Unreal Engine 5, [UE5 Developer Availability 2022-04-05]

[Deleted member 86764]

Yes, although I imagine it's tied to resolution, rather than independently variable. Seems like a natural goal of the "reyes" philosophy epic has talked up. (maybe not though!)

Requiring the highest detail model on a slow HDD would presumably cause huge pauses in gameplay every few seconds while the assets loaded. No matter how fast the GPU is.

I would have thought that model detail would have to be tied to the SSD/IO speeds in order prevent these pauses. It'd require a delicate balance between transfer speeds and GPU performance.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

You are not a strategic investor, which is the only possible goal a big corp like sony could have with a small money (but still big enough to bankroll entire features in the engine) could have in buying a like 0.01% stke or whatever in a company like epic.

I've invested relatively more (i.e. more than 1.4%) in smaller companies. Not all investments come with perks of steering management or engineering decisions.

If you're an investor, you surely know that investments happen to prioritize certain equal things in the business's schedule ( for example -- [x] has to launch on every platform at once, but the order it gets done in doesn't matter, so you get to the front of the line so you can promote early), or to cement marketing relationships, or for all kinds of other things. And you presumably also know that a big tech company investing in one of its tech partners isn't doing it to try and get a big roi payment.

See above. There is nothing in the PR that suggests Sony will be steering Epic's priorities. That's rampant and unfounded speculation.

I interpreted "the PC architecture just wasn't there " as a claim that nanite couldn't, at the time, run effectively on pc hardware. Maybe i misunderstood?

Yes, read my post again. This whole article is predicated on an efficient I/O system. Again, and I feel like various people have quote this same sentence many times now that is shouldn't need re-quoting, but now with MOAR formatting:

"PlayStation 5 is built not only on a huge body of flash memory, but also a very high bandwidth and low latency framework for accessing it, and for getting it to wherever you need for any type of work".​

Tim Sweeney mentions the flash storage but immediately mentions this is only not the only thing, then talks the fundamental I/O advantages of nextgen consoles (that's in another quote which I included in a previous post) which makes it clear this is not just about PS5, but also Xbox Series consoles. The I/O framework is where PC is behind. Microsoft's Direct Storage API will help but nobody knows what that is on Windows (relative to Xbox Series consoles) or when it is coming. It's coming, but it's not so soon that Microsoft have put a timeframe on it.

 

[function]

Perhaps we didn't read the same article.


I don't understand Chinese and even if I did, I wouldn't feel inclined to believe the claims of one guy in a chinese livestream I've never heard of, over the words of (the original creator Unreal Engine and CEO of Epic and most probably knows more about UE5 than all of B3D combined) Tim Sweeney's statements claiming he was running a video.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1261779320101572609

Clearly you prefer to believe this demo was running on a windows laptop based off a reddit post (which you retrieved from the Xbox SeriesX's sub where there is absolutely nothing against the demo being shown on a PS5 at all) linking to amateur chinese->english translations of some random chinese livestream, and you also chose to completely neglect or misinterpret all the on-the-record statements from Epic developers and their technically-very-literate CEO regarding the importance of a low-latency and hardware accelerated I/O system to make it possible.

Perhaps one should have some disbelief over the claims that a laptop with a RTX 2080 Mobile (a 9.3 TFLOPs Turing GPU) is running the demo no less than 33% faster than the PS5's GPU (40FPS vs. 30FPS), all of Microsoft's Direct Storage stack is most probably still missing and there's no hardware for data decompression... but I guess that's just me.





Regardless, since we're at the point of choosing to believe which source is more accurate (Epic Games developers vs. a post on a subreddit dedicated to the SeriesX), the conversation has run its course on my end.

They were running a video, but one of the lead engineers also spoke of how it ran on his laptop, according to the translation (a B3D member also said the same thing iirc, saying they were a native speaker of the language. I'll try and check on that).

There isn't necessarily any contadiction here. Both staments can be entirely true.

That final flying bit was on rails too, with lots of repeating assets. Probably very streaming friendly. I don't think this demo would have been stressing the PS5 IO. Its a technology demonstrater, not a PS5 SSD demonstrstor.

