Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2023] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]

[Shifty Geezer]

How exactly are Epic supposed to quality control the games created on its engine? That's like expecting a brush manufacturer to not allow artists to show their paintings unless the manufacturer has deemed them good enough. Epic supplies a tool; It's down to the developers to use it properly and release whatever they release. And even MS and Sony and Nintendo who have got powers to control what gets released on their ecosystems allow any old crap through!

 

[dobwal]

How exactly are Epic supposed to quality control the games created on its engine? That's like expecting a brush manufacturer to not allow artists to show their paintings unless the manufacturer has deemed them good enough. Epic supplies a tool; It's down to the developers to use it properly and release whatever they release. And even MS and Sony and Nintendo who have got powers to control what gets released on their ecosystems allow any old crap through!

Epic can’t control for crappy applications. But that’s not the issue. Every major title gets technically reviewed by YouTubers, gaming sites or whatever which allows reviewers/gamers to be clever enough to determine where issues originate (application, development tools, API or hardware). Engine issues will pop up as a common occurrence across titles that utilize such engine. If a gamer’s experience is severely impacted by that common occurrence they will naturally avoid games that employ that engine.

Epic is at work everyday to mitigate their engine issues. Some are just harder than others to stamp out. As UE5 grows more mature, it will grow more stable and more performant. And most gamers who may have been put off by games that used earlier iterations of UE5, will eventually abandoned their past stance.

 

[Remij]

How exactly are Epic supposed to quality control the games created on its engine? That's like expecting a brush manufacturer to not allow artists to show their paintings unless the manufacturer has deemed them good enough. Epic supplies a tool; It's down to the developers to use it properly and release whatever they release. And even MS and Sony and Nintendo who have got powers to control what gets released on their ecosystems allow any old crap through!

Change the editor to signpost heavily that PSOs need to be collected and baked back into the project?

Do more to ensure that people actually know what the hell they have to do in the first place.

Make it not so God damn convoluted... there's no reason why this shouldn't just be a checkbox and the engine appropriately creates the files, and knows where to read from to convert them and include them for the next bake. Why the hell do you have to mess around with a bunch of stuff? This is all stuff the engine should do on behalf of the dev, unless they specifically choose not to for various reasons.

That's what I thought "automatic PSO gathering" was going to be in the first place. Click a box, play the hell out of your game, then bake again. Not messing around. Devs SHOULD have to play their games and build up PSO collections... but the engine should make it as painless as possible so that they are encouraged to do it. Devs SHOULD profile their games and understand what's causing spikes and issues... having some half baked automatic system which encourages them to not have to think about it is BAD imo... because the reality is that the purely automatic system will never be good enough on its own. There's too many cases where it will not be sufficient.

Epic has an issue on their hands because it makes them look bad. I never said they deserve the blame here, I said it's making them look bad.. so naturally they should be doing soooomething.

 

[troyan]

Epic is at work everyday to mitigate their engine issues. Some are just harder than others to stamp out. As UE5 grows more mature, it will grow more stable and more performant. And most gamers who may have been put off by games that used earlier iterations of UE5, will eventually abandoned their past stance.

Dont see any real progression since 2021. Still no proper hardware raytracing support, still unoptimized for nVidia GPUs. Remedy and Epic have developed their engines under the same hardware conditions. But only one company has accepted hardware tracing. Now switching between Alan Wake 2 and Robocop is really absurd. It's like going from a PS5 game to a PS4 game on a PS4 base system.

UE5 needs a proper geometry system which fully supports hardware raytracing. Developers should be free to decide what it's best for their games. Robocop doesnt need Nanite. Biggest problem is the outdated UE5 lighting systems which produces so much artefacts and wrong looking scenarios.

 

[Subtlesnake]

Dont see any real progression since 2021. Still no proper hardware raytracing support, still unoptimized for nVidia GPUs. Remedy and Epic have developed their engines under the same hardware conditions. But only one company has accepted hardware tracing.

