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

Again, this is just a weird take. I don't know what this is trying to prove. Sure, if you removed nanite you couldn't have that city with basically infinite draw distance and near perfect lod scaling. Is that supposed to be a knock, or is it just illustrating how great the technology is? And the reality is, it does have nanite. That's the whole point of tech demo.

 

Are people really saying that?
Myself its always better pixels > more pixels. Actually not just # of pixels, basically anything in life, quality > quantity

Actually now I think about it others have disagreed with me about this in the past.

The DOF in this demo looks very nice, maybe the best I've seen
Also the lighting just on a different level considering its dynamic

 

I really don't expect this to be the case. Sure, maybe in terms of budget for staff polishing a game, but I seriously doubt this game has a huge CPU load and is going to buckle the moment you add some basic gameplay scripting. Not all parts of a game draw from the same performance pool, and ue5's renderer is heavily gpu compute driven (like other modern renderers). This demo has lots animations and physics, the main often-gpu-accelerated expensive things we hadn't seen alongside nanite previously

If you look at the naysayers in this thread, a lot of the complaints seem to be about resolution or temporal stability vs ps4 titles, yeah.

 

I have never spoken about miles morales? So why bring that up in my post.
My point is I would like to see them get the framerate up (perhaps reducing the resolution) We have seen in practically all the faceoffs with 30 vs 60fps, the majority of ppl go for 60fps, if that means for the ps5/xsx to render at 1080p so be it. 1080p still looks good, its what ppl were using last gen, and now we can have that resolution but with much prettier pixels

 

Andrew posted a bit back that there is a good amount of CPU headroom to take care of game logic and the rest not found in this demo.

 

People are allowed to like different things, so don't take this as criticism for having a different point of view. There is baked gi, but it places limitations on the environment. There are fully real-time dynamic gi implementations, but would they work with nanite and have reasonable performance? Does any other game have the draw distance and seamless level of detail? If you look at lumen in isolation, does it look better than other GI implementations. Probably not. But the whole point is that it works with nanite. You don't have to choose between nanite and gi. You can do both. You don't have to choose between static or dynamic geometry to have gi. You can do both. Looking at each piece in isolation is missing that they all work together.

 

Personally, I'll probably never play a game at 30 or 60 fps ever again. If I can't run it higher, I'll skip it. But that's just a personal preference. Doesn't do anything to diminish the technical accomplishments of this demo.

 

The MM part wasn't aimed at you, but seemed like a good illustration for 30 vs 60 fps gameplay as others had used it in that context. As a PC gamer I've honestly never really understood the fascination with high framerates. 60fps+ is actually required for some genres (mostly FPS) but I'm quite happy with a solid smooth 30fps in most others and would generally choose to configure my games for that framerate and maximised graphics rather than sacrifice graphics to achieve 60fps. That's not to say that all other things being equal 60fps isn't better of course, it is. And 120fps is better again. But after a short while at 30fps I think you get used to it to the point where it's a total non issue. Again, provided it's smooth and the genre is correct.

 

The FXguide article states the same

"The final experience however is indicative of what is possible for a game, running on a PS5 or XBox Series X/S there is still a lot of CPU headroom that would allow a game designer to run the normal mechanics of a game. The team did not want to build a demo that was unrealistic for what a new AAA game would be able to achieve."

 

Can you link? I couldn't find it. Good adaptive pathfinding AI is still not that common in driving games. Forza Horizon 5, which is 100% a driving game, has some ropey cheating AI whereas GTA has vehicles (size, weight, power, acceleration feeding into physics/inertia) that plays by the rules. I'm sure these are conscious decisions rather than the Forza team just dialling-in their AI. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

I am hoping we will get a 40FPS option in most future games that cant reach 60FPS, either with VRR or 120/3.

Considering my back log it is possible I will be playing UE5 games on a XBSXX or a PS5Pro at hopefully 60FPS.

 

What this demo is doing very well is combining GI with high density assets (nanite) and RT reflections in a big map on console for the first time AFAIK. I wouldn't say open world because it's has very limited interactivity being a demo. But it's a very good basis for a multiplatform engine (and this is exactly that apparently) that will have to run on very different machines with very different I/O capabilities, including maybe Switch and PCs with HDDs. The fact that it loads faster on XSS than on PS5 clearly shows that they aren't even using the custom I/O on PS5, at least for the main loadings, which is really a shame (and odd) after last year demo.

As such I think I was more impressed by the first demo running on PS5. The last part showcasing assets loaded on the fly was very impressive, even on a video, and actually new, still new if we ignore Ratchet onrails sections, and the 30fps wasn't impacting the wow factor of that.

