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

Indeed I think it's getting obvious that this is mainly a demo to show off their brand new GI + RT and improved nanite on all consoles after the first demo exclusive to PS5 that was showcasing nanite + I/O (loading of new assets on the fly).

 

I'm more impressed with the fact they've built a semi-functioning open world city for this demo than with the visual results themselves. They are good, but not jaw-dropping.

Comparable to Miles Morales indeed. And at a lower resolution and framerate while at it...

I'll check it in my big screen later, but my hunch is the facial animation is not up there with the best in the industry right now, and maybe that's making the cinematics look worse than they really are.

Cloth physics popped out to me. The GI wasn't really that noticeable, though. For the scenes they are doing there, an old-school probe grid would probavly have sufficed, as much as I hate to admit that...

The 2000's ish harsh color-grading was nostalgic. A lot of ps2 games went for that kind of look (without the modern HDR colour grading tools we have today) In fact, I think the recent Remaster of GTA III was missing a bit of that kind of tone-mapping to. It was part of the personality in the first game of the ps2 triology. They say fashion and aesthetics resurge in 20 year cycles. That means soon emulating that 2000's look will become cool again like vaporwave was a couple years ago...

 

ok, THAT was the most impressive aspect of the demo...

 

This being a Series S is still blowing my mind.

Here Here @Andrew Lauritzen

I'm going to give you guys some cheers.
The Matrix Awakens is an unmissable next-gen showcase • Eurogamer.net

From DF:

• The city is 4,138 km wide and 4.968 km long, slightly larger than the size of downtown Los Angeles
• The city surface is 15.79 km2
• The city perimeter is 14.519 km long
• There are 260 km of roads in the city
• There are 512 km of sidewalk in the city
• There are 1,248 intersections in the city
• There are 45,073 parked cars, of which 38,146 are drivable and destructible
• There are 17,000 simulated traffic vehicles on the road that are destructible
• 7,000 buildings
• 27,848 lamp posts on the street side only
• 12,422 sewer holes
• Almost 10 million unique and duplicated assets were created to make the city
• The entire world is lit by only the sun, sky and emissive materials on meshes. No light sources were placed for the tens of thousands of street lights and headlights. In night mode, nearly all lighting comes from the millions of emissive building windows
• 35,000 simulated MetaHuman pedestrians
• Average polygon count? 7000k buildings made of 1000s of assets and each asset could be up to millions of polygons so we have several billions of polygons to make up just the buildings of the city

 

What I find interesting in this demo is that people appear black within the nanite view. Probably because they aren't going through nanite.

Now, if you damage a car then the whole body of that car will turn black as well. Does that mean that the moment the deformation happens the object gets moved from nanite to a different system? And thus UE5 is capable of quickly switching objects/models between different systems?

 

I think they use Niagara for destruction IIRC.

 

Are the first 3 minutes also real-time rendered?

 

After spending some time with this demo, I'm even less impressed than I was yesterday. The tech demo looks okay and frankly, apart from the density, it's not revolutionary at all. I think developers have gotten good at faking it with several tricks(Baked GI, High Res Cubemaps, Good SSR) that when you get real thing, it fails to impress.

The resolution, framerate, TAA ghosting, animations and physics ranged from average to awful. As a whole package, its at best a step sideways from what we've seen so far and in some categories, it's a clear regression. I was more impressed by the showing of ARC Raiders than I was of this tech demo.

At the end of the day, most consumers don't care if you're using real time GI or Baked GI, SSR or RT, etc. They care about the results and frankly, after all the hype from Geoff, this was thoroughly unimpressive.

 

Yeah it really showcases the huge leap we get to see in just a year.

 

Some people (very overrepresented in tech enthusiast forums) would rather see something from the 90s at 8k, 16xmsaa, no temporal artifacts, etc, than something that looks photo real at 1440p.

Cart leading the horse on desire for visual clarity from new hardware.

Not that surprising by the way Nanite works -- There's not very much to load up front, and whats on screen any frame should be well within either ssd's ability. More traditional loading would be needed for the non nanite parts only.

 

I don't want to argue about it, we are clearly seeing 2 different things and we won't be able to meet. There are games that require certain things for visual game design to work. But if the goal is to make an adventure game look as good as possible, this is it.

The demo is 27GB as well.

 

Even that initial front load should be faster.
Would expect PS5 to at least be second+ faster.
How much GB can be loaded in about 5 secs is probably Intresting in this context.

 

I definitely don't want to be defending Tim Sweeney, but when then statements like this are made it's based on what 40Tf could achieve with the technology at the time. As time goes on, a flop delivers more - sometimes marginally, sometimes drastically.

This tech demo [on PS5] impressed me, but I'm curious what they would need to sacrifice to get this running at a solid 60fps.

 

Isn't that a good thing?

Yes indeed that is what happens. Nanite does not support deformation currently so when cars are deformed they get swapped to non-nanite versions.

I'll refrain from commenting too much on the specifics for now as I enjoy reading people's reactions, but for folks saying this is not that different from any other game, I really encourage you to go up high and view the whole city (hell rotate the sun ), then go zoom in super close on the detail in the scene as there's some pretty insane stuff even in places where you would never normally get that close. In some cases there are more polygons in some random roof greebles that are never in view from the ground than in entire buildings in other games. A few examples in these shots (yes... that's really geometry for the chain link fences), but it's all over the place:


This is of course a tech demo with a relatively small dev team/timeline compared to a real game (let alone a full open world one). Still, while stylistically it may not work for everyone, from a technical point of view I do believe it sets some new bars in terms of detail levels in a fully dynamically lit large world on a console.

Aside: before everyone was complaining about there only being rock demos and wondering if Nanite could do anything else like a city. Now you're complaining about cities

 

The demo likely has a lot of preloading happening behind the scenes.

 

I m trying to download The Matrix demo on PS5 and it tells me that It cant find what I m looking for. Anyone else having the same problem?

 

Yes, I was going to make commentary how well the it renders fairly identically on both consoles.

 

If I may ask, do chain link fences (or any see-through fence) work well in nanite?! I expected that was the type of aggregate geo that wouldn't LOD/cluster well.

 

It is pretty cool, I liked it even though I’m not immediately blown away, partly due to some frame pacing issues and weird lighting stuff.

I noticed something strange with the people too. First of all they seem to have limited hair styles and clothing and second they are pretty dumb still. I found a girl stuck walking in front of a lantern post and funnily enough when I returned later she had been replaced by a guy, so I think people are on fixed paths and occasionally swapped out with other physical manifestations when out of viewing range.

But the draw distance is really nice. When you fly up with the drone and keep looking back down that stays good and sharp and no obvious pop in or out.

 

There's no silver bullet for a lot of that stuff, but I find at least with the fences they tend to work at least as well as alpha test (sorted blend can of course be better, but is not realistic for most games). Alpha test is obviously not exactly a high bar, but it's the current baseline.

Trees are more hit and miss depending on the leaf configuration. But yeah, take a look in the demo at the fences and grates and overhead signs and roof detail and all that. There's tons of really fine-detail geometric modeled stuff so curious how other people feel it holds up on closer inspection.