Unreal Engine 5, [UE5 Developer Availability 2022-04-05]

[Frenetic Pony]

Yeah there's a distance where they turn off shadow casting from the NPCs in sandbox. I'm not entirely sure if that distance/decision was revisited later in the project though; it may not be as necessary as it was earlier on. That said, the NPCs are indeed non-Nanite (skinned, etc) and thus they are a lot more expensive to render into the virtual shadow map than the Nanite stuff.

It would seem easier to generate the uniform "popped" LODs for skinned characters, then rely on software defined tesselation to transition between LODs, than to try and move than entire complex, already crack prone clustered LOD scheme to 4d? Or at least I imagine, just as I just imagine the disc size cost alone would be prohibitive for trees and characters trying 4d graphed up, or even multiple 3d trees (separate out each component somehow?). Well, I don't even know why I'm typing, "under development" as it is and all.

Though I suppose you could fake distant shadows with screenspace tracing, Red Dead 2 does so. I don't know if it really works better than the shadows not being there though, with the visible haloing. Erm... there's detailed SDFs now... attach SDF approximations to each limb and use a combination of DF shadows and screenspace tracing? Either way DF shadows would be helpful for distant shadow casters. Larger penumbras without binary occlusion artifacts.

 

[milk]

Yeah there's a distance where they turn off shadow casting from the NPCs in sandbox. I'm not entirely sure if that distance/decision was revisited later in the project though; it may not be as necessary as it was earlier on. That said, the NPCs are indeed non-Nanite (skinned, etc) and thus they are a lot more expensive to render into the virtual shadow map than the Nanite stuff.

Not just characters. Nanite itself does glitch out sometimes, leaving holes and weird intersections here and there sometimes. Some objects also disapear and reapear for a second or so sometimes.

There also still seems to be some discreet LODs for whole buildings. At some point, they gotta replace all the instances that make up a whole building for a single proxy model for very far distances, and that kind of simplification is out of the scope of nanite. They seem to fade between the sates with stochastic transparency, as usual.

Another common graphical issue is high geometric density models seen at a distance and grazing angles. That unavoidably creates moire-pattern artifacts beyond the limits of what their TAA can handle, so it stays forever twitching, until the camera moves closer.

 

[DavidGraham]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1469246109390458887

 

[TEEDA]

Here are some recordings I made. i love the chaos physic engine and the lighting.
Feels so real. Last city tech demo that reminded me of this was The getaway tech demo on PS3 haha. At least this time all the car plates are different.
https://streamable.com/awbw9r
https://streamable.com/dtbmxe
https://streamable.com/1yireg
https://streamable.com/zpt620

 

[Cynicalking]

They main problem with this demo is the missed opportunity to let us fly around as Neo instead of the generic drone cam lol.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Do you have any plans to integrate crucial DX12U features like Sampler Feedback and Mesh Shaders into the engine? Mesh shaders for example could also be used in tandem with Nanite for deformable meshes.

Nanite already uses mesh/prim shaders (check out the shader source) for hardware rasterization. As with any other features, I'm sure we'll continue to evaluate and use those that make sense.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Though I suppose you could fake distant shadows with screenspace tracing, Red Dead 2 does so. I don't know if it really works better than the shadows not being there though, with the visible haloing. Erm... there's detailed SDFs now... attach SDF approximations to each limb and use a combination of DF shadows and screenspace tracing? Either way DF shadows would be helpful for distant shadow casters. Larger penumbras without binary occlusion artifacts.

I'm not super concerned about distant character shadows in the future. The engine has a variety of ways to deal with them already (DF, capsules, screen-space) and in the long term more and more stuff will likely be able to go through something more similar to the Nanite path (finer-grained cluster culling at least). Obviously mixing techniques can cause visual discontinuities but if it's just in the distance for some blobby shadows it's less of a big deal.

Some objects also disapear and reapear for a second or so sometimes.
...
There also still seems to be some discreet LODs for whole buildings. At some point, they gotta replace all the instances that make up a whole building for a single proxy model for very far distances, and that kind of simplification is out of the scope of nanite.

Right, there's HLOD stuff for the far distance, as usual. Nanite itself doesn't necessarily need HLOD to exist for its own efficiency, but there are lots of parts of the engine that can't necessarily handle the instance counts that Nanite can and thus it's still used to cut down and filter out various things in the distance from other systems (or just the raw number of actors, which are relatively heavy-weight on the CPU). In the future I'm sure there are better solutions but anything that affects the basics actor machinery in Unreal obviously has impacts on a wide range of user content.

Another common graphical issue is high geometric density models seen at a distance and grazing angles. That unavoidably creates moire-pattern artifacts beyond the limits of what their TAA can handle, so it stays forever twitching, until the camera moves closer.

Yes, as you note some amount of that is simply unavoidable (happens even in real life to some extent of course). There's some cleverness that TSR can apply to attempt to detect and clean some of it up a bit but I don't remember where that landed in terms of being enabled at what level for the demo or not.

 

[TEEDA]

They main problem with this demo is the missed opportunity to let us fly around as Neo instead of the generic drone cam lol.

haha right i also would have loved to be able to land or spawn on top of the buidlings.

