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

[datadigi]

So the Elemental UE4 demo was shown running on the PS4. However, people have spotted many apparent downgrades compared to the original PC demo that was run on a GTX 680. Things such as lighting, textures, shadowing, particle counts, post processing effects such as DoF and geometry have all gotten very noticeable downgrades. Are these the sorts of results we should expect from console games running on engines primarily developed and demonstrated on PC such as UE4, Luminous from SE, Watch Dogs which has still never been shown running on PS4 hardware.
Here are some images to demonstrate this:
PC

PS4

PC on top, PS4 on the bottom

PC on the left, PS4 on the right.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

We must first know what is their new realtime GI solution as the lighting is the biggest difference in both versions.Not necesarily worse now. Textures seem to have been rushed. Mark Rein was shocked to know the PS4 memory upgrade and i believe he was sincere since Sony wanted Epic to be the last to know because of its relationship with MS.Maybe 8 GB of commom baseline for work will allow them to deep into new algorithms.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

Reminds me somehow of the texture loading problem of the UE2...

I don't know what happened to the tech-demo. It just looked wrong at the beginning, like a technical error. The scenes at the end of the video however (ice crushing down) looked great as expected.

Tim Sweeney said he didn't know anything about the 8GB GDDR5 and also VGLeaks stated that all PS4 games are designed for 4GB GDDR5. I think we should keep that in mind.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

Reminds me somehow of the texture loading problem of the UE2...

I don't know what happened to the tech-demo. It just looked wrong at the beginning, like a technical error. The scenes at the end of the video however (ice crushing down) looked great as expected.

Tim Sweeney said he didn't know anything about the 8GB GDDR5 and also VGLeaks stated that all PS4 games are designed for 4GB GDDR5. I think we should keep that in mind.

They have to improve their materials shaders.Metal above all.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

They have to improve their materials shaders.Metal above all.

Does UE4 supports Forward+?

 

[almighty]

How can people blame the 4Gb GDDR5 RAM when the a GTX 680 only has 2Gb?

It's lack of power, pure and simple.

 

[Betanumerical]

How can people blame the 4Gb GDDR5 RAM when the a GTX 680 only has 2Gb?

It's lack of power, pure and simple.

it could be anything, the original specs for the demo are rather high and I am not sure if a console would be able to outgun that much raw power.

 

[Hecatoncheires]

How can people blame the 4Gb GDDR5 RAM when the a GTX 680 only has 2Gb?

It's lack of power, pure and simple.

So UE4 doesn't need any system memory? Good job, Epic Games! :smile2:

 

[Love_In_Rio]

Does UE4 supports Forward+?

Look,this is avery good video (Leo GCN tech demo) of forward + lighting, that is a compute shader that manages tiles lighting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2y7e3Zm1xc&feature=youtu.be

If these consoles are GPGPU improved, the Crysis 3 crowd will eat more than one crow.

 

[L. Scofield]

I'd say, no:

 

[Davros]

You do know that the ue4 pc demo can have 1 680 (or even a titan, or 3 titans if you wanted) doing graphics and 1 doing gpgpu I dont think the crysis crowd will be eating anything.

 

[deanos]

How can people blame the 4Gb GDDR5 RAM when the a GTX 680 only has 2Gb?
.

Maybe because Epic had additional DDR3 ram to play with?
With 8GB GDDR5 there is no doubt in my mind this tech demo could have been much better.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

You do know that the ue4 pc demo can have 1 680 (or even a titan, or 3 titans if you wanted) doing graphics and 1 doing gpgpu I dont think the crysis crowd will be eating anything.

Well crysis 3 is what it is already and already runs on very high at 720p on a 7850.Crysis 4 may take advantage of a titan making computing or not...

 

[BRiT]

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

Answer: No. For instance see the following video footage.

 

[almighty]

Maybe because Epic had additional DDR3 ram to play with?
With 8GB GDDR5 there is no doubt in my mind this tech demo could have been much better.

And?

The original spec PS4 had 4Gb so that would be the same as a PC with a 2Gb GTX680 and 2Gb system RAM.

I seriously, seriously doubt that this demo uses over 2Gb of main RAM, especially as the demo might not even be 64bit.

The GTX680 is just a much much faster GPU then what's inside PS4 and that's what the problem is, not lack of memory

 

[hurleybird]

A port of what is essentially an Nvidia tech demo doesn't run as well on the PS4? You don't say?

 

[almighty]

A port of what is essentially an Nvidia tech demo running on a 3Tflop+ GPU that doesn't run as well on the PS4's 1.9Tflop GPU? You don't say?

Fixed

 

[deanos]

Fixed

I think you're underestimating the concept of coding to the metal.
Did you already forget Timothy Lottes's blog post?

If PS4 has a real-time OS, with a libGCM style low level access to the GPU, then the PS4 1st party games will be years ahead of the PC simply because it opens up what is possible on the GPU. Note this won't happen right away on launch, but once developers tool up for the platform, this will be the case. As a PC guy who knows hardware to the metal, I spend most of my days in frustration knowing damn well what I could do with the hardware, but what I cannot do because Microsoft and IHVs wont provide low-level GPU access in PC APIs. One simple example, drawcalls on PC have easily 10x to 100x the overhead of a console with a libGCM style API.

 

[almighty]

I think you're underestimating the concept of coding to the metal.
Did you already forget Timothy Lottes's blog post?

Coding to the metal only gets you so much and can not make up for the lack of certain things.

The GTX 680 has more bandwidth, the one thing that coding to the metal will not magically get you more of.

 

[PalmiNio]

I'd say, no:

And this is confirmed running on actual PS4 hardware?

I think we are jumping the Gun.

With time the UE4 engine will be better for console.

Remeber this is more than 10 month befor launch and that Sony has gameplay that is more than just Alpha to show is very good.

This means the console is not rushed and that devs has plenty of time for optimization.

So lets wait with the PC vs PS4 until november.