Is UE4 indicative of the sacrifices devs will have to make on consoles next gen?

[Laa-Yosh]

There's a lot of chromatic aberration-type effects too, making the image slightly blurred and out of focus.

 

[KKRT]

For now guys. Gamers seem to have short memory. Compare any of the first demos of UE3 with the last gears games. Those engines only get better with time.

Yep, i remember, they all had dynamic lighting which lacked in UE till version 3.5.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1m7T5ay_8DI#t=62s
And parallax occlusion mapping that wasnt used in any UE game i've played or remember
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1m7T5ay_8DI#t=109s

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There's a lot of chromatic aberration-type effects too, making the image slightly blurred and out of focus.

Effects that add natural limits of optics I can understand and appreciate, even going so far to recreate contemporary styles of certain eras (eg. 1970s camera for a Driver game set in the 70s). But when was the last time you watched a Hollywood movie or TV series or even home video where no-one bothered to clean the lens?! It'd only make sense artistically if that effect was applied to a 'live cam' view, like a head-mounted camera or camcorder.

 

[RDGoodla]

"-High-quality temporal anti-aliasing, eliminating jagged edges and temporal aliasing"
Sounds like TXAA, thats why its blurry and means that it can be easily scaled down, because TXAA is expensive.

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No, thats why demo is quite downgraded.

May I ask why? In PC games if one game runs at 30 fps with GTX 680, than with PS4 GPU the game should only run at less than 20 fps. However, in consoles since the efficiency is higher, can't we achieve higher frame rate? Thx.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

It'd only make sense artistically if that effect was applied to a 'live cam' view, like a head-mounted camera or camcorder.

Again, it works very well for our stuff, but where're using it as a much more subtle effect.

This demo is to sell the new engine, so it makes some sense that they push everything to 200%.

 

[Albofighter]

seriously. For people who wear glasses, sometimes they get dirty and it's such a huge bother when you're watching something in HD. You feel like you can't really enjoy it unless everything is crystal clear...and they put that as an effect in a game? I can kinda forgive when there's environmental destruction happening where dirt gets on the protagonist's eyes (usually it's first person like crysis 3) but at least those effects disappear whereas in the demo it kinda stayed there. I hope devs don't do this in the future.

Also, ps4 demo was disappointing. Definitely notciable downgrade there. Makes me a bit worried for multiplatform games.

 

[Davros]

the ps4 Gpu isnt as powerful as a 680, so it depends if the efficiency is enough to overcome this

 

[AlexV]

However, in consoles since the efficiency is higher

You take a fact that is unproven as an axiom (no people claiming it is so in interviews and slideware, does not count). That is a rather risky stance to take.

 

[KKRT]

Again, it works very well for our stuff, but where're using it as a much more subtle effect.

This demo is to sell the new engine, so it makes some sense that they push everything to 200%.

Looks very expensive for just tech demo though.

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May I ask why? In PC games if one game runs at 30 fps with GTX 680, than with PS4 GPU the game should only run at less than 20 fps. However, in consoles since the efficiency is higher, can't we achieve higher frame rate? Thx.

Because GPU in PS4 is like 50% slower than 680 and ps4 cpu is much slower than i7.
They can achieve Infiltrator demo on PS4 sure, but not without severe compromises like in Elemental Demo.
Making game with such fidelity is other issue.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Might be using assets from their new IP, the same way UE3 was demoed with Gears content.

 

[MystWalker]