 

[milk]

Here are some recordings I made. i love the chaos physic engine and the lighting.
Feels so real. Last city tech demo that reminded me of this was The getaway tech demo on PS3 haha. At least this time all the car plates are different.
https://streamable.com/awbw9r
https://streamable.com/dtbmxe
https://streamable.com/1yireg
https://streamable.com/zpt620

Nice. Those car piles give a much bigger apreciation for their dynamic GI. Those shadows between those cars are a sight to behold. Only game aproaching that level of contact shadow beauty was Quantum Break, but those were noisy as hell, and everything else in that game was a mess. Its instances such as these that the usual probe based aproximatins can't handle as gracefully. Good stuff!

 

[Karamazov]

after spending hours with that demo, i must say i felt like when the PS2 was revealed, that kind of leap that wowed me at the time.
i already had that feeling when they first showed UE5 in may 2020, but being able to actually see it and play with it, it was like the first time i tried the Metal Gear Solid 2 Demo on the PS2.
Thanks to all the people involved in the developpement of UE5, you did a great job, and i can't wait to play games that use it.

 

[Nesh]

I spent some time checking how Nanite handles triangles

Very weird logic with some objects but its crazy how many changes happen with the triangles based on angle and distance yet there is not a single visible change when all visual settings are turned on

 

[rabidrabbit]

after spending hours with that demo, i must say i felt like when the PS2 was revealed, that kind of leap that wowed me at the time.
i already had that feeling when they first showed UE5 in may 2020, but being able to actually see it and play with it, it was like the first time i tried the Metal Gear Solid 2 Demo on the PS2.
Thanks to all the people involved in the developpement of UE5, you did a great job, and i can't wait to play games that use it.

The Matrix demo is almost as impressive as this was

 

[Shortbread]

The Matrix demo is almost as impressive as this was

Sony was really pushing FUD about the PS3 capabilities. SMH.

 

[Shortbread]

after spending hours with that demo, i must say i felt like when the PS2 was revealed, that kind of leap that wowed me at the time.
i already had that feeling when they first showed UE5 in may 2020, but being able to actually see it and play with it, it was like the first time i tried the Metal Gear Solid 2 Demo on the PS2.
Thanks to all the people involved in the developpement of UE5, you did a great job, and i can't wait to play games that use it.

The demo is very impressive and next-gen, however, the shadow LoD issues (especially the NPC shadows popping in and out frames at certain distances), flickering interiors within certain buildings (more likely a bug), and the heavy use of motion blur tends to break immersion for me.

 

[PSman1700]

The most impressive aspect to me is that the XSS can run it relatively well, i'd expected the PS5/XSX to run UE5 engine/games since the engine has been showcased on both platforms before. The XSS has gotten negativety due to its low (ish) hardware but it seems to be able to tag along quite well this generation, albeit at lower resolutions and not the performance modes the premium consoles might offer. Someone on a tighter budget with a 1080p screen has a cheap alternative to get 'next gen' hardware at home. Also, their actually available.

Also looks like UE5 is a quite good scalable engine, if 4TF's of rdna2 can already give use-able results that could mean we have a nice engine at hands for multiplatform use. The recent addition of HW RT acceleration makes things very intresting on the pc side to see what can be done there with this amazing engine.
Now this is just a tech demo but hellblade 2's graphics which we had a hard time believing werent CGI, im now strongly believing that what we have seen of HB2 so far has been what we can expect, even on the XSS. While not the leap of previous gens, the leap this time is large enough to not complain about it at the least.

 

[Karamazov]

Sony was really pushing FUD about the PS3 capabilities. SMH.

Look closer. Characters, vehicules and buidings were not much detailed, lighting was great (but shadows low res up close). GTA5 was better in the end.

 

[Karamazov]

https://imgur.com/9karhoV

About those numbers, does that mean all the 45000 + 17000 cars are always rendered at any given time ? As i could not notice any car pop in (or out) anywhere.

 

[Shortbread]

Look closer. Characters, vehicules and buidings were not much detailed, lighting was great (but shadows low res up close). GTA5 was better in the end.

It's the amount of geometry, vehicles, NPCs, animation, and life-like interactions that's displayed in Getaway that was total BS.

 

[Karamazov]

it's just a London city place, not a whole city though, it's not that much, it was impressive because it was shown before even GTA4.
The same place was done then in Gran Turismo 5.



up close that looks pretty bad compared to GTA5

 

[Shortbread]

it's just a London city place, not a whole city though, it's not that much, it was impressive because it was shown before even GTA4.
The same place was done then in Gran Turismo 5.

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up close that looks pretty bad compared to GTA5

I'm not simply talking about aesthetics and artistry, I'm talking about the amount of activity, animations, population density, traffic density, and interactions going on. PS3 GTA 4 edition wasn't even remotely close to showing the amount of things/activities/interactions going on screen as seen in the TG3 demo. If I'm not mistaken, The Getaway 3 playable demo failed to impress because so much was stripped from the original reveal demo.