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

[cheapchips]

I had a go on my humble S. It getting quite low res at times during the chase but it still looks great. The cinematic nature of it all covers a multitude of sins.

I thought the free roaming bit was better if you turn off the matrix filter.

 

[Karamazov]

it's really impressive, from the realtime cutscenes then the free roam, it really feels next gen, of course it misses the polish of a real game, but show the potential between good hands, like a GTA6 or a sppiderman 2-3, FH6 etc...gaming future is bright !
flying around and seeing all those traffic, it feels alive

 

[Dictator]

I thought the free roaming bit was better if you turn off the matrix filter.

It definitely is. The matrix filter culls nearly all the bounce lighting look to it.

 

[Karamazov]

any DF comparison of consoles versions of that demo incoming ?

 

[Karamazov]

how do they handle off screen reflections ? simple dynamic cubemaps ? or some low RT ?
theres a mix of cubemaps and SSR

 

[Globalisateur]

The sub-30fps framerate during driving is very disappointing particularly in an demo. This is no better than GTA5 running on PS4 when it released. Just a bit more realistic but with much less gaming interactions and logic.

For now the best "next-gen" city is still Spiderman + RT at 60fps (and more stable than this sub-30fps). In the UE5 there is GI, it's a bit more realistic on a screenshot, but 30fps is too much of a downgrade and in motion Spiderman is much better looking. People have forgotten how sharp, smooth and realistic Spider-man is. For me this is the definition of next-gen: ~1440p + RT + 60fps.

 

[SlmDnk]

https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-matrix-is-unreal/

The video is all rendered in real-time with the exception of two shots, that were pre-rendered. When Neo and Trinity multiply each other, and one wide shot of the city. This was just because the data was so vast, there would have been a short time to load the assets, which would have broken the pacing of the experience. Other than those shots, the experience renders in real-time on a standard console.

“The first time you see the older Keanu that was a video shoot that we (Epic) filmed of him,” Pete explains. “After they come back after Morpheus that was all the CG versions. It was color corrected to match and look the same.” There is also one point where we see footage in the mirror this was real film footage that was comped in UE5. The first shot of Morpheus is also not CG, but then becomes CG when the young Thomas Anderson (Neo) appears. Even the desk scene at the beginning when Anderson is asleep was a real-time recreation of a scene from the original film.

The team had a CPU, Graphics and performance budget when making the Experience. For example, when the CG characters are on white, there is no background and so that “allowed me to use more Ray-traced area lights,” Pete recalls. “Whereas when we got into the car, we had to budget for the complex background, so I had to use less lights.” When the project first came together it only ran at 15 fps but as things were optimized the frame rate rapidly shot up. “But when we started everything was way over budget, we used a lot of 4K textures, a lot of geometry, Lumen, – which had a cost of its own, a new shadow maps technique for the sunlight – originally we were basically pushing the limits of everything.” The final experience however is indicative of what is possible for a game, running on a PS5 or XBox Series X/S there is still a lot of CPU headroom that would allow a game designer to run the normal mechanics of a game. The team did not want to build a demo that was unrealistic for what a new AAA game would be able to achieve.

 

[Karamazov]

that's sure is a lot of traffic !
remind me the good old times when i was doing that in midtown madness

 

[snc]

While cutscenes faces looks amazing and still holds very close to reality during on rail section I'm not that impressed walking on streets section, noisy low resolution, cars models, main character and npc's level below some current games (checked on ps5, downloading xsx version)

 

[Karamazov]

let the Karamazov's screenshots flood commence

 

[Karamazov]

 

[Karamazov]

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Impressions from a single play through of the YT video:

Pretty good, but I wasn't blown away. Was set up kinda expecting it to look real and it's still a computer game, just in more detail and better quality. Scenery is great in detail and lighting, but repeated data was jarring at moments. The intro had more opportunity for refined realism and Keanu was great, although for the past 20 years we've been shown incredible videogame faces! But in game faces, the dialogue from when in the car, were definitely automata. Lighting/shading on the people wasn't quite right. City simulation and scope was fabulous, and street views + cars very convincing. Trees, not so much. Even as static models, they didn't look good. Particle effects really disappointed me. These haven't progressed at all since forever. I feel computer game smoke will always disappear within 1 second - that's how we'll know when we're really in the Matrix. People may look real and act real, but an exploding car full of petrol to make a nice, cinematic fireball, there'll be a puff of smoke and yet no choking cloud! My dreams of volumetric calculations and thick, simulated smoke seem abandoned as the GPU cycles are needed elsewhere.

 

[Nesh]

Pffft they will never reach the quality of the GSCube

 

[Dictator]

any DF comparison of consoles versions of that demo incoming ?

Yeah - the differences beyond series S though are completely uninteresting tho

 

[zed]

The lighting in some of those shots is brilliant.
The thing is though, ppl are now used to 60fps in games as standard, I doubt they are gonna want to go back to 30fps.
That and the lack of foliage are the biggest issues but exciting times ahead anyways.

 

[techuse]

Looks pretty amazing. The opening chase sequence more so of course. A substantial improvement over any games available today.

 

[snc]

The lighting in some of those shots is brilliant.
The thing is though, ppl are now used to 60fps in games as standard, I doubt they are gonna want to go back to 30fps.
That and the lack of foliage are the biggest issues but exciting times ahead anyways.

already played ceyberpunk, guardian of galaxy and fh5, miles morales in 30 fps modes as there are clearly graphicaly superior, imo we will back to 30fps on consoles soon after crossgen era end

 

[London Geezer]

The sub-30fps framerate during driving is very disappointing particularly in an demo. This is no better than GTA5 running on PS4 when it released. Just a bit more realistic but with much less gaming interactions and logic.

For now the best "next-gen" city is still Spiderman + RT at 60fps (and more stable than this sub-30fps). In the UE5 there is GI, it's a bit more realistic on a screenshot, but 30fps is too much of a downgrade and in motion Spiderman is much better looking. People have forgotten how sharp, smooth and realistic Spider-man is. For me this is the definition of next-gen: ~1440p + RT + 60fps.

I do think that for an 'open world', Spidey/Miles look way better, but it is also true that this demo is trying to do something quite a bit different. The real question is whether Spidey/Miles would look and run as good as it does if it were made and optimised on UE5? Now that's an interesting question.

 

[Allandor]

already played ceyberpunk, guardian of galaxy and fh5, miles morales in 30 fps modes as there are clearly graphicaly superior, imo we will back to 30fps on consoles soon after crossgen era end

I can't like your post with this content. But you are right, even if I don't like the truth

People in many forums expect 60fps because the CPUs are now better. It is not like last gen consoles couldn't reach 60 fps because of the CPU. It is always a design question if a game can reach 60 fps with the given resources. Given away half the GPU resources per frame to get to 60 is also sometimes really hard. Maybe we should look at it that way, games of the last gen looked better because game developers chose to have 30 fps on those CPUs and therefore enhance the graphics of the game. So games on last gen looked better than they should have