Hardware Lumen doesn't use ray tracing?

 

[Frenetic Pony]

This game seems like a train wreck on all platforms - on PC though of course it is extra levels of trainwreck. A 7900 XT besting a 4090 at high res is frankly hilarious - what on earth did they do lol

It runs on UE4, no raytracing, of course a 7900XT beats a 4090. People jumping up to complain their fandom isn't being justified is a tiny little internet plague.

 

[Lurkmass]

Dont see any real progression since 2021. Still no proper hardware raytracing support, still unoptimized for nVidia GPUs. Remedy and Epic have developed their engines under the same hardware conditions. But only one company has accepted hardware tracing. Now switching between Alan Wake 2 and Robocop is really absurd. It's like going from a PS5 game to a PS4 game on a PS4 base system.

UE5 needs a proper geometry system which fully supports hardware raytracing. Developers should be free to decide what it's best for their games. Robocop doesnt need Nanite. Biggest problem is the outdated UE5 lighting systems which produces so much artefacts and wrong looking scenarios.

Just because the use of hardware ray tracing aligns with Remedy's goals in mind doesn't mean that other developers with different objectives should have to follow them and developers are free to use whatever feature they want. If it ultimately becomes an arms race of artist iteration time improvement between hardware ray tracing and nanite then you should to come to terms with whichever outcome prevails ...

It's on the leading hardware vendor to improve the feature to convince other developers that they'll end up with a better overall outcome ...

 

[sinTheta]

Remedy and Epic have developed their engines under the same hardware conditions. But only one company has accepted hardware tracing. Now switching between Alan Wake 2 and Robocop is really absurd.

Isn't Alan Wake 2 utilizing baked GI with optional ray tracing for adding small scale GI on top of it? Dynamic objects don't cast indirect shadows and indirect lighting has lightmap-like jaggies.

 

[DavidGraham]

It runs on UE4, no raytracing, of course a 7900XT beats a 4090. People jumping up to complain their fandom isn't being justified is a tiny little internet plague.

What do you mean? The 4090 is at least 50% faster than 7900XT in pure rasterization. The 7900XT being faster under any circumstances is a failure of an epic proportion.

 

[techuse]

How exactly are Epic supposed to quality control the games created on its engine? That's like expecting a brush manufacturer to not allow artists to show their paintings unless the manufacturer has deemed them good enough. Epic supplies a tool; It's down to the developers to use it properly and release whatever they release. And even MS and Sony and Nintendo who have got powers to control what gets released on their ecosystems allow any old crap through!

The only thing I think Epic can be held accountable for is the lack of multi-threading in the engine. There is no excuse for that being ignored for a decade.

 

[pjbliverpool]

It runs on UE4, no raytracing, of course a 7900XT beats a 4090. People jumping up to complain their fandom isn't being justified is a tiny little internet plague.

This statement wouldn't make sense with the 7900XTX, let alone the 7900XT. There are plenty of UE4 games without RT out there to be used as comparison points. In how many of them does the 7900XT exceed the 4090's performance? Same question for the XTX.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

If they were not labelled I would have picked dirt rally 2 as the newer game.

Same, I clicked the video and just thought "Well yeah it's demanding, but the quality is obvious" and only after realized the game on the left was the older release.

 

[techuse]

The prior game also runs dramatically faster.

 

[Scott_Arm]

The only thing I think Epic can be held accountable for is the lack of multi-threading in the engine. There is no excuse for that being ignored for a decade.

At least they’re publicly working on it now. Hope games in development integrate those improvements as they roll out.

 

[OlegSH]

Isn't Alan Wake 2 utilizing baked GI with optional ray tracing for adding small scale GI on top of it?

