Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2019]

My V5 still runs in my vintage-pc next to me . The V5 is from 2000, half life is from 1998. It was quite normal those days that the newer card could run everything in the highest available res and still be playable. I'm not sure, but my Voodoo 3 could also run the game in high resolutions ("22bit" through the filtering trick). But as far as I remember 1024*768 + 4xSSAA (it was RGSSAA if I remember it correctly) was the rounder package with the V5 (and my CRT in those days could only handle 1600*1200 at 60Hz … but 85Hz @1024).

 

Looks damn nice, in special on pc.

 

The technical gap between the XBS and PS4 is larger than ever in the most recent games... the X version got the worst treatment from the developers... this version is decent but far from what the console is able to do.

 

80% higher resolution and better performance on PS4 vs the S is strange. The X running a lower resolution (it's pretty obvious in screenshots) and still running slower than the pro is really strange.

 

Would not surprise me if coded in DX11. Direct port from PC. Minimal investment to get it running on Xbox.

 

I thought unreal used dx12 by default on xbox now.

 

AFAIK no. Either way DX12 isn't a magical solution for poor coding and the cluster f@kk of an engine that UE4 is, in terms of performance optimization. Contrary to popular beliefs UE4 is far from great besides looking good in tech demos (especially for large scale AAA games)… As a matter of fact there are only a handful of UE4 games that don't run like total ass.. Fortnite (well..obviously developed by Epic), Microsoft's own games which use their own internal heavily modified branch of the engine (Gears, SoTs..) and ClayBook (which frankly isn't an AAA project at all but Sebbi literally had to code his own renderer, physics engine etc..). Doesn't help either that the engine is also heavily biased towards Nvidia's GPUs on PC (which is mitigated by Ms's work on its own branch which is why AMD's GPUs are nearly a match in Gears & SoTs..). Just look as how PUBG runs like on all platforms even though the devs (Bluehole) have been throwing hours of dev and $$ to fix this for years.

 

What are the alternatives?
Me and some friends are making a game and we are planning to go with UE.
So this concerns me

 

Unity I suppose...

 

Depends on the type of game you are planning on developing & also the platforms you want to release it on. Unfortunately there aren't many alternatives: Unity, Godot..or develop your own engine (!). Unity has been improving and adding tons of new features in the past two years to make it practically reach feature parity with UE4. Frankly it all depends on your project. I know first hands that Epic loves flashy/shinny tech demos..and often "promote", "help" technically & financially such projects as it helps them pimp out their engine..doesn't mean that they really care about the devs though or if the project actually goes to completion etc...

 

They must always provide a dx11 render path because most developers cannot code DX12.

DX11 may sound old but it contains the same feature sets as DX12. The major difference really boils down to high lvl API and low level API. Even with PS4 they must support both GNM and GNM+.

 

What are some examples of especially poor performing games on UE4? Pubg and Ark seem to normally be considered outliers.

 

Unity is in the middle of a huge flip of the engine to a data-oriented design. They're doing some amazing things. Unfortunately right now it's piece by piece, so much of the engine is still written in the old heavily object-oriented way, and only pieces are the new high-performance way.

 

Unity will never be performant as long as it uses a GC. Is there any comparable game to AC7 that runs at 60 fps on the consoles powered by Unity?

 

Tekken 7 runs fine, Batman Arkham Knight runs fine, Injustice 2 runs fine, Hellblade, Mortal Kombat, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, Paragon, Rime, Street Fighter V, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux, State of Decay 2, Sea Of Thieves, all the Gears games, and many others run fine. And I am sure Days Gone and Crackdown 3 will run fine as well.

All of the games you mention are CPU limited (including PUBG and Ace 7), that's where consoles falter, and that's where AMD GPUs lag behind, in fact most games that are CPU limited exhibit the same behavior: massive gains for NVIDIA GPUs over AMD. You can see that in Assassin's Creed Origins, Odyssey, GTA V, Conan Exiles, Ark Survival, Dying Light, Hitman 2 (2018), Watch_Dogs 2, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Agents Of Mayhem, Final Fantasy 15 .. etc. Most of these games don't even use Unreal Engine.

UE4 has one of the best implementation of DX12 to date, unlike FrostBite for example, which doesn't seem able to do it despite several iterations.

 

Spend some time reading or watching videos about unitys entity component system and the burst compiler.

 

I've worked on UE4 projects directly with Epic & with studios working exclusively on it, have had access to both PS4 SDK & MS's XDK which means that I have a fairly good grasp on how things work internally... Your experience as an end-user is in no way, shape or form, an indication on the viability of the engine as a great development platform especially for non AAA devs.

BTW the only version of the engine which has great DX12 implementation is MS's own internal branch. Not the public one. (Unity isn't great either here..but it finally publicacly supports it along side async on Xbox which was exclusive to PS4 for one year until the current 2018.3.)

 

Considering what's on-screen, load times are pretty abysmal for a lot of these (IME). Arkham Knight's problems stem a lot from UE's loading systems not being designed (originally) designed for large scale streaming as opposed to level loading. Even then, these side-view versus fighters have ridiculous load times (Injustice 2 is awful, and has its own stutter problems IME). Sea of Thieves takes forever to load, and the graphical bang/buck trade-off is dubious.

Epic putting their full weight behind the Gears series is somewhat of bad example since they're trying to sell an engine (albeit one that is a lot of smoke and mirrors, and works mostly fine for the tight corridor). State of Decay, We Happy Few, Pubg are not "ok" by a long shot for very obvious reasons.

 

Maybe you can spend some time answering my question?

 

I think he did, the videos sort of argue against your point.