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

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Performance on medium virtual shadows is not the same as before on the same settings but noticeably lower even though the virtual shadows for grass and debri are, as intended for medium settings, not rendering.

I don't know of any other changes that would affect these settings, so I imagine there may have been some content things. Hard to know as I'm not actively working on Fortnite stuff currently.

Performance does not change between medium and high virtual shadows.

It will depend a lot on the specific case, view and system. Likely the cases where you are most likely to notice a difference are on lower end GPUs when directly inside tree foliage (due to resolution differences). Possibly also some differences in scenes with many large local lights present (some of the warehouses or castle views, but you have to know what you are looking for). That said I do not expect the differences to be large here, and without a proper way to replay a frame by frame capture you're not going to be able to weed out stuff like a couple hundred microseconds in specific sequences from the noise I imagine.

That said, as discussed in the other thread, it's pretty common for certain settings on PC to not have large performance impacts in specific view/GPU combinations. That's just the nature of the beast. If it doesn't affect performance much on your system, set it to high and enjoy

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Bunch of blog posts on how we did various things in UE5.1/Fortnite Chapter 4 went live:

• https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/...-features-on-fortnite-battle-royale-chapter-4
• https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/...umination-to-fortnite-battle-royale-chapter-4
• https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/bringing-nanite-to-fortnite-battle-royale-in-chapter-4
• https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/virtual-shadow-maps-in-fortnite-battle-royale-chapter-4

Hope the details are interesting to folks here!

 

[Inuhanyou]

Benefits of having an actual dev familiar with the technology he is talking about in the same thread relating to the topic at hand. Just great stuff here. I hope a lot of these can be extrapolated out to how other devs might utilize these technologies

 

[cheapchips]

I had wondered how they'd approached the building wobble, and pretty sure I forgot to ask.

 

[orangpelupa]

Btw anyone know why twinmotion imported to UE 5.1 Works fine in the editor, but once exported to oculus quest APK, most of the textures are replaced with checkerboard?

 

[Inuhanyou]

It's nice to hear about some hints regarding features included in ue5.2

Asynchronous Compute Lumen seems like it can really help devs and may even free up game performance in general

 

[Dampf]

That said, as discussed in the other thread, it's pretty common for certain settings on PC to not have large performance impacts in specific view/GPU combinations. That's just the nature of the beast. If it doesn't affect performance much on your system, set it to high and enjoy

Sure, but the issue is that I feel like after the patch I get a ton more drops below 60 compared to before (with VSM on medium and same settings) It was pretty stable before the patch.

That is why I'm suspicious that something is wrong when comparing performance between medium and high VSM now. Even when I look at grassy fields the performance does not change though the visuals do) The visuals behave exactly like expected now (shadows for grass disabled at medium and enabled at high) but the performance does not reflect that, you know what I mean?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Hope the details are interesting to folks here!

Always! So pleased B3D still has some dynamite dev presence.

 

[Dictator]

Bunch of blog posts on how we did various things in UE5.1/Fortnite Chapter 4 went live:

• https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/...-features-on-fortnite-battle-royale-chapter-4
• https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/...umination-to-fortnite-battle-royale-chapter-4
• https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/bringing-nanite-to-fortnite-battle-royale-in-chapter-4
• https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/tech-blog/virtual-shadow-maps-in-fortnite-battle-royale-chapter-4

Hope the details are interesting to folks here!

love the blogs

 

[SlmDnk]

@Andrew Lauritzen

How's the work progressing on remastering the original Unreal game for UE5? =)

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Sure, but the issue is that I feel like after the patch I get a ton more drops below 60 compared to before (with VSM on medium and same settings) It was pretty stable before the patch.

Not sure what to suggest. Are you sure it's actually shadow-related?

The visuals behave exactly like expected now (shadows for grass disabled at medium and enabled at high) but the performance does not reflect that, you know what I mean?

The performance cost of contact shadows is actually quite low in most cases, especially on PC. It's a screen space effect so it will depend on the render resolution of course, but I wouldn't necessarily expect it being on/off to be noticeable on mid/high-end configs.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

@Andrew Lauritzen

How's the work progressing on remastering the original Unreal game for UE5? =)

Hah, that'd be fun eh? There's a lot of youtube videos of people doing "XYZ level/game/style" in UE5 for portfolio projects and similar; would love to see something similar for one of the old Unreal games.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

On an aside, your sig is classically old-school in a way that feels insufficient these days, with corporations deciding there's no personal separation from any internet presence. Has Epic management spoken about online presence and what conditions there are? Are they particularly open as seems to be the case?

 

[SlmDnk]

@Andrew Lauritzen

How's the work progressing on remastering the original Unreal game for UE5? =)

Hah, that'd be fun eh?

I really hope that you guys are working on it. First-person shooters haven't been amazing in ages. What better way to make it happen again than remastering Unreal - the game that was such an incredible and memorable experience almost 25 years ago. I recently finished Unreal Gold for the nth time and also listen to the soundtrack every now and then, by the way.

 

[cwjs]

Hope the details are interesting to folks here!

Great posts, really appreciate the team sharing the details and iterations reducing screen space artifacts! Those WPO baked environment animations in the nanite section are really cool too

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

On an aside, your sig is classically old-school in a way that feels insufficient these days, with corporations deciding there's no personal separation from any internet presence. Has Epic management spoken about online presence and what conditions there are? Are they particularly open as seems to be the case?

There's a pretty detailed social media policy that is pretty similar to previous places I've worked. Some topics are obviously off-limits but there's a fair amount of leeway with released products especially in the case of Unreal, which is both open source and directly benefits developers when there is public interaction and documentation.

 

[techuse]

I really hope that you guys are working on it. First-person shooters haven't been amazing in ages. What better way to make it happen again than remastering Unreal - the game that was such an incredible and memorable experience almost 25 years ago. I recently finished Unreal Gold for the nth time and also listen to the soundtrack every now and then, by the way.

Unreal Tournament 2004 is the greatest FPS ever made.

 

[PSman1700]

Unreal Tournament 2004 is the greatest FPS ever made.

Still great for LAN gaming, graphics were ahead of its time also. I think there was htrf/3d audio aswell. UT3 went multiplat and we know what happened to the series from there.
Unreal Engine today isnt even close to what it was back then.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Nostalgia is a helluva thing. Besides shader compilation stutter, UE has evolved beyond what anyone could have imagined and helped shape the industry at a time when devs critically needed an all purpose engine that could give modern graphics pipeline that's easy to use.

Not to argue against the wow factor it must have been as a PC gamer back then to see such revolutionary advances in the PC space. As console gamer, I didn't have any knowledge of unreal engine at all before the 7th gen and games like gears 1 and bioshock among countless others. And learning about the pre history was a great experience

 

[PSman1700]

UE3 is just as much nostalgia.