Unreal Engine 5, [UE5 Developer Availability 2022-04-05]
- Thread starter mpg1
- Start date
D
Deleted member 2197
Guest
I know it will be included as a feature of UE5, but where does it say this presentation is using TSR?
Something about the GI lighting doesn't look quite as impressive as last years demo imo.
Yup!
Downloading it now.
yea i'm struggling here with downloading it. For some reason it's trying to cache it on my C:\ before moving it to my desired directory. I can't install it becauyse my C:\ is incredibly small compared to the rest of drives. sigh... it's > 50% of my C: . Moving all my liibraries and shit off just to download this. So frustrating I want a new drive now
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Nanite/
Some number for Nanite tech assets size on the page
Some number for Nanite tech assets size on the page
How does Nanite work?
Nanite integrates as seamlessly as possible into existing engine workflows, while using a novel approach to storing and rendering mesh data.
Since Nanite relies on the ability to rapidly stream mesh data from disk on demand. Solid State Drives (or SSDs) are recommended for runtime storage.
- During import: meshes are analyzed and broken down into hierarchical clusters of triangle groups.
- During rendering: clusters are swapped on the fly at varying levels of detail based on the camera view, and connect perfectly without cracks to neighboring clusters within the same object. Data is streamed in on demand so that only visible detail needs to reside in memory. Nanite runs in its own rendering pass that completely bypasses traditional draw calls. Visualization modes can be used to inspect the Nanite pipeline.
What Types of Meshes Should Nanite Be Used For?
Nanite should generally be enabled wherever possible. Any Static Mesh that has it enabled will typically render faster, and take up less memory and disk space.
More specifically, a mesh is a good candidate for Nanite if it:
An example of an exception to these rules is something like a sky sphere: its triangles will be large on screen, it doesn't occlude anything, and there is only one in the scene.
- Contains many triangles, or has triangles that will be very small on screen
- Has many instances in the scene
- Acts as a major occluder of other Nanite geometry
Performance of Typical Content
For comparison purposes, the following GPU timings were taken from the PlayStation 5 Unreal Engine 5 technical demo Lumen in the Land of Nanite:
When considering these GPU times together, it's approximately 4.5ms combined for what would be equivalent to Unreal Engine 4's depth prepass plus the base pass. This makes Nanite well-suited for game projects targeting 60 FPS.
- Average render resolution of 1400p temporally upsampled to 4K.
- ~2.5 millisecond (ms) to cull and rasterize all Nanite meshes (which was nearly everything in this demo)
- Nearly all geometry used was a Nanite mesh
- Nearly no CPU cost since it is 100% GPU-driven
- ~2ms to evaluate materials for all Nanite meshes
- Small CPU cost with 1 draw call per material present in the scene.
Numbers like these should be expected from content that doesn't suffer from the aforementioned performance pitfalls in previous sections. Very high instance counts and large numbers of unique materials can also cause increased costs and is an area of Nanite development that is being actively worked on.
Data Size
Because of the micro detail that Nanite is able to achieve, it might be assumed that it means a large increase in geometry data resulting in larger game package sizes and downloads for players. However, the reality isn't that dire. In fact, Nanite's mesh format is significantly smaller than the standard Static Mesh format because of Nanite's specialized mesh encoding.
For example, using the Unreal Engine 5 sample Valley of the Ancients, Nanite meshes average 14.4 bytes per input triangle. This means an average one million triangle Nanite mesh will be ~13.8 megabytes (MB) on disk.
Comparing a traditional low poly mesh plus its Normal map to a high poly Nanite mesh, you would see something like:
Low Polygon Mesh
Static Mesh Compressed Packaged Size: 1.34MB
- Triangles: 19,066
- Vertices: 10,930
- Num LODs: 4
- Nanite: Disabled
Nanite Mesh
Static Mesh compressed package size: 19.64MB
- Triangles: 1,545,338
- Vertices: 793,330
- Num LODs: n/a
- Nanite: Enabled
Low Polygon Static Mesh
with 4k Normal Map
High Poly Static Mesh
with 4k Normal Map
The compressed package size isn't the entire size of the asset though. There are also unique textures only used by this mesh that have to be accounted for. Many of the materials used by meshes have their own unique textures made up of different Normal, BaseColor, Metallic, Specular, Roughness, and Mask textures.
This particular asset only uses two textures (BaseColor and Normal) and thus is not as costly on disk space as one with many other unique textures. For example, note the size of the of the Nanite mesh with ~1.5 million triangles is smaller in size (at 19.64MB) than a 4k normal map texture is.
