Epic Says This Is What Next-Gen Should Look Like
 

Some shots from Epics presentation.Didn't know where to put it so I made new thread.

http://betacache.gawkerassets.com/as..._logo_text.jpg

LINK

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More shots here

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...64&postcount=2

Not as impressive as I'd hoped. They said it was going to be as awesome as the original brumak UE3 trailer/screens were. Maybe the video will be better.

Damn!:shock:

Sub-surface scattering? Didn't Crytek beat everyone to the punch with that in CryEngine2 ?

Screw more detailed muscled monsters (human or otherwise) in crappy looking armour.

How about they get clothing and hair right? Now that would be a step forward. Oh wait that can't be leveraged on antique consoles whereas you can just throw lod and simplified shaders at this sort of stuff to get it to run.

Even when Epic tries to model a human in a jacket the jacket still looks like GoW armour ...

I could get behind this. I especially like the lighting with the picture of the cars with headlights facing us.

Regarding what MfA said with cloth and hair. The hair could use a bit of work but it isn't horrible. Clothing is still something that doesn't look quite right, I don't know if it just needs overall higher resolution in textures, or if they shaders they use just aren't doing a good job of giving it an authentic cloth look.

The hair in those shots (in the link) look pretty damn good.

I am not a big fan of UE3 but if with the new version they fix all the problems they have to bring a smooth experience to consoles when trying to add effects like MSAA, then I want to run on the hype train too.

Some of the pics are amazing and show techniques that Crytek has been doing for some time now. Thanks for sharing. I posted the pics elsewhere but this is a more appropriate thread in the context.

Thats utterly impressive heavy tech going on there and it looks like CGI. The resamblance to Blade Runner is great and visuals actually close to movie to. I'll bet that requires a beast of a system to run.

http://www.abload.de/img/shadowedpointlightrefl3k5f.jpg

Yap,they look very CGish.Seems like they are finally fixing some things that UE3 is infamously known for.I mean on DOF and hair by that:smile:

Short hair looks fine ... it's not the rendering I'm objecting too. The problem is that I was kinda expecting the "next gen" to start handling animation problems. Physical cloth and hair ...

Wow theyve upgraded it heaps heres a shot from 2004,
A way lower polygon count.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news_images/...3_bezerker.jpg
Crysis, uncharted, killzone cant hold a candle to these 2004 images ;)

Epic said that this demo was running on a GTX 580, and that all the licencees already have this engine, becouse when Epic update the engines they do it for all licencees.

So.. what are the odds that Batman: Arkham City will look like that? :P

Fixed it for you. ;)

actually at neogaf the yare saying it was on amd radeon hd 5x00 hardware.

There's been a lot of different fake solutions ever since the first UE3 release. One early ATI Rubi tech demo had it too, probably the first (where they render a lightmap into texture space and blur it repeatedly).

I wouldn't call any of these subsurface scattering though, more like translucency or fake skin shading. Even the name SSS implies that you actually scatter light within the volume, which none of the realtime fakes can actually do.

This looks more like an incremental upgrade than UE4 or anything radical. They're basically adding cosmetic features:
- bokeh DOF is a new post processing filter
- better shadows probably still don't mean a full dynamic lighting system or deferred rendering, just a new shadow algorithm (suggested by use of MSAA, although it also probably means they've done some architectural changes?)
- tessellation also doesn't have much of an effect on anything larger within the renderer
- reflection and skin shader stuff are probably just the old methods utilizing new DX11 shader features


Overall I find Frostbite 2 to be far more impressive so far. Better colors and contrast, very nice lighting, those visuals are really a step above practically everything else. This one is looking like "just" more of the same.

... did I miss someone on the thread?
I'm pretty sure that quote from Rein says nv hardware.

You've got to watch out for these hyper-featured advertising reels. We've seen it time and time again that these engines houses can put out demos with amazing features, but we never see them in games. There's too much high end hardware required to get these images alone. No one runs them in a game, let alone a game that will sell on enough lower systems to make a financially viable product. No one makes games or the high end content that is only going to be seen by a fraction of a percent of their target audience.

So while these images look great, and while the engine can produce all these features and special effects, going by past history, we may not actually see them in games.

Mark said this demo was running on 3 GTX 580's. Doesn't seem impossible for next gen hardware.

Also I thought the most interesting part was this

Seems almost a veiled threat we will force next gen!

