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

- Some people claim that a laptop ran the demo.

A laptop ran the UE5 demo with undisclosed detail settings. There's no indication that the laptop rendered the demo with the same settings they used for the video.
 
- Some people claim that a laptop ran the demo.

Not some people, an actual Epic Engineer. They said their laptop can run the demo in Editor mode. This was said to bolster claims that Epic has a lot more optimizations still to perform for these new subsystems but are seeing good results so far in the few months since March and how their aim is 60 FPS by the time they reach Early Access in 2021.
 
There are two claims here being repeated over and over:
  1. Only PS5 can run the UE5 nanite/lumen demo with that level of detail because it requires the PS5 SSD to stream in the content on the fly.
  2. A laptop with an RTX2080 was able to run the same demo with the same details and resolution at 40fps.
We don't know that either of this claims are true. They both could be potentially true, or they both could potentially be false. I can imagine scenarios where 1 could be true, and I can imagine that 2 could be true. It doesn't mean that they are.

Just the fact that they're aiming for 60fps on console tells me their performance is quite a ways off of where they expect it to be, so there probably isn't much point in putting too much stock in the performance numbers right now.
 
It would be interesting seeing this demo running on ps4-pro and more one x.... as I know the new unreal engine runs also on old gen console
 
After we become really tired about all this repetition that now moves from texture to geometry, ...well, this is why cloud streaming seems the only way to move forward.
I do not want to depend on always online. We'll see how good artists are at hiding repetition, but sooner or later there won't be any alternative. :/

Could always figure out runtime substance designer! Or hell, runtime substance designer + shader graph stuff for 99% procedural art. Trade memory for performance, classic thermodynamics at play.

That and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is online only for this exact reason. It's not some economically dubious cloud compute scheme (Nvidia has to be losing money on Geforce Now right?) but they do stream the art assets to you to avoid whatever ridiculous install size a high res recreation of the entire planet takes up.
 
...he said their laptops ran the opening scene at 40fps in the editor (assets not fully “cooked”).

When running on the laptop, the Epic engineer stated that the assets were not fully cooked.

People seem to want to ignore this part. I don't interpret that as saying the details are the same. Sounds very much like a compromise.

As far as we're all aware, that laptop's GPU is directly equivalent to the PS5's. So if the assets aren't fully "cooked", then this is highly likely to be because the storage device cannot keep up with the data streaming.
 
Could always figure out runtime substance designer! Or hell, runtime substance designer + shader graph stuff for 99% procedural art.
I often thought about this, but some simple procedural worley and perlin noise... is it still good enough? And layers of that already have some cost. So you would like to precompute on asset load. Why a fast SSD then? Just stream and display would no longer work.
It's much more attractive to do it offline, so results are really good, and just compress it as usual. I think even Substance designer is not enough anymore for the purpose. I consider to utilize fluid simulation and curvature fields to guide material growth and placement. This could give good quality, but realtime is out of reach.

For artists the workflow of browsing Quixel assets and build your stuff from that seems also quite restricted. Can't model every bit with Zbrush and add all those details. So a leap in procedural geometery tools is also necessary. Just placement of scanned building blocks is not enough either.
Now we could make those tools, but then we get too much unique geometry. Not enough instancing, not enough storage.

What's the solution? Using less details for less needs of instancing? To have more freedom to create more unique worlds?
Technically it would not work. Because at some distance there is no difference if we use poly at centimeter or miliimeter level. At some distance it's all the same, and memory requirements do not change because of less detail. Because LOD switch only happens at sub pixel level, memory will be always full with tiny triangles.

So that's the missing part. How do they handle LOD if subpixel detail is not possible, and discrete switches become visible above that?
I'm curious about this, also for mobiles or other low power platforms.
 
When running on the laptop, the Epic engineer stated that the assets were not fully cooked.

People seem to want to ignore this part. I don't interpret that as saying the details are the same. Sounds very much like a compromise.

As far as we're all aware, that laptop's GPU is directly equivalent to the PS5's. So if the assets aren't fully "cooked", then this is highly likely to be because the storage device cannot keep up with the data streaming.

Or that they haven't been optimized to the same degree. We simply don't know. Anyone making definitive statements like "the PS5 SSD is required to run this demo" or a "PC with a mobile 2080 runs it with better performance" has no solid basis for doing so, and is simply speculating.
 
It would be interesting seeing this demo running on ps4-pro and more one x.... as I know the new unreal engine runs also on old gen console

Really? I thought SSD was essential and this was an engine designed for next gen (ie not held back by HDDs). Why even have it run on this gen? Who will start developing games for this gen in 2021 that can’t use UE4?
 
When running on the laptop, the Epic engineer stated that the assets were not fully cooked.

People seem to want to ignore this part. I don't interpret that as saying the details are the same. Sounds very much like a compromise.
Or the very opposite, and despite not being properly optimised, they were still getting 40 fps. There's zero information to be gleaned from what we know. It's too vague for reliable interpretation.
 
Or that they haven't been optimized to the same degree. We simply don't know. Anyone making definitive statements like "the PS5 SSD is required to run this demo" or a "PC with a mobile 2080 runs it with better performance" has no solid basis for doing so, and is simply speculating.
Except Tim Sweeney was explicitly asked why the demo was shown on a PS5 and not a PC, to which he very clearly answered it was because of SSD speed and data decompression.



Why don't we stop claiming that some stuff is still "up in the air" when the engine makers have been very clear about what made this particular rendering run possible?
Sure, the demo can scale down to lower performance levels: lower compute, lower I/O effective speeds, lower memory bandwidth, etc. It will most definitely scale up too. The visuals we saw in last weeks' video were made realtime on a PS5, and they weren't made on a PC because it can't be done on a PC.