No, it features a fully-fledged PT GI, as noted in the game settings. You can easily spot the large-scale GI shadows and specular occlusion with PT in many indirectly lit corners of the game.
Here are 3 comparison pairs for example: https://imgsli.com/MjE4NDg2/4/5

I suspect the decision to keep the baked GI On was mostly about maintaining the consistency of lighting and level design with RT On, as the game is very art-driven. Simply replacing their baked lighting with PT GI would have required significant rework throughout the game. Also, it seems they didn't put much effort into tweaking the content for RT either, for example, the mirrors in the dressing rooms have very rough surfaces to aid the lack of reflections without RT. Tweaking the mirror material to be more mirror-like (by removing excessive distortions and roughness, this issue could be easily fixed even with a mod, if there were a way to extract the game's resources) would have undoubtedly made the game more visually appealing with PT in many scenes). I guess many of the RT issues in this game stem from assets, lighting, and levels being tweaked for the best appearance in rasterization.

 

[trinibwoy]

Given the lights are static why isn’t the baked GI on static geometry “perfect”?

 

[techuse]

Given the lights are static why isn’t the baked GI on static geometry “perfect”?

Good point. Why doesn't every baked game have lighting quality like TLOU 2.

 

[OlegSH]

Given the lights are static why isn’t the baked GI on static geometry “perfect”?

Baking high-resolution GI requires a tremendous amount of video memory, and even then it would be impossible to achieve per-pixel accuracy of RT GI.
The baked GI in AW 2 is fairly low-resolution, so it misses all the small objects everywhere and the dynamic geometry of course (of which there is actually plenty). That's why PT GI still offers a significant improvement even when used with the baked lighting, as can be seen in Alex's video and in the screenshots I posted.

 

[Below2D]

It runs on UE4, no raytracing, of course a 7900XT beats a 4090. People jumping up to complain their fandom isn't being justified is a tiny little internet plague.

"Of course a 7900 XT beats a 4090."

Did you confuse the 4090 with the 4070? The 7900 XT has no business beating the 4090 under any circumstances.

 

[Jupiter]

No, it features a fully-fledged PT GI, as noted in the game settings. You can easily spot the large-scale GI shadows and specular occlusion with PT in many indirectly lit corners of the game.
Here are 3 comparison pairs for example: https://imgsli.com/MjE4NDg2/4/5

I suspect the decision to keep the baked GI On was mostly about maintaining the consistency of lighting and level design with RT On, as the game is very art-driven. Simply replacing their baked lighting with PT GI would have required significant rework throughout the game. Also, it seems they didn't put much effort into tweaking the content for RT either, for example, the mirrors in the dressing rooms have very rough surfaces to aid the lack of reflections without RT. Tweaking the mirror material to be more mirror-like (by removing excessive distortions and roughness, this issue could be easily fixed even with a mod, if there were a way to extract the game's resources) would have undoubtedly made the game more visually appealing with PT in many scenes). I guess many of the RT issues in this game stem from assets, lighting, and levels being tweaked for the best appearance in rasterization.

Good point. I hadn't even considered that. Maybe Pathtracing alone would look worse without pre-baked GI.
However, the change worked well in Cyberpunk 2077. Almost everything looks better to me with pathtracing although the standard GI seems to be deactivated.
You can also notice the difference between these two games when opening and closing doors. In Cyberpunk 2077 the light behaves more realistic while in Alan Wake 2 the light bleeds through more often. Such examples were also shown in the DF Alan Wake 2 video.

Baking high-resolution GI requires a tremendous amount of video memory, and even then it would be impossible to achieve per-pixel accuracy of RT GI.
The baked GI in AW 2 is fairly low-resolution, so it misses all the small objects everywhere and the dynamic geometry of course (of which there is actually plenty). That's why PT GI still offers a significant improvement even when used with the baked lighting, as can be seen in Alex's video and in the screenshots I posted.

Exactly. Although pre-baked GI nostky looks much better than traditional real-time solutions for static objects baked GI is nowhere near as accurate as good RT GI. When I for example look at open drawers or bookshelves in TLoU they are often not darkened. In these cases there is still a lot of light as if there were no walls even if it should be darker. It becomes even more obvious with even smaller objects etc.