They've gone deferred shading/lighting (not clear on which implementation, but it's not your forward renderer with deferred shadowing).

I want to see the video, but this is tech demo, while Battlefield 3 was a pre-alpha gameplay...
I agree about seeing more of an upgrade of UE3 than a new engine.. For example, cloth are still low poly.. and the face doesn't look enough realistic.
I'm pretty sure that UE4 will have its own real-time G.I solution, and i expect also far better skin shading, and higher texture resolution..
Frostbite 2 is really the first and only next-generation engine as today..

Is there something more about this on the net? Sure it can be done like in KZ2, but still, even light pre-pass doesn't agree with MSAA that much... Maybe it's more like Uncharted?

Not at the moment, I don't think. :) Light pre-pass or mini G-buffer approaches would certainly allow them to go with more materials though. One can only imagine what their artists would do if they had gone with the uber G-Buffer.

Uber G-buffer means it has stuff like rgb specular color, glossiness, maybe even anisotropy and so?
Exceptionally good shaders will probably mean something better than a phong specular model though, cook-torrance and such, and better results on the reflection channel...

Yes, this screams for a Bladerunner game. To bad it last propably lightyears before we can run something with this engineupdate.

I always like the UE's.

From same link,

Plenty of room with 4-8 MRTs if one targets DX10+/G80+ hardware. :p

Just out of curiosity, what do you think of Torrance-Sparrow? Beckmann is too expensive?

Seriously, nor Rein, nor Cervat should be quoted in B3D .
They're just shameless PR

Well, I only see the specular models in our shader rollouts, don't have much more to do with them being a modeler ;) So I'm not really sure about the differences. We certainly can afford the cycles for any specular model, it's by far not the slowest element of our rendering.
We also have this energy conservation stuff where specular + diffuse can't be more than the incoming light, so the more shiny something gets, the darker the rest of the surface becomes... but these shouldn't require more than some material id channels...

Aren't those meshes a bit over tesselatted? I mean some area are completely white.
They got a deal with Nvidia? :lol: that's a joke I'm not calling for rough answers ;)

MSAA and deferred rendering has confused me for some time now. I thought DX10+ brought the ability to use MSAA with a deferred renderer, and in fact it has already been done in some games (Two Worlds 2 comes to mind).

Perhaps the performance/IQ tradoff becomes too steep with MSAA in a deferred renderer? What have I missed?

It's expensive to shade per sample. :p

Might shed some light *ahem* http://oles-rants.blogspot.com/2008/...-hardware.html

I'm more interested to read about the improvements they made to their data streaming technology, if any.

With that said, that new DOF implementation effect is impressive.

Why data streaming?

Doesn't UE has texture popin issues?

They've blend between mipmap transitions since Gears 2. Batman AA featured this as well. Funnily enough, there are times when Mass Effect 2 fails to load the appropriate mip level and it's the usual texture pop, but the instances of that occurring are pretty rare.

can someone show me an actual ingame screenshot of a epic engine game that looks like that screenshot that I posted.
i.e. have they delivered what they promised 7 years ago?

Oh this might shed some *ahem* light:
http://oles-rants.blogspot.com/2008/...-hardware.html

The method "2b" for MSAA under dx9 sounds pretty suspiciously familiar going by a certain recent AA method by a certain IHV.

In what sense? That creature was featured in Gears of War. :p
http://i3.tinypic.com/89qjic3.jpg
http://blog-imgs-21.fc2.com/g/a/m/ga...20x1080_18.jpg

Geometry-wise it looks spot on. The texture resolution is lower for obvious reasons. The blue and orange (ಠ_ಠ) in your pic are just lights. *shrug* One might go so far to say that the lighting improvements in Gears 3 surpasses that pic, but I'm not really sure what you mean by delivering. Texture resolution is the easiest thing to deliver if you have the RAM, but that's not a fault of the engine.

edit#23421351:

Here's the same creature imported into Unreal Tournament III:
http://hdimassimo.files.wordpress.co...rserkerub5.jpg

Isn't there a tile based shading technique that manages to decrease its "expensiveness" both in bandwidth and shading? Maybe im confusing it with something else. Wasn't it mentioned on the recent frostbite 2 presentations and cryengine 2 as well?

Also (minor nitpicking) the screen with the car headlights don't project any light onto the scene/street at all(maybe they turned it off to make it easier to notice the shadowed point light reflections), there's just reflections and flares.

