Is UE4 indicative of the sacrifices devs will have to make on consoles next gen?

Impossible to run PhysX on non-nvidia GPUs, that's unless Nvidia port it to DirectCompute or OpenCL.
I'm just going to presume that it's their own fluid solution and they will reveal it sometime later.

 

I really wonder now, how UE4 is going to look on Xbox One. Because we know now that XO is indeed weaker than PS4. hmm

 

Most likely the same but at a lower resolution.

 

Less particles, lower quality shaders, less high res textures, lower rendering buffer, but same lighting and shadowing system. Maybe lowering tessellation level too.

 

Why not just reduce the resolution and have it look otherwise the same.

 

Reducing the reso won't get around the TMU differences (thats the only one i can think of atm).

 

They could double down on post-processing. eSRAM loves them post-processing shaders.

 

Well, more usable ram could literally store more texture information or higher res textures that's for one.

 

Hm.. makes me wonder if the demo we saw was actually lowered to X1 specs rather than PS4 specs.

 

They did change things in UE4 for actual use, and the original demo was running on a significantly stronger GTX680/i7. That explains the difference. If it was an X1 demo we surely would've seen it on X1, instead of PS4.

 

On X1, in wireframe mode. Sorry, couldn't resist that one.

 

Guerrilla Games doesn't use Unreal Engine, but their own proprietary solution.

 

Posting this here as well:

New presentation:

http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/karis/s2013_pbs_epic_slides.pdf

The most interesting part to me is about the area lights. Unlike the methods of other engines like KZSF's and CryEngine 3, UE4 supports area-omni lights, instead of just area-spot lights.

 

I think KZ did show spherical lights and such.

 

It did, all their lights are area lights.

 

Yes but only spot lights emitted from planes like those in CryEngine 3. No omni lights like the tube light shown above.

 

They did not show anything like a tube light, that's true, and as shown in their slides they aproximated lighting from tube-like bulbs with thin rectangles. But they had spherical lights which is pretty much an area-point light, thus omnidirectional. So far, the only type of area light show by crytek for their engine are indeed spot lights, though they had examples with very wide angles almost aproaching the reach of a half-sphere. That is not the case for guerrilla though, they didn't only had spot lights.

 

I'll recheck their presentations then.

 

OK, I checked KSZF presentation about their area lights and the spherical light you mention is still a spot light. None of the area lights shown in there are omni lights.

 

I think we are talking about different things. Please, define what you mean by spot light, omni lights, area lights and so on. As far as I know, in real time graphics people usually use the term spot lights to refer to a special case light that only affects certain directions, leading to a cone-like region of influence, as opposed to an omni-directional light that gives off light in every direction around it, where its region of influence is a sphere around the source. In this context, a point light is omnidirectional, very much like a spherical light. Killzone SF's engine does support that kind of light source, and many parts of their demos show off things that could only be achieved had their engine had support for it.

EDIT: On a side note, latest showings of cryengine already showcase spherical lights too, and their most recent presentation made avaliable on-line (saw it yesterday) even went as far as propose a better aproximation for the shadowing of such lightsource in real time than the currently popular cube-shadowmap using voxel cone tracing instead.