Weird differences. At the very beggining, the pilars seem to show a very strong reflection of the hanging cloth, which is a dynamic object, but it is so strong it makes me think it's something elese, like a lit candle, but I see no lightsource there. First demo didn't have that, but reversely, there was strong reflection of the blue light coming from that cave on the nearby wall, this one is now missing on ps4. All that could be consequences of the different sun position on both demos.
The other funny difference is the opening door sequence. Both demos had wrong lighting in that sequence, in the first showing, that part was really dark, and kept so even after the door opened, wich should have brightened up the inside environment. On ps4, that whole section is lit by the outside, but even when the door is closed! That is the kind of out of place lighting that always jumps at me on evey Gears of War game, but it's somewhat uderstandable with UE3's very stactic lighting model. With UE4's big push for dynamic lighting and no baking, this is somewhat odd. The ps4 version suffers the most as this artifacts causes the door to have all sorts of out of place specular reflections on the borders of its geometric details, the kind of thing I can't believe most artists didn't notice, and I don't understand why they would neglect that, but they did. The ss specular occlusion proposed by Tri-Ace would be perfect for that particular scene, but the engine does not support that apparently.
Lava scene still displays the whole body of lava casting light into the scene. Evidence of Voxel Lighting? Maybe, but they could have found another way to do that... At around 1:10 there was very strong parallax on the streaming lava on the first showing, but this is either missing or much more suttle on ps4.
The latter shot is the one where the omission of cloud shadows is the most obvious, the most clear and non-subjective compromise of the ps4 conversion. You can't just say this was an artistic choice, the clouds are not dimmer, they are completely absent.
This last lava close up has vey different lighting on both versions too: the ps4 seems to have a rather obvious point light atatched to the tip of the lava stream (watch its specular highlight) which disapears after the lava goes under the pillar (did it go inside with the lava? haha) That was handled completely differently on the first demo.
The outside mountains are completely different too. Aside from the the whole cracks openingn and ice monster awakening thing that simply didn't exist last year, they have other rock formations and somewhat cartoony looking pine trees now.
Overall I'd say this latter demonstration looks less organic and "CGey" than the before. The general look of lighting is sharper and less smooth now, which creates better contrast, but seems more artificial. This is the kind of demo I use to hate. As it shows a good end result, but what I wanna do is be able to point at very speciffic things and say "this is tessellation" "this is sprite based depth of field" "this shadows use variance shadow mapping rather than pcf filtering" and so on, but it is clearly designed to not do that. The focus is on the overall look and feel of stuff. But on something this "directed" the general look and feel is meaningless, and not very representative of what real gameplay could produce.

In the DF article where that video comes from, Leadbetter specifically mentions that SVOGI wasn't used in that demo. In fact, they're not using any type of dynamic GI, it's Lightmass.


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-gdc-2013-unreal-engine-4

The key differentiating factor between last year's demo and this newer iteration is that the Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination (SVOGI) lighting system hasn't made the cut. Instead, Epic is aiming for very high quality static global illumination with indirect GI sampling for all moving objects, including characters.

"[SVOGI] was our prototype GI system that we used for Elemental last year. And our targets, given that we've had announced hardware from Sony, that's where we're going to be using Lightmass as our global illumination solution instead of SVOGI," senior technical artist and level designer Alan Willard told Eurogamer,

 

[user542745831]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aCbJS8tqp3I

ue4 elemental on ps4 !

High bitrate version:

Unreal Engine 4 Playstation 4 Elemental demo GDC 2013

http://www.shacknews.com/file/34808/unreal-engine-4-playstation-4-elemental-demo-gdc-2013

File size: 286 MiB
Duration: 2mn 50s
Bit rate: 13.9 Mbps
Width: 1920 pixels
Height: 1080 pixels
Frame rate: 30.000 fps
Scan type: Progressive

 

[milk]

Yep, i remember, they all had dynamic lighting which lacked in UE till version 3.5.

I nitpick about these kind of things just like you. Did you see my extensive comparison of the changes from last year's and this demo? Yet, to be fair, the overall final results are what matter the most. The demo of the first link, though sporting some advanced graphical feats, looks very dull to today's standards. If that was to be a level of a current ps3 or 360 game, it would be cosidered downright ugly by anybody.
Also, how long it took for dynamic lighting to actually make the cut into the availiable engine is of no importance. I didn't want to say the engine will be able to produce stuff as good as those demos on next-gen consoles right away, what I meant is that throughout the gen, the engine will gradually improve, and I'd say by 2016 or so, games will look better than this, from the overall final general look of things point of view, but not exactly by speciffic laundry list of effects going on.
Don't forget that for every thing the early demoes showed that didn't end up becoming very wildly used in the end, there are a bunch of other things that got added in later that the early demos did not have either. SSAO, lightshafts, massive character counts, smooth texture streaming, distance field shadowmaps, light-mass. All those came into the engine later on, and I'm sure a similar amount of new tech will be added to UE4 throught the years.
And finally, just for the sake of completeness and acuracy:

And parallax occlusion mapping that wasnt used in any UE game i've played or remember

It does apear in some games. Not very comonly, and it is used quite sparsely, but it is not completely absent. Both Gears 3 and Judgment have it in some levels if you want precise examples.

 

[arijoytunir]

in my eyes the killzone shadowfall demo is looking better than the elemental demo on ps4 . ( note: this is only me )
even deep down looked better.

 

[KKRT]

@
"but not exactly by speciffic laundry list of effects going on."
But that laundry list is what is impressive about this demo and what You are talking about 'looking better' is just pure art. Get for example something like Dishonored, its AAA last year title that is beautiful from art standpoint, but from tech standpoint it doesnt even uses many UE 3.5 features.
What You see in this demo is technological target and art have nothing to do with it. If they want to achieve this down the line [2016 for example], they will need to optimize their algorithms by 50% or downgrade precision of/cut some features. I'm betting on latter.

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@Laa-Yosh
I hope it uses assets from new IP, i want to explore this city

 

[RDGoodla]

You take a fact that is unproven as an axiom (no people claiming it is so in interviews and slideware, does not count). That is a rather risky stance to take.

How much benefit can we achieve with "low-level optimization", "higher efficiency" on PS4? For example, can we say that a PS4 which has better effieiency may have performance equivalent to a PC with i3 & GTX 670 (or some spec like this)?

 

[Silenti]

I have been unimpressed with "next-gen", until that Infiltrator demo. Now that has my attention. Though, from a gameplay standpoint, if someone panics and hits a button that destroys my tank factory because one guy got in, I would be might pissed.

 

[metacore]

Well, guys don't overreact here. First it's not a secret that epic is a little closer with nvidia and work started earlier here. Just tak a look at wording about this issue in tim sweeney interview at gamasutra. i'm sure this is why cerny didn't show full demo at psmeeting.


Second it's not like Jen and co. aren't dancing with PR. We heard this "running on xyx" many times , remeber this doom 3 on geforce3, crysis on 8800gt at ultra details and full hd at 40-60fps" then reality and bootleneck in pc(dx) world kicks in and its better to have two gen card later There was a time when nvidia showed true live samaritanian demo, take a look

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=j9E6UaX2M30#t=647s

mighty 680 and we already see drops to very low fps, and when the action starts jen is quickly turning off the demo. When this compute heavy games will ship , if anything i expect 680 class hardware to lag behind orbis because of PCI latency, non unified memory, mulithreded rendering, lower compute dispatchers count , draw calls issues and in compute these will be exposed badly. in current games even simple uses are rather costly... GAF pc "experts" already even downplaying 8 vs 2GB, well they can try current gen pc port on card with 128MB...

BTW very nice new demo.

 

[szymku]

Looks very expensive for just tech demo though.

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Because GPU in PS4 is like 50% slower than 680 and ps4 cpu is much slower than i7.
They can achieve Infiltrator demo on PS4 sure, but not without severe compromises like in Elemental Demo.
Making game with such fidelity is other issue.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

GeForce 680 vs Radeon 7970M

More like 32-35% slower with much more advanced memory subsytem and 8 core cpu. Its not very fast but show me PC game that usues 8 cores

 

[Bagel seed]

"-High-quality temporal anti-aliasing, eliminating jagged edges and temporal aliasing"
Sounds like TXAA, thats why its blurry and means that it can be easily scaled down, because TXAA is expensive.

There's a lot of chromatic aberration-type effects too, making the image slightly blurred and out of focus.

Me thinks they went a bit overboard here. Obviously does wonders for the CG style non-aliased look but to the detriment of edge detail. Made it look somewhere in between SD and HD imo.