But while overall it's very good at combining all those technologies the main problem is that it's only 30fps which will destroy every pixels in motion. They maybe aimed for a too high average resolution. With TSR and the quality of the textures they should lower the resolution and aim for 60fps. I can't forget how incredible GI can be on a very dynamic open world game (way more dynamic than here) at locked 60fps like Exodus (even if it's noticeably less sharp and with lower quality of assets).

Some people are quite happy with XSS 864p + TSR at 30fps (I think obviously because of GI + nanite + high quality textures), with a few optimizations couldn't it run at average ~1080p + TSR at 60fps on PS5 and XSX? Finally I wonder if those RT reflections are not actually detrimental to the otherwise excellent GI (the best thing for me in that demo). They are really low quality (noisy?) and can look awful at times but here I am probably spoiled by Insomniac reflections.

But at what cost? when you start creating car collisions (with like with just a dozen cars) the framerate is worse than early PS3 games (I have seen down to 16fps on PS5).

 

My mistake i was thinking of this post.
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2232700/

 

To me 30fps is too low, 40 or 45 is about the lowest you want to go. Its a pity TVs were 60hz in the US, if we used the PAL 50hz standard then 50fps games would of been standard (though prolly a lot of devs would of snuck in some 25hz games as well )
First video I get from youtube 60fps vs 30fps

Are you saying the 30fps looks better to you?
Perhaps its my old eyes, but it tires me, I would take something looking worse but more fluid any day.
We dont have to revist this FPS topic, Im sure its been done to death 100s of times on these forums. So dont answer my question, its just rhetorical

I had another quick look at the matrix demo, superb, best yet dada yada but Im looking as a person watching a movie on yuotube, if I was playing the game with thecar driving part where FPS looks to be a lot lower than 30fps, it just wouldnt feel right playing. Perhaps its OK, some ppl here have played it can tell you if its OK.

 

Thanks! That's why I couldn't find it - it wasn't in a quote under a different name.

I really do hope UE5 can turn in a decent performance,ance at 60fps. I have got used to almost all games being 60fps (and some 120fps) and this demo - as technically impressive as it is - is a reminder of why I do not wish to return to 30fps.

 

https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-matrix-is-unreal/

According to this article, yes

 

Sure but like... this is not trying to be a full AAA open world game, which would require a much larger team and a much larger amount of time. It is trying to show that you could make a AAA open world in Unreal Engine 5. I don't really think they ever pitched it as anything other than a tech demo so I must admit I'm puzzled by all the comparisons of the form "but it doesn't have all these features that a full AAA game does".

The pivot to foliage is also a little weird to me. Sure foliage is another problem in and of itself, but obviously you could have 'regular game amounts of foliage' in UE5 because you can already have that in UE4. But there's not a lot of foliage in the Matrix movies either... When they release the assets feel free to just go drop some of your own in the scene, but I'm not sure why anyone would expect typical game foliage would be a particular problem. Certainly dense forests is something that would be great to handle even better in the future, but you can't do everything in every demo, nor would you really even want to I think.

Whether or not you personally care about fully dynamic lighting on an open-world-sized scene with extremely high levels of detail and minimal pop-in, I assume most people can admit this is something that a lot of people - and specifically developers - *do* care about. Obviously I'm biased, but that to me is the main achievement of this demo; the rest of it is proof of concept level stuff to convince folks that none of this is being faked.

 

Thanks for the response. I agree. In my earlier posts I was a) speculating could be achieved if the target was 60fps, but also b) what could be delivered with an actual game running. I hadn't seen the comments regarding their being ample headroom for that which @techuse subsequently linked.

I didn't post anything about foliage or dynamic lighting, that must have been other people.

I was genuinely impressed with the demo. It's the first "holy crap" I've uttered using my PS5 since the first few weeks of getting it at launch. I spent a good hour just messing about with it and it'll definitely get shown off when friends and family visit at Christmas.

 

I assume XSS will be using lower resolution textures and possibly other elements than the PS5. Therefore having less to load and thus loading faster.

The 60fps is definitely better, I just don't think it's better by a significant enough margin in a lot of genres to be worth halving my render budget with the associated loss of graphical fidelity that brings. Obviously if I can max out the game at reasonable resolution (not necessarily 4k) then I'll take the higher frame rate every time. But if I have to deal with noticeably lower settings or obvious aliasing to achieve 60fps, I'll happily drop back to 30fps in those genres that can accommodate it.

 

Did anyone else turn on the instances view? The buildings are made of a handful of repeating instances. It's an obvious thing, given the nature of buildings, but I thought it was neat to see that they were kitbashed together.