitely get why.

[00:05:05]>> Understanding them changes everything.

[00:05:07]So why does your expensive GPU sit around?

[00:05:10]>> Shout outs to the mobile players though.

[00:05:11]I know there's a lot of y'all.

[00:05:13]>> Y'all are keeping the game thriving.

[00:05:15]>> Honestly, they are >> 100%. I don't know. I heard that the game runs well on like whatever's the new Snapdragon >> probably Snapdragon 8 something like that.

[00:05:23]>> I don't know. It could be six. I don't know. But it's not.

[00:05:25]>> Let us know in the comments what it is so we can argue about it in real life.

[00:05:30]>> Next video.

[00:05:31]>> This is the part that surprises most people. Unreal Engine 4, the engine that Waves runs on, processes all game logic through a single thread called the game thread. Think about what that means.

[00:05:43]Every NPC deciding where to walk, every building with an interactive door, every particle effect, every quest trigger, every collision check, all of it has to get processed in sequence on one single CPU core before the GPU is even allowed to start drawing the frame. The article gives a great analogy that really helped me visualize the problem. So, imagine this, a highway with eight lanes, but there's only one toll booth. All the traffic has to funnel through that one point before it can move forward. It doesn't matter how many lanes you have.

[00:06:14]It doesn't matter if the highway itself is a Formula 1 track, for example.

[00:06:18]Everything waits on that one booth. In Waves, the game thread is that toll booth. Star Touch Academy has dozens, maybe even hundreds of NPCs and tons of interactive buildings.

[00:06:31]>> And he got a strong he got 64 gigs of RAM.

[00:06:33]>> Yep. And 29 frames, bro.

[00:06:35]>> Yeah. And he has frame gen on. So, he actually has 60 FPS, >> but with But that's with frame generation.

[00:06:42]Right. Um, what's crazy to me hearing this is that means that it in just for weathering wave sake, that means in theory you would only want a CPU that has a really high gigahertz like core. Um, and you don't really care about it being multiple cores, multiple threads then. So, I mean, I would assume that would mean that Intel would be better in theory for weathering waves.

[00:07:14]>> I have no idea. He worked for a computer company. I >> Interesting.

[00:07:18]>> I No, I don't know what you're talking about, but yeah, I believe it.

[00:07:21]>> This is interesting.

[00:07:21]>> It's just crazy that it got 29 frames >> ambient systems and Quest E60.

[00:07:26]>> All of it is queuing up through that one thread and it starts to clog up in a sense. And when it's full, your GPU is just sitting there idle waiting for instructions that are stuck in line. A technical benchmark found that on a high-end system, like we're talking about an i7 with an RTX 5070 in there, the game was hitting nearly 100% load on one CPU core, while the overall CPU was only around 40 or 45% busy and the GPU was averaging somewhere around 55% utilization. The hardware >> So, it's not utilizing all of the GPU and CPU.

[00:08:00]>> Yes, it's not. It's only so how it works is is is the computer has well ours we'll go by ours we have a 5800 X so the 5800X there's eight cores >> right >> right for each core there's two threads so there's 16 threads >> okay >> okay so for this sake 100% usage is on one of the cores and all the rest of the seven are only using 50%. So that's why he's taking longer is what he's saying.

[00:08:24]And on top of that is that um you know Weathering Wave is a very graphical game, really strong graphical game. So um your GPU should be used as much as possible so they can take off some of the load on on your CPU so you can breathe more >> um for like the graphical part. And he's saying that it's at 58%.

[00:08:42]>> Right. The only thing that I want to say that just cuz I kind of I'm not on this level, but I'll at least give my opinion like I'm like kind of a nerd on it. Uh my GPU runs at 98. I just got to put that out there. Mine runs at 98. I check my temperatures every time I launch Weathering Waves every single time.

[00:08:59]Mine's at 98. But the reason my graphics card is at 98% is cuz I play on 4K, >> right?

[00:09:06]>> And that's because I have RTX on, I have frame gen on, and I'm playing at 4K. So, it's forcing my graphics card to use almost 100% GPU. And I'm assuming for when he's doing his calculations, they're in 1080p.

[00:09:21]>> Oh, cuz the majority of people can't even play in 4K.

[00:09:25]>> Yeah, I would say. So, most people don't play in 4K. So, what I'm saying is really an anomaly is just based off of how I play the game. I usually play the game at for even if it's on low settings, I play for I usually just play the game on 4K and I play on a TV. So for me I get 98% you know almost 100% GPU usage.

[00:09:44]>> Okay.