It'll be a multiplatform demo for UE5. Making it anything else would be pretty silly IMO.

 

[chris1515]

You are not a strategic investor, which is the only possible goal a big corp like sony could have with a small money (but still big enough to bankroll entire features in the engine) could have in buying a like 0.01% stke or whatever in a company like epic.

If you're an investor, you surely know that investments happen to prioritize certain equal things in the business's schedule ( for example -- [x] has to launch on every platform at once, but the order it gets done in doesn't matter, so you get to the front of the line so you can promote early), or to cement marketing relationships, or for all kinds of other things. And you presumably also know that a big tech company investing in one of its tech partners isn't doing it to try and get a big roi payment.



First point --
https://www.sony.com/content/sony/e...rategic-investment-from-sony-corporation.html
"
TOKYO & CARY, N.C.--Sony Corporation (“Sony”) and Epic Games, Inc. (“Epic”) are pleased to announce that Sony has agreed to make a strategic investment of $250 million to acquire a minority interest in Epic through a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony. The investment cements an already close relationship between the two companies and reinforces the shared mission to advance the state of the art in technology, entertainment, and socially-connected online services.

The investment allows Sony and Epic to aim to broaden their collaboration across Sony’s leading portfolio of entertainment assets and technology, and Epic’s social entertainment platform and digital ecosystem to create unique experiences for consumers and creators. The closing of the investment is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals."


Second point --
I interpreted "the PC architecture just wasn't there " as a claim that nanite couldn't, at the time, run effectively on pc hardware. Maybe i misunderstood?

The PS5 SSD technology is ready since nearly 4 years, a slower prototype is used. Fabian Giesen said in 2016 the planning for make the hardware decoder was very tight. You know that each year Mark Cerny goes see the first and third party developer to ask what they want into a console. And they showed the PS5 prototype to the biggest third party publisher and Engine middleware like Epic or Unity. They were probably the only one to be ready so early with this new technology long ago at least on SSD side and it makes them the first possible partner.

And the PC software stack is not ready. Where is Direct Storage? It will arrive later.

 

[cwjs]

The PS5 SSD technology is ready since 4 years, a slower prototype is used. Fabian Giesen said in 2016 the planning for make the hardware decoder was very tight. You know that each year Mark Cerny goes see the first and third party developer to ask what they want into a console. And they showed the PS5 prototype to the biggest third party publisher and Engine middleware like Epic or Unity. They were probably the only one to be ready so early with this new technology long ago at least on SSD side and it makes them the first possible partner.

Gonna make this claim now before we actually see the engine come out so i can point back to it:

ue5 is going to run fine on sata ssds, and great on regular (pcie 3.0) m2 drives or better.

Faster ssds/better IO will help but they weren't waiting around for them and the tech doesnt depend on them to run 1440p.

This whole discussion is what happens when you learn about tech through marketing speak and ceos rather than reading what developers are saying and learning how techniques work.

 

[chris1515]

Gonna make this claim now before we actually see the engine come out so i can point back to it:

ue5 is going to run fine on sata ssds, and great on regular (pcie 3.0) m2 drives or better.

Faster ssds/better IO will help but they weren't waiting around for them and the tech doesnt depend on them to run 1440p.

This whole discussion is what happens when you learn about tech through marketing speak rather than reading what developers are saying and learning how techniques work.

Who said it will run bad out of you on SATA SSD? I have no idea how it will run on SATA SSD or PVIE 3 SSD or PCIE 4 SSD. Maybe the preview release will help or more probably the final release end of 2021?

There is no marketing the PS5 SSD is faster than a SATA SSD or a PCIE 3 SSD they wanted to impress better run on the best technology available at the time at least on storage side. The other choice they had was Microsoft but it seems they had PS5 devkit since a longer time than Xbox Series devkit. My bet the demo will run as good on Xbox Series X.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

Also, my phone could run the same UE5 demo at 1440p and 60fps, but the quality of the assets would be very basic by comparison and proportional to the speed of the storage.

 

[cwjs]

There is no marketing the PS5 SSD is faster than a SATA SSDor a PCIE 3 SSD

We might be talking past eachother here, I don't understand this point. Sata ssd speed caps out at like ~500mb -- definitely nowhere near the peak speed a ps5 or even a low end m.2 drive will provide for streaming.

