Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

There's not a lot simple about UE4 when you start working with it. How far did you get with it?

Why do you think experienced UE devs are in demand and paid well?

 

Wow, the halo update seems to have complete changed performance for me. GPU performance is significantly better and it feels more responsive and looks smoother (on low settings I'm pretty much always cpu limited now without a cap in place). Conversely CPU performance has gotten a lot worse. I can no longer break 200fps on empty maps by turning resolution scale down. On big team maps that are empty with everything low/off I dip into the 130s, where I had everything adjusted to maintain a 140 cap at all times before. Even on small maps at 53% renderscale I get dropped into the 130s. I do think I'll be able to play at native res, or much closer to it now. So this could still be a win for me. For a while I was playing small maps like streets with a 180 cap at a lower resolution, but that looks impossible now. 1440p wasn't really an option before, but now I may actually be able to play that way. Need to test it out further.

The weird frametime spikes from moving are still there, but I think they're a bit less pronounced.

I guess the sad part is if they ever add fsr or dlss, I won't be able to use it to gain performance, just turn up higher graphics settings. Not the worst, but would have been nice to try to get close to 200fps with a reconstructed image.

 

Which engines are easier to use than UE4?

 

well unity is an obvious one. Ive used both a lot. This is from a programming perspective, designers/artists though often prefer unreal. (perhaps godot as well though never used it)

 

Totally depends on what you want. Getting something to run without much knowledge -> Unity.
You want to create a big game and be able to optimize as much as possible -> Unreal.
Currently both engines are the ones with the most active community.

 

Indeed. Halo 4 still looks incredible to this day. Play it at 4k60 and at points it looks a lot better than Halo 5.
Anyway, as to your point, I think 343 has had a lot of issues. Jason's piece touched on some of it and I am sure there's even more to it. I don't know how they go about rebuilding the engine. The time between 5 and Infinite was partly to overhaul the engine. It will be interesting to see if and how it evolves. There are job postings for Principal Rendering Lead, etc, signaling they will keep developing the engine. I imagine that once the last-gen consoles are dropped things will improve even more.

 

Actually playing the game im even more baffled by the "vrs is always bad" crew. This is definitely the worst looking use of vrs ive seen, but its nowhere near as noticable as the temporal artifacts.

Generally the game is great though, and actually quite good looking, albiet clearly not technically cutting edge.

 

I stand corrected. I thought as far as game development goes, UE4 was one of the easier/developer friendly engines and that’s the trade off for it not being very performant.

 

UE4 is cross platform and has some easy-to-apply high end features, so it does tick some boxes corresponding to 'easy to develop for'. It really depends what you want to do. Unity emerged as a desktop/iOS cross-platform engine, extended to multiplatform, and wanting to be used for AAA games and TV/movie content. Unreal Engine was a AAA shooter game engine, extended to consoles, that's being extended to supporting mobile and to make TV/movie content. Both can get a prototype or simple game made pretty easily, with various pros or cons. When you want to do something outside their comfort zone, though, both can be very hard to work with.

So yeah, for an indie, Unity and UE are a complete doddle. As you want to do more, they resist more. Top tier devs tend to have to work at the level of editing the engine to make it do what they want, by accounts. I think any large scale project will find any existing engine troublesome simply because it has a lot of 'bloat' of stuff they don't want and fixed ways of operating. On the flipside, rolling your own engine isn't easy either, even more-so if you want to be cross-plat.

In short, game dev is hard no matter how you approach it! The only way to win is not to play. Or pick an engine, learn it, and then ignore your dream game and just write what'll actually be easily possible. Grab UE and make a Gears clone!

 

UT 2004 levels were also absolutely tiny compared to Halo: Infinite levels, the same goes for Crysis. Neither of them had to deal with streaming assets in as the player moved around the level. Everything was in memory once a level loaded which greatly simplifies rendering at a low latency.

I'm actually pretty amazed at how responsive the controls are for a relatively open world game like Halo: Infinite. It was the first thing I noticed. The responsiveness in controls is far better than any open world shooter that I've played. And unlike many open world or semi-open world shooters, there can be 10's of NPC combatants in a given battle and that's not counting the 5 human NPCs that I like to bring with me just for fun. Compare that to some open world shooters where you may have a handful or less of NPC combatants.

That responsiveness in controls is one of the big reasons the freely attachable grappling hook feels so good. The last time I used a grappling hook that was this responsive and precise? Quake 2 Threewave CTF.

Regards,
SB

 

There were massive user made maps for onslaught mode in UT 2004. Not quite as big perhaps but certainly much bigger compared to the times.

 

The Matrix Awakens is an unmissable next-gen showcase • Eurogamer.net

 

Excuse me @Dictator not sure if someone has made the suggestion but could we get power usage information when you guys do a comparison of the Matrix demo, like compare it Gears 5 and other graphics intensive current gen games. Thanks.

 

This past week should be considered a very good week for Digital Foundry. A great deal of Milestones in the industry happened this past week IMO.

Quote from John

Couldn't agree more. The sooner the better. I look forward to the day when a RTX 2060 and an AMD RT6600 are the minimum required GPUs. We will be in for a real visual treat IMO.

 

So UE5 transitioned from tracing against SDF in software for Lumen to tracing against triangle approximations (bounding boxes) in hardware, right?

I like the fact that Digital Foundry addressed the skeptics who doubted the need for hardware RT to even exist, I guess the skeptics are proven wrong now by the performance and fidelity Lumen receives from hardware RT, Lumen now runs much faster, doesn't suffer from screen space artifacts, and can do more precise diffuse and indirect lighting. Hardware RT reflections also comes into play to flesh things out in a performant way.

 

Isn't is similar to what Bluepoint are doing in Demon's Souls with the lighting?

 

Demon Souls is more Like LPV + SSDO