Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2021]

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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.
 
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Which engines are easier to use than UE4?
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.
 
Which engines are easier to use than UE4?

UE5.

At least we should hope the next engine is easier to use and they have saner default settings picked. I don't think much has changed in the blueprint scripting portion, which looks like absolute nightmares for non-trivial matters.

Having to create a motorcycle by making it a car with the left and right wheels overlapped is one of the funniest and saddest things I have heard about UE4.
 
Just like Infinite is an evolution of the original Halo engine, UT 2004 was once upon a time this type of engine, which eventually it moved away from.

Comparing adventure titles features which are done on a small scale and saying they scale up wards to the size of these new titles is not realistic. It's like sayiing we can create twitter and run it on our desktops; easy; until you need to allow for millions of tweets per second (hard).

We have a mod here who worked on Days Gone who had an extremely challenging time trying to get a motorcycle to work. The amount of challenges Unreal has to what they finally came up with, you can ask him. I'm not sure if he still posts here, but it's not easy.

Certain genres of games often look like the others, there is a reason for that, it's because they have similar features and constraints in which they build their titles.

When Halo 4 came out, people were really surprised that it was a 360 title, today people are still surprised. But all they did was constrain the game from it's wide linear to a corridor shooter, and that was all it took. It was the same engine, it's still the same engine, just rebranded as slipspace.
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! :runaway:
 
Few people consider anything about BF2042 impressive. Unreal Tournament 2004 which released 17 years ago was already doing exactly what that first video demonstrates. There is nothing impressive or technically demanding about it. Crysis did it as well. The plethora of open world games dating back to PS3/Xbox 360 etc.

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
 
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.
 
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The Matrix Awakens is an unmissable next-gen showcase • Eurogamer.net
First of all, the experience is actually split into three separate and distinct sections. The first is a character showcase, with Epic successfully creating digital models of both Keanu Reeves (Neo) and Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity) - rendered as they are today, but also as they were in the original Matrix trilogy. What we're seeing in these initial scenes is a fascinating mixture of both library assets and fully real-time rendered characters, and it's actually been quite fascinating for us at Digital Foundry to attempt to pick out which is which! Epic's impressive MetaHuman digital actor technology is deployed here, with Reeves and Moss digitally scanned and custom-built but added to the MetaHuman systems which handle rigging and animation.
 
Article @ https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...kens-previewing-the-future-of-gaming-graphics

Inside The Matrix Awakens: a vision for the future of real-time graphics
Digital Foundry talks to Epic about the demo and the evolution of Unreal Engine 5.

For Digital Foundry, the highlight of The Game Awards wasn't actually an award as such or even a massive triple-A reveal but rather the debut of The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience. Sandwiched between CG trailers, its impact may not have been appreciated during the event, but once downloaded onto your console, it's clear that this is a genuinely important moment in real-time rendering. What Epic Games and partnering studios including The Coalition have achieved is the closest we've seen to an interactive motion picture, delivering new levels of fidelity in character realisation, environmental rendering, lighting quality and post-processing. If you own a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series console, you owe it to yourself to check this out - particularly if you're feeling the effects of cross-gen fatigue.

However, Epic's objectives with this demo are many and varied, beyond the obvious visual spectacle. We spoke to key members of the firm's special projects team to gain a better understanding of the full significance of this landmark release, discovering that the team has some serious pedigree, having made the original Reflections demo for the Nvidia Turing launch, using Star Wars: The Force Awakens assets to demonstrate hardware accelerated ray tracing. It's the same group that worked on Lumen in the Land of Nanite - the stunning real-time demo that showed the world that the new consoles were capable of so much more. Valley of the Ancient followed, emphasising the quality delivered by the Nanite micro-polygon system and enhancements in Lumen-powered global illumination, and made available on PC. This team also worked with Lucasfilm, creating the remarkable LED wall used in the production of The Mandalorian's virtual sets. For this talented group, The Matrix Awakens is a chance to validate Epic's technology on the kind of mass scale we've not seen so far. It's about wrapping it up and delivering it to the new generation of mainstream gaming consoles.

"Let's just release it, let's release it to the public, right?" says Jeff Farris, the Technical Director of Special Projects. "[Let's allow] developers and customers to put their hands on it and hold ourselves accountable for making sure that this tech is 100 percent ship-ready. And that's what we pushed through to make sure that yes, you can put this on real world hardware - this level of graphics and this level of interactivity is achievable."

...
 
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
This is a perfect example of why cross-gen needs to go after this current round of games because this demo is impossible, 100% impossible to do at this fidelity on those last generation machines. There is just no way you are getting that to work. It's not just the rendering speeds, the memory requirements, all this stuff, storage requirements, it just would not be possible. A developer could not create a game that looks like this while still targeting last gen machines and it is the perfect example of why it is time for them to go.
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.
 
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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.

 
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?
 
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