 

[chris1515]

We might be talking past eachother here, I don't understand this point. Sata ssd speed caps out at like ~500mb -- definitely nowhere near the peak speed a ps5 or even a low end m.2 drive will provide for streaming.

They have a partnership with Sony since a long time, Unreal Engine 4 for console was presented on PS4. The PS5 devkit were available before. If I remember well Xbox R&D began in 2016. Sony R&D began in 2015 one year before. This is just a logic choice.

In March 2020, they coud have done the demo on Xbox Series X but they did it with Sony because it is a long partnership predating PS5 and they worked on PS5 since a longer time. Tools were probably more mature too on Sony side. If tools were better for launch on Sony side I suppose it was the case 6 months before.

The demo was supposed to be presented in March 2020 at GDC.

 

[cwjs]

They have a partnership with Sony since a long time, Unreal Engine 4 for console was presented on PS4. The PS5 devkit were available before. If I remember well Xbox R&D began in 2016. Sony R&D began in 2015 one year before. This is just a logic choice.

In March 2020, they coud have done the demo on Xbox Series X but they did it with Sony because it is a long partnership predating PS5 and they worked on PS5 since a longer time. Tools were probably more mature too on Sony side.

The demo was supposed to be presented in MArch 2020 at GDC.

Oh, okay, yeah, I misunderstood you, sorry. You're talking about the order they developed in, not what was capable of running it at the time. That said, while i think your theory about xbox vs ps is correct here, it has nothing to do with the "running on a laptop case" I'm arguing about. I agree they probably had way less work done on the xbox than the ps5 at the time of the demo, but probably more on pc than either.

 

[Karamazov]

of course the engine will run just fine on XsX and low range PC cards.
If the PS5 fast IO/SSD speed allow to render 20 millions triangles per scene, and XsX "only" 15 millions, i challenge anyone to see the difference without 400% zoom.
But maybe the pop in would be easier to notice in the final flying scene on XsX, maybe.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

If one of the engineers heading up the demo is talking about PC requirements, and how the demo runs on his laptop, I think it's probably the best source for demo requirements at this time - though admittedly I'm relying on translations by others.

The admission I bolded is the key issue IMO.
I think this is the problem with internet gullibility in general. The "Trust but Verify" motto is rarely followed these days.

There are tons of statements from Epic developers saying the new consoles' (plural, so SeriesX / S included!) I/O subsystems with dedicated I/O accelerators for lower latency and higher effective throughput are crucial to making the UE5 tech demo possible, yet here's a bunch of western people being completely thrown off by one chinese guy in a chinese livestream showing something on a laptop and saying stuff they clearly don't comprehend (and as you said relying on amateur translations by others).

Going back to the motto, I can't find any way to verify the claims of this one chinese guy nor the validity of the translations. But here's a few points that we can verify:

- Brian Karis and his team work at Epic's headquarters in North Carolina (as seen in his linkedin page).

- The demo was well kept under wraps until the released into the public and it's been kept rather tight ever since. If UE5's alpha version was being freely distributed by all the Epic dev teams across the globe there would probably have been more leaks and/or screenshots and/or newsbits about it already. Save from this weird appearance in that one chinese livestream, every new bit of info seems to have been released by the very same team from Brian Karis at NC (or since the pandemic wherever their homes are, I guess).

- Where does the chinese guy work at? If it's at Epic Games China then AFAIK they mostly work on China's Fortnite (where it's a completely different game) with Tencent . I can't find anything about them working on new engine R&D. So why would this guy that works on a completely different studio across the globe have access to what seems like a rather secret R&D project from HQ? Besides, it seems he was running a video after all..?



Regardless, all of this is moot when Tim Sweeney claims the guy was just running a video and we have tons of interviews and statements from the engine's dev team declaring how the low-latency I/O subsystems in the new consoles are what made the demo possible. And obviously running the demo is completely different from "running UE5". UE5 will obviously run on pretty much everything, probably on the Switch even.

It'll be a multiplatform demo for UE5. Making it anything else would be pretty silly IMO.