Texture Type
Texture Size
Size on Disk
BaseColor
4k x 4k
8.2MB
Normal
4k x 4k
21.85MB
The total compressed package size for this mesh and its textures is:
Because the Nanite mesh is very detailed already we can try replacing the unique normal map with a tiling detail normal that is shared with other assets. Although this results in some loss in quality in this case, it is fairly small and certainly much smaller than the difference in quality between the low and high poly version. So a 1.5M triangle Nanite mesh can both look better and be smaller than a low poly mesh with 4k normal map.
- Low Poly Mesh: 31.04MB
- High Poly Mesh: 49.69MB
Total compressed package size for the Nanite-enabled mesh and textures: 27.83MB
High Poly Static Mesh
with 4k Normal Map
Nanite Mesh
with 4k Detail Normal Map
There are plenty of experiments that can be done with texture resolution and detail normal maps, but this particular comparison is to demonstrate that the data sizes of Nanite meshes are not too dissimilar from data that artists are already familiar with.
Lastly, we can compare the Nanite compression to the standard Static Mesh format using the high poly, where both are identical at LOD0.
High Poly Static Mesh
Static Mesh Compressed Packaged Size: 148.95MB
- Triangles: 1,545,338
- Vertices: 793,330
- Num LODs: 4
- Nanite: Disabled
Nanite Mesh
Static Mesh compressed package size: 19.64MB
- Triangles: 1,545,338
- Vertices: 793,330
- Num LODs: n/a
- Nanite: Enabled
Comparing the Nanite compression from earlier with a size of 19.64MB is 7.6x smaller than the standard Static Mesh compression with 4 LODs.
Nanite compression and data sizes are a key area that will be improved in future releases of Unreal Engine.
Any quick or dirty math on how compressed sizes would look using PS5/XBSX respective compression techniques?
This is the demo size into the editor. This has nothing to do with size at runtime. Here it is the raw assets not the format they use in Nanite and after there is the compression. This is probably much less.
Here you ahve the original millions polygons assets.
Here they compare assets size against low poly assets and high quality 4k normal maps and 4 LOD for an assets and Nanite wins
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Nanite/
An example
EDIT: They will explore way to improve data size on disk
Last edited:
I haven't had that problem, but Epic servers are somewhat slow today for obvious reasons. Usually, I can do 80-110MB/s easily any other day, but now...
https://www.resetera.com/threads/unreal-engine-5-dev-workflow-stream-today-5-26.431627/post-65781908
gofreak on era packaged and buid the demo and the size is 24.8 GB
gofreak on era packaged and buid the demo and the size is 24.8 GB
D
Deleted member 86764
Guest
INTERESTING
looking through all the r.lumen commands is interesting. The specular reflections are pretty rough as I am seeing right now, but pretty interesting!
*Waiting for your video analysis*
im' resolved, I moved the cache directory off C:\ and I can download finally. lolI haven't had that problem, but Epic servers are somewhat slow today for obvious reasons. Usually, I can do 80-110MB/s easily any other day, but now...
https://www.resetera.com/threads/unreal-engine-5-dev-workflow-stream-today-5-26.431627/post-65781908
gofreak on era packaged and buid the demo and the size is 24.8 GB
Maybe that explains 64GB RAM needed for pc. PC could load the whole thing into ram and avoid using ssd/decompression... Interesting to see how ram requirement changes once directstorage is available and integrated into ue5.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Lumen/TechOverview/
Lumen details and performance on Xbox series X and PS5. This is the costly part of the rendering not Nanite
Lumen details and performance on Xbox series X and PS5. This is the costly part of the rendering not Nanite
I assume they mean 60 fps is also 1080p there?
I suppose too.
They change the technology, no voxel, just detailed sdf for individual mesh for static geometry until 200 m. Further distance details are using screen space GI.
Screen space GI is used for the character too.
EDIT: they use screen space too for details losr in sdf tracing.
Last edited:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Lumen/TechOverview/ - this is probably the most interesting documents section. Just finished reading it.
Yes, they do support HW RT GI for all types of geometry via the low poly proxies. Moreover, they claim that it's a better quality solution overall because the quality of proxies can be adjusted and it works for all geometry. SDF based Lumen has a lot of limitations and simplifications
They make it sound like HW-RT is a lot slower than their software solution, which kind of defeats the purpose of having HW-RT at all.
Sure it might look a bit better, but most people won't notice anyway, as Lumen looks more than good enough. They should focus on having HW-RT accelerate Lumen.
Similar threads
