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

Mega Lights looks amazing. Is this for Hardware RT only or is there a software fallback again?
I mean functionally you can use DF tracing in any places where RT is used, but the quality is not very usable with direct shadowing/visibility. Currently you'd have to know your way around cvars to get that path and I don't know that it's something that I really expect anyone to want to use.
 
30 second Megalights video from Epic in 4k

I dunno. They are carefully avoiding the character to get near to any kind of reflective surfaces (and anyways there are almost none except for the ground). Character's reflection on surfaces should be the most important aspect for immersion, the first thing to get working properly! Most games have reflective surfaces like transparent windows, metal surfaces or mirrors. I remember for instance Infamous Shadow Fall lack of character's reflections on all surfaces and how it killed the whole presentation for me.

This is where Nintendo get it. In Mario 64 the first (only?) thing that could be reflected was Mario, and it was incredibly effective and impressive! I mean, still now compared to many 2024 games.

Character's reflections were in Duke Nukem 3D too!

 
Seems like ghosting is one of the drawbacks of megalights. Typical accumulation error stuff.


Edit: Some comments from the guy on twitter says accumulation is 12 frames by default. You can lower that to reduce ghosting, but then the tradeoff is noise. I imagine like all accumulation problems, at 120 fps or higher it'll look a lot nicer and megalights would help people hit 120 fps.
 
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Seems like ghosting is one of the drawbacks of megalights. Typical accumulation error stuff.


Edit: Some comments from the guy on twitter says accumulation is 12 frames by default. You can lower that to reduce ghosting, but then the tradeoff is noise. I imagine like all accumulation problems, at 120 fps or higher it'll look a lot nicer and megalights would help people hit 120 fps.

Next Generation Games, really means next generation engines, and not next generation hardware. The hardware is having less and less of a factor - as these are only leading to additional frame rates or higher resolutions. The true generational leaps are from evolution of the graphical rendering pipelines in the engines. Very few companies have the resources to do what Unreal and Unity does. MS and Sony are probably taking note here, if you don't have a team that is just dedicated to shipping engine, you're not likely to ever get there.

From what I can see, MS appears to be just leaning most of their studios into UE, and having UE specialist teams instead. Not sure what Sony's plan is, they have a handful of their own inhouse engines that they use for a lot of stuff.
 
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@DavidGraham I'd guess it's not production ready until UE 5.6 or 5.7, so there's a lot of road left to make improvements. It'll likely always have some drawbacks, but if you have a scene with a lot of dynamic lights it could be the right trade. From the video it sounds like you can basically enable and disable it dynamically, so the person suggests it could be used indoor where there are more light sources than outdoors where the light source is primarily the sun. Or just it at night but not during day. Lots of possibilities to only use it where the tradeoffs make sense.

I'm also curious to see what the fixed cost is, and where the inflection point of switching from megalights off to on is. Is 20 lights, 50 lights, 100 lights, 500 lights etc?
 
I'm also curious to see what the fixed cost is, and where the inflection point of switching from megalights off to on is. Is 20 lights, 50 lights, 100 lights, 500 lights etc?
I'd imagine this is scene-dependent and something each developer would have to determine on their own by profiling their project.
 
Next Generation Games, really means next generation engines, and not next generation hardware. The hardware is having less and less of a factor - as these are only leading to additional frame rates or higher resolutions. The true generational leaps are from evolution of the graphical rendering pipelines in the engines. Very few companies have the resources to do what Unreal and Unity does. MS and Sony are probably taking note here, if you don't have a team that is just dedicated to shipping engine, you're not likely to ever get there.

From what I can see, MS appears to be just leaning most of their studios into UE, and having UE specialist teams instead. Not sure what Sony's plan is, they have a handful of their own inhouse engines that they use for a lot of stuff.
Without certain hardware there is no ray tracing and no AI super resolution so it plays a major role.
With Tensor and RT cores Nvidia has ushered in a new and exciting graphics era. I didn't see much development before that. Without ray tracing the games oof today would still not stand out much from a Star Wars Battlefront 2015.

Hellblade from Microsoft could currently be the best-looking console game. The flight simulator will also be technically complex. According to the videos I think the level of detail in the new flight simulator is very good but there are a lot of shadows in the lighting.

I haven't seen much technical ambition from Sony recently. Whether PC port or Sony exclusive games. They used to be further. Now they are lagging behind.

People often complain about Ubisoft but Avatar and Star Wars Outlaws are currently among the best-looking games on the PC.

Today smaller studios like Remedy can also achieve a lot. Maxed out Alan Wake 2 lis only for hardware enthusiasts but it looks extremely good.

With usuing Unreal small studios can produce very good looking games where most big studios can hardly keep up.
 
Without certain hardware there is no no AI super resolution so it plays a major role.
I still can't believe anyone would choose AI hallucinated pixels over actually rendered ones if given the choice (performance not included), RT I can understand even though I still don't think the hardware is there because they need hallucinations.
What changed when people went from "they're cheating!!!" mad to "they're cheating" yay?
 
I still can't believe anyone would choose AI hallucinated pixels over actually rendered ones if given the choice (performance not included), RT I can understand even though I still don't think the hardware is there because they need hallucinations.
What changed when people went from "they're cheating!!!" mad to "they're cheating" yay?
Without getting in to why replacing the native TAA that games use is beneficial, even just the lower heat from the console-pc and the energy savings are more than enough reason.
 
Without getting in to why replacing the native TAA that games use is beneficial, even just the lower heat from the console-pc and the energy savings are more than enough reason.
TAA sucks too, but it doesn't make hallucinations any better. I rather take slower progress in graphics in native rendering over guesswork
(given the choice I too do choose hallucinations or algorithmic scaling over TAA though, Skyrim became completely new game when someone implemented FSR3 Native AA (or DLAA depending on hardware) for ENB over TAA. Now if only we could replace the built-in TAA too)
 
TAA sucks too, but it doesn't make hallucinations any better. I rather take slower progress in graphics in native rendering over guesswork
What kind of hallucinations are you seeing? I don't think they have been in any way noticeable for a long time.

And developers will start making games with ai upscaling as a base, so even if those hallucinations were a problem, they would become the developer intent 🙃
 
TAA sucks too, but it doesn't make hallucinations any better. I rather take slower progress in graphics in native rendering over guesswork
(given the choice I too do choose hallucinations or algorithmic scaling over TAA though, Skyrim became completely new game when someone implemented FSR3 Native AA (or DLAA depending on hardware) for ENB over TAA. Now if only we could replace the built-in TAA too)

TAA is bloody awful and one of the worst things to ever happen to gaming.

The amount of detail it destroys (especially on motion) is crazy.
 
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