They will probably have UE5 on all platforms indeed, but why assume this particular one is going to be made available on all platforms? Was the Samaritan demo ever released for consoles?
Was this demo ever released on the PC or XBone?

 

[Deleted member 86764]

of course the engine will run just fine on XsX and low range PC cards.
If the PS5 fast IO/SSD speed allow to render 20 millions triangles per scene, and XsX "only" 15 millions, i challenge anyone to see the difference without 400% zoom.
But maybe the pop in would be easier to notice in the final flying scene on XsX, maybe.

You could imagine a scenario when the player character is moving through the scene at normal speed and the Xbox Series X is at a higher resolution, while the PS5 has higher quality assets.

During a static scene, both would likely normalise to roughly the same resolution / frame rate / detail of assets.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

You could imagine a scenario when the player character is moving through the scene at normal speed and the Xbox Series X is at a higher resolution, while the PS5 has higher quality assets.

Win-win or lose-lose?

 

[BRiT]

Are these Plot Assets?

 

[Deleted member 86764]

Win-win or lose-lose?

I was thinking win-lose and lose-win.

 

[pjbliverpool]

If it's just an SSD, why is Tim Sweeney banging on about nextgen consoles and their I/O?

Because the big change which has enabled UE5 is the move of consoles from HDD's to SSD's? The article makes clear multiple times that HDD's as seen in the last generation of consoles make this tech impossible, so the move to SSD's was the key enabler. Here's what EPICs CTO had to say"

"The console manufacturers, Libreri says, were surprisingly open with listening to Epic's requests for flash storage. "Having SSDs in a console does add to the cost, so it's a big decision for them to make. But it definitely makes a massive difference to the ability to, you know, stream an open world of super-complicated geometry into a game so that the user doesn't even notice." "

Why did Epic just not demo this on a PC with a fast NVMe drive?

Because of their long term collaboration with Sony? The article literally gives that answer directly:

"The team at Epic received very early hardware access to the next-gen console, and the Sony collaboration has been far longer-running than the Microsoft one, Sweeney says, something which naturally influenced Epic's decision to reveal Unreal Engine 5 using PS5 instead of Xbox Series X."

Conversely why has Tim Sweeney consistently avoided saying that the demo won't run on PC, even when asked directly? All he's ever said is that it wasn't running on the laptop during that live stream. Which no-one has actually ever claimed anyway.

SSD performance is reliant on I/O bandwidth but they are not tech same thing.

They're both reliant on each other but no-ones suggesting they're the same thing. Only that at no point has anyone from Epic specifically said that the PS5's specific IO system is required to enable that demo, even when asked directly. They have specifically said that SSD's are required though. And two separate Epic sources have claimed the demo can run on a PC. I don't even know why we're still arguing about this. I thought it was put to bed in this very thread back in May. No new evidence has been revealed since then.

Sony is an itsy-bitsy minor investor with their piddling $250m investment. But you've misunderstood my entire post, this is not about the SSD, this is about system I/O of which the SSD is just one part. Again: "PlayStation 5 is built not only on a huge body of flash memory, but also a very high bandwidth and low latency framework for accessing it, and for getting it to wherever you need for any type of work". Again SSD =/= I/O.

$250m may only be a little over 1% of Epics market value but it's still more than enough to make them a preferential partner for showing the new tech on.

 

[PSman1700]

I don't even know why we're still arguing about this. I thought it was put to bed in this very thread back in May. No new evidence has been revealed since then.

I think everyone knows why, but doesnt say it. The graphics topping benchmark doesnt reside where some want it, RDNA2 RT isnt all that of a powerhouse etc. Backpaddling to a tech demo from over a half year ago is the only thing that can be done at this point. Theres even posters comparing UE4 vs UE5 here.

Thing is, the demo was running on a laptop equipped with a 2080maxQ (2070 dGPU match?) and a nvme drive.
No clue why some think UE5 demo in that fidelity wouldnt be possible on such system or the Series X for that matter. UE5 engine is going to show up across a majority of future games, and its going to shine on PC where things arent being held back, much and much faster storage solutions are on the rise there, heck, there already is. Someone somewhere is going to max out that engine.