[00:09:45]>> So you know just some food for thought >> as capacity. It can do a lot more but the bottleneck is the design. And here's the part that really blows people's minds. More CPU cores won't help. Having a 16 core processor doesn't move the needle on this specific problem in the slightest. The work that causes the stutter, all that MPC and scripting logic, is hardcoded to one thread. The other 15 cores can't touch it. What does help a little is a CPU with a large L3 cache like AMD's X3D processors, and I'll explain why in a moment. So, underneath the single thread problem, there's actually a second issue making it worse, and it has to do with how data is stored in memory. Unreal Engine 4 uses what's called objectoriented programming. Every single object in the game, every NPC, every brush, every building facade, everything is its own individual thing sitting in its own random spot in your RAM. When the game needs to update 10,000 of these objects every frame, the CPU has to go and hunt each one of those individually all over your memory. A good way to picture this is to imagine a librarian who needs to look up 10,000 books, but the books were shelved wherever they happened to fit when they arrived. So, they're not put away in any particular order. So, the librarian has to walk across the entire library up and down, up and down for every single book. And that back and forth walking time adds up massively, even if reading the book itself is quite fast. That walking translates to CPU slowdowns called cache misses. when the CPU has to fetch data from slow main memory instead of fast nearby cache. And these checks happen thousands of times per frame in a dense city. This is why AMD's X3D CPUs, which have a massive amount of extra L3 cache, help a lot more with Weathering Waves specifically.

[00:11:39]More cash basically means like the librarian has a bigger desk to keep books nearby. She still has to make trips, but far fewer of them. It doesn't get rid of the problem entirely, but it can significantly reduce the worst of it. Some other games like Ark Knight's Enfield are built on an architecture called DOD or ECS, where all the data for similar objects is stored together in a neat row. Basically like having all the books on one topic shelved right next to each other. The CPU obviously loves this. It makes their job a lot more easier. And that's part of why those games handle lots of characters and effects more easily. But >> that's also why mobile's better. Yeah, exactly. I think the phone would love that too because it runs extremely smooth on on the phone >> because that's how you play. You play on mobile. Yeah.

[00:12:23]>> Yeah. So, >> wow.

[00:12:25]>> Cuz Arc Knights works perfectly on mobile or on PC. It's just like obviously on PC the graphics are going to be better, but like the optimization is like seamless on both, honestly.

[00:12:37]>> Damn, that's awesome.

[00:12:38]>> Wu's engine simply wasn't built that way. Now for the second problem, the hard freeze when leaving a city. This one has a different villain, a different Thronodian, if you will. Something called V8. Kind of like ALF1, but different. Within Waves has a scripting layer running underneath the gameplay built on a system called Pertis, which uses V8, the same JavaScript engine that powers Google Chrome. This has been confirmed by game log files and binary analysis. The reason it exists is developer convenience. The team can code and update the game quickly without recompiling the whole game engine every time like they would need to do so in C++. The problem with V8 is what's called its garbage collector. While you're inside the city, the game is constantly creating small chunks of data, NPC behaviors, interactions, quest triggers, stuff like that. And over time, these things pile up. And when you leave the city, V8 decides it's time to clean house. And here's the painful part. V8 does its big spring clean in what's called a stop the world pause.

[00:13:46]Everything freezes while it tidies up.

[00:13:48]So for anywhere from >> half a second to two full seconds, your game is at zero fps. Then >> so it stops everything. So it can clean everything.

[00:13:57]>> Wow. That's super interesting. Wow.

[00:13:59]>> You know what's interesting too? Well, I random memory that that that came from while listening to that is >> he said that um because it has to like garbage collect the way that their how theirs work, how weathering waves one works.

[00:14:16]It's kind of like they do it so they can write script fast. It remind me of maybe that's why we don't get like how long is the maintenance for a new patch?

[00:14:24]>> Like two, three hours >> compared TO MAPLE STORY.

[00:14:30]THAT'S ALL I was thinking of. I was >> wait a second.

[00:14:36]>> Yo, those [ __ ] Maple Story patches were like >> 12 hours long. And then after 12 hours, we um experienced some inconvenience. We are going to be extending the delay of the patch by an extra 8 hours.

[00:14:50]>> And then after that 8 hours, we experienced ANOTHER INCON.

[00:14:55]>> AND BACK in the day, we didn't get ash strikes.

[00:14:57]>> Yeah. WE DIDN'T GET NOTHING, BRO. IT WAS JUST, DAMN, that's crazy. Uh, wait, >> the most we would potentially get was like, okay, you guys will get um a specific DESIGNATED TIME OF 2X.

[00:15:09]>> YES, YOU'RE RIGHT.

[00:15:10]>> FOR LIKE 2 HOURS.

[00:15:11]>> OH, YOU'RE RIGHT.