Yeah, tile-based deferred. Andrew covers it here. Looks very promising and he compares it to existing deferred methods.

http://visual-computing.intel-resear...red_rendering/

IIRC, Bizarre Creations did something similar (if not the same idea) for Blur on PS3's SPUs.
http://www.slideshare.net/nonchaotic...ltime-lighting

It got better with the latest iteration of UE3, but it's still a source of concern. Not to mention that going forward the amount of data needed to render any given frame is going up not down.

With the first UE3.0 demos, Epic made sure to show off the engine capability in terms of data streaming (whole map). So, I wonder whether they made any significant advance to their current solution.

Also, AlStrong, stop quoting and answering yourself!

Exactly, what I was thinking as well! Great post, as usual, by the way!

Ah... hm... I do wonder if that ties in with their city-creation pipe. Batman Arkham City might be a good showcase in both respects since that's supposed to be open world.


:p

I think Id Tech 6 looks to offer more detailed, this one still has that Unreal engine looks for some reason. My preference for next gen is console build around the Id Tech 6 engine.

maybe because it's still UE :P
I personally like the "look" of this engine but there are games on UE that don't have this typical UE look.I think it depends on how developers use it and only EPIC tech demos and some of their games have this similar art.

Thank you :cool:

yes and so were some monsters in doom2 as well as doom 3, i.e. but theres a huge difference in quality between the two pictures, surely you can see that, its hugely obvious.
(EDIT - i.e. compare the visual result from the rendering not the base models)
Not just the higher res textures
better lighting/shading model
shadows from the lights
higher resolution/AA (prolly rendered at >10MP)
etc

this http://i3.tinypic.com/89qjic3.jpg (taken on a PC so no doubt higher quality than a xbox360 screenshot) is no way comparable in quality to this http://www.bit-tech.net/news_images/...3_bezerker.jpg (also done with a PC, but as seconds per frame instead of FPS for PCs at the time)

What Im saying is they did NOT deliver on their last promises, so why should ppl believe them this time.
As George bush jr said, "theres a saying texas" :) same as the old boss

Leaked video:

http://nl.media.multiplayer.it/files...GDC2011.hi.mp4

Holy, that's impressive! I want to watch it in HD (and direct feed), but still, much better than i thought. It seems they have a dynamic lighting system... It really seems a new generation engine :)

There's a part that is a direct courtesy toward Crytek.

Wow, it really delivers. Epic did wonderful job and its still only upgrade for UE 3 - outstanding.

BTW I can imagine Mass Effect 3 running on this upgrade, but i know its impossible with Bioware ;\ If I would be ME 3 developer i would postpone my game just to make it run on this upgrade.

Epic demoed UE3 with the Gears world in 2004. So "the samaritian" may come from a new ip they are building. And it's really cool. I think that games with this updated version of the engine will come in 2013. This also means that they have postponed UE4 at least a couple years away (to be showed in GDC 2013, and firstly used in 2014-2015 games?).

I mean there would be no point of giving such a major update of the engine (and expensive too), if UE4 will launch next year.

It is impressive but they used 3*GTX580 for the demo which isnt that impressive. I think its more in the gpu performance than engine. If everyone would make games playable on 3*GTX580 than maybe the few who own one would see such graphics already.:wink:

The only thing lacking is shadows. I'd expect penumbra shadows by then.

While that is a really impressive video and I love the concept of the plot...(nowadays tech demos are like concept cars...look amazing but when released to production nowhere near as epic...pun intended) I still don't think they got the face right. I am getting more and more sold on this DX 11 bandwagon. I am thinking that the next gen consoles will be some serious piece of kit and maybe they will close the performance gap to high end PCs by a significant amount and then we will see more parity in game releases between the 2 systems. Yes I am an optimist!

It's an engine showcase... sponsored by Nvidia :grin:
Actual Performance are not really important.
And BTW, before games actually using it come to the market it will be 2013, and by that time, a gpu solution of similar performance will be much more common (GTX 760 / Radeon 7770)

They've also hinted around they think it could be optimized to run on a single GTX500 card.

Yeah, this looks like still basic UE3 + some new "superficial" features (filters, tessellation, etc) + deferred lighting (if AIStrong's info is good ;) ) + a lot of horsepower. Base UE3 should be able to do a lot of these visuals IMHO.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3XeCHywNYM

This is nuts! even though some things a missing shadows / Ambiant occlusion (trash bags , Lamp Pole etc..)