UE5 is still coming to the PC. It's obviously coming to the SeriesX, and the Switch, and Android, and iOS. I bet it's even coming to MacOS. There's no need to worry about that.
Whether or not any of the other platforms can replicate last week's video that fetches new geometry from storage multiple times per frame, that's a whole other story.
And that's okay, because I'm sure Epic will find other ways to compensate for the other platforms' advantages and disadvantages. Even if it requires loading times and >=32GB RAM on a PC, for example.
 
Why don't we stop claiming that some stuff is still "up in the air" when the engine makers have been very clear about what made this particular rendering run possible?
Because it is, and you're dismissing that just to secure a narrative that only PS5's IO makes it possible.

Sure, the demo can scale down to lower performance levels: lower compute, lower I/O effective speeds, lower memory bandwidth, etc. It will most definitely scale up too. The visuals we saw in last weeks' video were made realtime on a PS5, and they weren't made on a PC because it can't be done on a PC.
We don't know that. This discussion is about identifying whether that's the case or not, not the least because we have an Epic engineer showcasing a demo of UE5 running on PC on a very fast (3.5 GB/s) SSD. There are pages and pages covering the dissemination of various tweets and articles! eg. When asked about PC, someone (Sweeney?) said a 2070 and fast SSD would get good results.

There are several fragments of info that don't all fit. Until Epic provide a technical presentation, we need to crunch the numbers, for the fun of it. That means not ignoring any possibilities just because they don't fit our assumptions or prejudices.
 
Again, another tweet from Tim Sweeney saying hardware decompression is crucial to the demo as we saw it:






Because it is, and you're dismissing that just to secure a narrative that only PS5's IO makes it possible.
Quotation needed. Where did I ever say only PS5's IO makes it possible?

Fast storage and hardware decompression is what makes it possible, as explained by the engine makers, and that makes two possible candidates for making this possible: the PS5 and the SeriesX.

There are no hardware decompression solutions for the PC.
Willfully ignoring Epic CEO's very clear statements about why the demo was run on a PS5 and not a PC makes me wonder who's trying to secure what narrative.


This discussion is about identifying whether that's the case or not, not the least because we have an Epic engineer showcasing a demo of UE5 running on PC on a very fast (3.5 GB/s) SSD.
A demo of UE5 != rendering this in real time.
Of course they can showcase UE5 on a PC. They couldn't have developed the whole engine on PS5 and SeriesX devkits, could they? Why is this even in question?

When asked about PC, someone (Sweeney?) said a 2070 and fast SSD would get good results.
Sweeney wrote that UE5 would run great on PS5, SeriesX and high-end PCs, with features that can scale down the content to present-day hardware (hence the laptop running it).
I don't recall him saying anything about a particular discrete GPU, or a fast SSD on a PC:

 
Or that they haven't been optimized to the same degree. We simply don't know. Anyone making definitive statements like "the PS5 SSD is required to run this demo" or a "PC with a mobile 2080 runs it with better performance" has no solid basis for doing so, and is simply speculating.
Did I speak in absolute terms about the PS5's SSD being a requirement? I merely pointing out the obvious discrepancy.

If the assets are not fully loading, then it does imply a bottleneck in the system. If the system engineers are stating that the SSD is being utilised, then we can fairly safely assume that it's the most likely culprit. Slow streaming seems to match pretty well with assets not being "cooked", no?

By the way, I have no doubt that a PC will always be faster than a console. It just may be required to get faster SSDs in order to prevent hitching or data not properly loading.

And also, we dont know the speed of that PC's SSD. Others may very well be fast enough.
 
It doesnt seem strange that a rtx2070 pc with a fast nvme (3.5gb/s?) can run that demo at the same settings. Highly doubt anyone has already tapped the ps5 ssd to its fullest yet (if that will ever happen, cause you know, the rest of the system must cope with the ssd also).

I think any ’concerns’ regarding I/O are unfounded for ps5, xsx and 2020 and on high end pc’s. If there will be a difference you wont notice it, perhaps the pc version coming out ahead like usual, a 20tf 3080Ti zen3 setup with a 7gb/s drive and gobs of ram with the velocity arch will be the showstopper, at a price atleast 5 times a console.

All have nvme ssd now, atleast 100x over current designs/hw. One might be more efficient, another brute force, and another compression tech. All will be fine.
 
Because it is, and you're dismissing that just to secure a narrative that only PS5's IO makes it possible.

But surely an engine can be made that would directly make use of the hardware that's available? Just as the same engine will make use of the extra 2tflops on the Xbox Seeies X, or the RTRT capabilities of the next Nvidia card.

If Epic have been working with Sony on this engine, which they have stated. The we can only assume that it has the capacity to make use of the significant IO capabilities. Surely that makes logical sense?

It's a bit lile people saying that deveopers will not make use of the extra compute in the Xbox because they can't conceptualise it. Doesn't mean it won't happen.
 
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It doesnt seem strange that a rtx2070 pc with a fast nvme (3.5gb/s?) can run that demo at the same settings.

Were they the same settings? As far as we can tell, the data were not properly loading. If the assets are not properly there, then it's likely that the laptop would be performing faster than if they were. It's a bit like settings being lowered.

Any comments that suggest that the IO and decompression of the PS5 will not be able to be fully utilised will not age well.
 
Were they the same settings?
I havent been following too closely, but this to me makes the most sense, unless someone can point to where they say they were using the exact same setting as the ps5 demo on the laptop.
It was running in the editor, which typically you want to run less optimized build lower quality anyways for faster development time
 
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