[00:15:13]>> SO, SOMETIMES THEY BE LIKE, 2X EXP AT 1:00 P.M., [ __ ] I'M AT SCHOOL. I CAN'T DO THAT [ __ ] >> It's over.

[00:15:21]>> It's over, bro. That [ __ ] sucks.

[00:15:23]>> And sometimes they, bro, there was this one time when they had a patch. I swear it lasted like three days long. I was like coming home from school EVERY DAY LIKE WHEN IS THIS [ __ ] GONNA [ __ ] FINISH, BRO. I I don't know WHAT WAS GOING MAYBE THEY GOT DOSED AND THEY DIDN'T WANT TO EXPLAIN IT. That [ __ ] really pissed me off and we didn't get nothing, bro.

[00:15:43]>> Maybe maybe somebody deleted the the cash.

[00:15:47]>> Somebody went inside the cash and I was like, "This mine, bro.

[00:15:50]>> They became the garbage collector or something." I don't know, man.

[00:15:52]>> It's completely fine. That's pattern two. and that's the exit freeze. The version 3.1 patch actually improved this by fixing the asset streaming side of the problem. The game now loads city data faster when you leave, but the V8 garbage collection part is still there.

[00:16:09]Fixing it completely would need a much bigger change. So, what's Kuro doing?

[00:16:15]Actually, something pretty significant.

[00:16:16]They're just not out there bragging about it because it's technical infrastructure stuff that's invisible to players and it doesn't really sound as exciting as it actually is. What the honest is I don't think most people would care. I don't think most people would want to know like what they're trying to do to to fix about to fix it in terms of technical in terms of >> they just want it fixed.

[00:16:36]>> Yeah. They just want like a date to be said, hey guys, we're working on fixing optimization expected to be fixed in 2029, >> you know, like being realistic. That's what people really want to hear. No one wants like a real survey like or like a like a dev talk like yeah for optim op optimization we did realize that we were held back because we are on Unreal Engine 4. So we're going to either try to move to Unreal Engine 5 or we're going to move to Unity because we see what Architect Enfield is doing. They don't give a [ __ ] They just want that [ __ ] When is this going to cuz MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO idea what this [ __ ] is.

[00:17:10]>> Yeah. I mean most people don't understand what cores are and what threads are and >> and like you don't need to.

[00:17:16]>> It's not that important for you.

[00:17:17]>> It's not a disc. It's just like >> like what >> forth? Yeah. For the general con consumer, what importance does that really have other than I know I have a good computer. Why is my game lagging?

[00:17:31]That's all they're going to be thinking about. So, they're going to be all they need to say is >> people who have a decent computer will not be lagging on in 2028. Yep.

[00:17:41]>> That's all they need to say.

[00:17:42]>> I agree.

[00:17:43]>> They don't need like yeah the tech all this. They don't need all that.

[00:17:46]>> They're migrating their scripting layer from Typescript, which uses V8, to C Sharp, which doesn't. C uses a completely different garbage collector that works incrementally, spreading its cleanup work across multiple frames, piece by piece, instead of doing one big freeze. What this means is that even the worst case pauses go from potentially several hundred milliseconds down to single digits. Evidence of Kura making this switch can be found in the game's own data files since back in version 2.8 8 when these new C config entries started appearing. By version 3.1, more and more systems had been moved over, but it's an ongoing process that will take a few more patches to fully complete. They can't just flip a switch and move everything over at once on a live service game. And that's the key context. They're doing all of this while maintaining a six week content release schedule. It's kind of like they're rebuilding and replacing the engine of a car while it's driving. Every new character area and every event that they release on the new C path carries less performance risk than it would have on the old V8 path and that value compounds over time. What this change does not fix, however, is the game thread single core ceiling. That lone toll booth is still out there on the CPU data highway because it is a structural limitation Unreal Engine 4 that unfortunately no patch can ever fully solve. Now, let's talk about the comparisons that everyone makes. Why does Genshin feel smoother?

[00:19:13]Genshin runs on Unity, which has an architecture that's naturally closer to that cash friendly DOD approach we talked about earlier. And Hoyver had over a decade of experience building and customizing Unity before Genchin even launched with the experience from their other title, Hongai Impact 3. This means that they had an enormous head.

[00:19:30]>> Legs look like that.

[00:19:31]>> I don't know. I was thinking the same thing.

[00:19:33]>> It just look really weird. Yeah, but you know that actually like them having experience with Hongkey Impact there.

[00:19:40]That makes me curious about what engine because I'm not sure what engine Punishing Grey Raven is on because Punishing Grey Raven came out before >> Weathering Ways. So, I wonder if it's on Unity and from everything that I've seen, I don't see Punishing Grey Raven having like crazy frame drops or anything or crazy optimization issues.