Edit: Sorry it was already posted.

Now that it's leaked anyway, Epic should really give us some direct feed goodness! :)

Obviously.
This is mostly an updated toyshop demo.ATI cinema 2.0 is still far more impressive stuff to me ,and the highend crytek stuff (sandbox for cinema), a close second .
Dark settings and glowing lights are allways easier to do.Nice job ,but nothing out of this wold.

I'll bet it runs just fine on a single GPU if they optimise/simplify the Bokeh DOF filter. In their UDK the Bokeh DOF reduces my framerate with almost 10x for forest demo vs no Bokeh DOF.

Better yet, maybe a tech demo/benchmark! (just wishfull thinking...:lol:)

On another note, i'd love to see something like deux ex/blade runner/gta4/mafia futuristic sandbox environment where bwig scawy robots like that could sneak up on the player without noise untill the last moment and go "HALT CITIZEN!" aproaching the player in that intimidating/threatning way shown in the trailer making all sort of pneumatic and electrical motor noises, just because some crime was perpetraded earlier on the area the player happened to passing by (murder, robbery, etc), giving the player more interactivity, on whether co-operate or go rage agains't the machine :D

Only gta4 so far has managed try to do that level of AI interactivity. Also is rockstar attending GDC? what are those guys up to?

I dont how why people can complain about shadows, they're really good and even every light in those scenes cast shadows! There were stencil shadows and even shadows from that burner and from light in mechs 'mouth'.

If this version of UE3 is already avaiable to the public, then they should release this demo also. :)

The shadows look great, but that kind of shadowing is pretty much a solved problem on lesser hardware. A scene with area-light shadows would really show the limitations of current consoles.

I'm also curious about the efficiency with MSAA

I agree. I can't believe the fawning going on in this topic. I'm of the opinion it should be locked.

maybe but GoW 3 for me is better than that tech model ;) http://images.gamersyde.com/image_go...-1708_0007.jpg

So you picked the most horrible screen imaginable (http://i3.tinypic.com/89qjic3.jpg) to compare with.

Really just stop.
That looks like a cutscene.
If fawning was a reason for locking, KZ3 thread shoulda been locked months ago. At least this UE3 demo actually looks remarkable, even if it is an example of next gen.

Here is a good Gears 3 shot of char model: http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/1...page=mediaFull

Kratos model is always that same, there are no LOD changes and he's always in memory.
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow...ow3_img001.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow...ow3_img002.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow...ow3_img003.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow...ow3_img004.jpg
http://strony.aster.pl/kakarotto/gow...ow3_img005.jpg

You mean that bullshot?

This is a ingame shot i made from the press multiplayer footage.
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/4340/gears8.png

More in my post
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.p...&postcount=247

Does anybody have the full specs of the PC that ran this? I find it hard to believe that 'next gen' consoles will run this at 30fps with near this fidelity.

That UE3 monster model really only stands out due to the lighting. Texture wise and geometry wise it doesn't look better than characters in UT3/Gears of War PC version and other UE3 engine games, some years old. But the lighting that was also present in BS promo Gears of War shots is MIA AFAIK.

For that shot it doesn't look like they did anything other than set up a really nice light rig...which you can do for a promo shot of a single model, but can't do for a game.

I didnt choose that shot, alstrong did (I take it that means youre agreeing with me, theres a huge difference in quality between the two screens, the promise + the reality)
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.p...0&postcount=39
Not actual ingame screenshot.

I think Ive proved my case, they havent sofar achieved ingame what was shown in 2004. Thus any new media they show of how the new engine will look like when your playing the games has to be taken with a massive grain of salt based on their trackrecord.
Yes Ild like the unjustified 'fawning' to stop, until we see how it 'really looks like ingame' i.e. not bullshots. If they bring out a product where it actually looks like whats been shown/promised, then fawning can commence again :D
I have stated before + will state again, any screenshots that are bullshots, should be labled as such.
Why? Since some companies release actual ingame screenshots i.e. they get punished for given a truthful representation. I ask what is wrong with this? honestly what is wrong with wanting the truth?

OK Ive heard ppl here say ppl on beyond3d are smarter + can tell the difference but the reality is different. Many here (including me sometimes) cant tell the difference between ingame + bullshot