Anyway, 1440p/30fps, if thats whats required to get that going on the system without any game logic, repeated assets and a total focus on demo'ing a next engine, i would keep expectations in check anyways.
Would think that, a 3080 or matching GPU (30TFs of compute), in combination with a 7gb/s nvme drive before compression, coupled with gobs of ram would make for some serious impressions down the line using this engine. Ampere with its heavy focus on compute is actually going to shine in situations like this, its RT hardware is only going to add to that.

$250m may only be a little over 1% of Epics market value but it's still more than enough to make them a preferential partner for showing the new tech on.

Indeed. Anyone thinking just because its a little amount for Epic has no clue how business like that works.

 

[trinibwoy]

The difference in lighting is very big, also if we try to ignore geometry. Some screenshots look like direct lighting with constant ambient. No idea what he's using and how hard he worked on tuning, but i assume RTX GI could look better.
Interestingly, the difference geometry makes is less about details, but mostly about feeling more seamless with consistent resolutions than the other, where you can see which model is which. But this also implies a purpose of doing some programmer art to test something out. It's just not polished, other than having some nice assets.

Probably not worthwhile to use someone's side project as a measuring stick for RT GI vs Lumen. It'll be interesting to see how many UE5 developers even bother with any other GI solution besides Lumen as it will likely be better integrated and supported in the engine.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Perhaps we didn't read the same article.

I think you're indulging in a rather creative interpretation of what's being said here. Let's look at the bit you didn't quote:

"They have faster CPUs, they have faster GPUs, and that was really important to be able to achieve the visuals that we showed – but the biggest change across console generations is absolutely going to be the IO bandwidth that we're able to achieve with the SSDs that are in next-generation consoles."

"It's a key unblocker for what Brian and team have built here," Sweeney confirms."

He's quite clearly referring to both next gen consoles there. Not the specific PS5 implementation. They are talking about faster IO systems in general - SSD based IO systems - being the key enabler for the tech. They even say as much in other parts of the article:

"Sweeney says. Their discussion wasn't just about graphics, but about the growing realisation that storage architecture in game hardware – having to load data from a hard drive, the huge amounts of latency between mass storage and a processor – was a limiting factor in Epic's and all developers' future plans for game-making"

"The previous generation of consoles required you to support spinning hard disks, which means you have variable latency time, and it's not totally predictable how long it's going to take to get a piece of data. With the flash storage, you have way, way more predictability and much, much lower latency to be able to get those reads into memory."

I don't understand Chinese and even if I did, I wouldn't feel inclined to believe the claims of one guy in a chinese livestream I've never heard of, over the words of (the original creator Unreal Engine and CEO of Epic and most probably knows more about UE5 than all of B3D combined) Tim Sweeney's statements claiming he was running a video.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1261779320101572609

Tim Sweeney is simply confirming there that something which was never claimed wasn't true. He specifically tweeted later that "I think people were confused by an event where the VIDEO was played on a laptop.". Except no, they weren't, that was never the claim. The claim was quite clearly that an EPIC engineer in a live stream that Tim is clearly acknowledging was legitimate stated that the same demo was running on his laptop.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1261800971585404930

And then there are the comments from Kim Libreri himself (Epic CTO) that have been verified by PC Gamer (and I'm pretty sure someone from DF too although I can't find the post right now) which you've conveniently ignored making the exact same claim as the Chinese engineer.

Perhaps one should have some disbelief over the claims that a laptop with a RTX 2080 Mobile (a 9.3 TFLOPs Turing GPU) is running the demo no less than 33% faster than the PS5's GPU (40FPS vs. 30FPS), all of Microsoft's Direct Storage stack is most probably still missing and there's no hardware for data decompression... but I guess that's just me.

Tim Sweeney himself already stated that the PS5 demo was capped at 30fps and could run faster in places while it's entirely likely the PC version running on a development laptop was not locked.

In addition, if the SSD speed requirements aren't ridiculous as specifically claimed by the EPIC engineer who worked directly on the demo, then there would be no need for Direct Storage or hardware decompression provided you have a fast CPU. Which funnily enough, the same engineer stated you needed.