[00:19:55]>> Well, it could be open world versus >> Yeah, that's true. But Hankai impact third was also um instancebased.

[00:20:04]Um, so I'm just curious what what engine to push that engine to its limits. Plus, it's worth noting that Genshin has a significantly lower graphical ceiling than Weathering Waves. It's a different game with different constraints. Now, what about Hogwarts Legacy? This is the comparison that should really settle the Kuro is lazy argument.

[00:20:26]>> Hogwarts Legacy was made by Avalanche Software with a Warner Brothers budget.

[00:20:31]It runs on Unreal Engine 4.27 27 and at launch it had almost identical stutter complaints. It was CPUbound in dense areas like Hogsmead. GPU is underutilized and throwing more CPU cores doesn't help. Community members diagnosed the exact same single thread problem independently. Hogwarts Legacy is an offline linear game without the additional complications of being a live service game with mobile support or a six week content schedule and it still had the same problem because it's the same engine. The issue isn't Kuro's quality of work. It's that no open world game on Unreal Engine 4 has solved this.

[00:21:08]>> Yeah. Which is the thing. Yeah. Which is the thing that sucks because with all the data we were given in the previous video of everything they are doing to essentially break Unreal Engine uh 4 and like you said make Unreal Engine 4.5 to make the game look as good as they can. It sucks that they are still tied down. Yeah.

[00:21:32]>> By the shackles of Unreal Engine 4 and the fact that they can't switch because it's like having to go from Smash 4 to Smash Ultimate. You'll like have to remake the entire game from the ground up.

[00:21:45]>> You will literally if you want to It sounds like if you if you want to fix this issue, you essentially have to do the meme and make Wing Waves 2.

[00:21:54]>> Y the only thing you could do to fix the game.

[00:21:58]>> Damn. That's tragic. That That's tragic that that's the case.

[00:22:02]>> Jesus.

[00:22:04]>> Here's what I think is the most honest takeaway from all of this. Wooden Waves is trying to do something genuinely ambitious. Open world, high-end visuals, densely populated cities, complex combat VFX, crossplatform all the way from budget phones to high-end PCs on a 6W week live service release schedule. And all on an engine not purpose-built for this combination. No other gacha game on the market right now is doing all of these things simultaneously on this engine at this level. Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2 run on custom engines that studios spent decades building specifically for open world performance. So the comparison is a little unfair. It's like asking why a production car doesn't keep up with a Formula 1 car. They're built for different things with different resources over a completely different time scale. Huru continues to work on this. Performance patches appear in nearly every major update. The migration from TypeScript to C is real and ongoing. The version 3.1 improvements made a measurable realworld difference for the exit freeze. And these are incremental steps, not magic fixes, but they're real nonetheless. So, next time you see someone in the comments saying something like, "Just optimize the game.

[00:23:18]It's not that hard." You can point them to this video. And next time you see someone say, "It's a skill issue. just upgrade your PC. Also, point them to this video, too, because upgrading your GPU won't help a CPUbound bottleneck.

[00:23:30]And I'll be clear, I've been guilty of this as well, of just saying, why can't Kuro just optimize this? So, reading this article was really enlightening for me because the honest answer is that this is an engine architecture problem compounded by the realities of live service game development and a lack of documentation compared to other engines out there. Kuro is making real progress.

[00:23:49]It's just slow because the right fixes are hard and they're doing it all without stopping the game. I'll leave a link to the GitHub article in the video description. And I'll be fully clear. I I'm not sure if everything is 100% correct. There was a lot of technical stuff that went way over my head, but I did my best to read through and understand it to make this video. If you have any experience in this field, and if there was anything off with the information in this video, please let me know down in the comment section below.

[00:24:17]not only for me to learn more, but for all of us to understand a bit more about the process. And if you found this video useful, don't forget to like and subscribe cuz it greatly supports the channel. Also, let me know down in the comments. Do you have >> Yeah, guys, like and subscribe to this channel, okay? As well, you know, >> subscribe and like.

[00:24:34]>> Yep. Like and subscribe to, you know, Ryuku Sensei. And also like and subscribe to us. You know what I'm saying? Like we need some subscribers, you know, like I I'm just saying I, you know, I could use some I could I could get back to I get 125k subs. I'm right there.

[00:24:52]>> Also, don't dislike and subscribe. JOIN THE DISCORD.

[00:24:55]>> YEAH, JOIN THE DISCORD, ACTUALLY. YEAH, y'all [ __ ] better join it. We having in we having insane conversations about the G7 Gamester controller in the general chat right now. Uh if you want to join up and see what's popping with it. And we talk about weathering waves all the time and I get flamed for the teams that I use and I get coached. So if you guys want to get coached I guess by other like-minded folks like yourselves, you know, link is in the description.