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

I'm just entirely blown away by the UE5 videos I've been seeing. Amazing, gorgeous, spectacular, exceeding my expectations, delighting me, and in general making me think it'll be a good thing.

 

What this demo absolutely nails, which is obviously the aim, is to achieve the visual aesthetic of the Matrix movies; the green hue, a very specific lighting style etc.

The demo made me want to watch the movies, and I re-watched the original movie and Reloaded and yeah. That so nailed that look.

 

[Semiot]matrix movies? There's only The Matrix. Reloaded and whatnot don't exist.[/Semiot]

The demo looked great at least on YouTube, hopefully we'll get similar pieces for PC Master Race sooner rather than later

 

So like many other titles, a combination of SSR and hardware RT is at play here. SSR is used for small objects (likely particles too), while RT is used for big objects (buildings, cars, people). However I think PS5 and XSS are using 1/3 RT reflection resolution with several objects discarded from the BVH structure (like shadows and reflections within reflections). However, some surfaces like puddles and cars during the daylight use just cubemaps, though during the night cars use RT.

I hope the PC version will have RT cover more objects and surfaces and at a bigger resolution.

 

Sorry if this has been brought up before but does anyone else find interesting that The Coalition, who is arguably the best UE developer in the Xbox side, had to be brought to optimize the demo on XSS/XSX and even after that, it runs worse (framerate-wise) than the PS5 version?

Two possibilities I can think of:
- Either Epic doesn't have the knowledge to optimize their own engine on those platforms, which seems unlikely
- Or the XSS/XSX hardware is not really well suited to run something like this

Seeing as UE is one of the most, if not the most, used engine across third parties I don't think it bodes well for comparisons across platforms. If I were Microsoft I'd undoubtedly give in to every demand Epic has when developing a hardware console

Another thing interesting is UE running better on the PS5 when none of their first party studios use it.

 

No. Not really. I've seen people say Sony also helped out. In reality it's likely they were pulled in because they wanted it to be the best possible it could be.

 

I "played" the demo on PS5. The way they can mimic the movie look&feel is really great. At the same time, the movie grain can't hide the fact that's it's very blurry imo. So, while impressive on some aspects, in the end, I wouldn't want stay a lot of time in a game looking like that.

 

Can you point to some of the people that said Sony also helped out? Is there any proof of that?
Even taking your point for granted, Xbox not being able to keep up even with the involvement of one of their best studios seems worrying to me.

 

cars seems to use RT (+SSR and maybe cubemaps) in daytime too.

 

Not really. The metrics should be leveraged as a data point to see how well they can handle “future” gen titles. I wouldn’t use these as good data for actual performance between the two systems.

Coalition was brought in to make the demo fit in memory; an optimization requirement that has to exist on Xbox but doesn’t on PS5 due to the differences in pool splits. I wouldnt take coalition getting involved to meaning re-writing shaders etc to maximize the hardware.

 

Looks like automatic city creation marked the other side as window for building interior.

Showcases the new interior mapping method nicely.
Classic room walls with analytic intersection, combined with apparently two layer POM/relief mapping for all those furniture etc.

 

In addition to that, any contributions to The Matrix Awakens that The Coalition did likely also greatly benefitted the PS5 version. While there might be some optimizations that The Coalition did that only benefit the XBS consoles, I'd be surprised if the vast majority didn't also carry over to the PS5 version.

Regards,
SB

 

So it seems the culprit for the major fps drops in the demo is the work in progress in streaming assets and assets initiation on the CPU, as well as deformation of nanite meshes. They said they will fix it soon enough. Also they stressed out that Nanite streams in data 10MB/s in the open world, an HDD could very well service that.

 

They said from the off its more about seek times than bandwidth.

 

I know it’s not a game and that’s irrelevant to my complaints. UE5 delivers poor performance on next gen consoles. 100% of the time it’s been shown, it’s delivered poor performance. I’ve moved 2 of my projects from UE4 to UE5 just to mess with nanite and lumen and even on my 3080, the performance is simply not good enough.

 

What are you contributing 'of note'? You're just repeating how unimpressed you are. When people point out the unique things this engine is doing, you just hand-wave them away.

And yes, that's exactly what you argued:

I mean, the entire point of realtime graphics engines is to give the impression of infinite details. UE5 isn't producing "infinite details" for the hell of it, it's giving the impression of that better than previous attempts we've seen so far through a combination of many techniques. To postulate that there's a better version of this engine (a year away from release) out there that can be far more performant....because all engine makers need to do is 'hide stuff better' is something that's just begging to be poked fun at. It's an absolutely ridiculous statement.

Your posts perhaps aren't garnering likes because you're bravely swimming upstream against the supposedly blinkered masses here, they're just generally hyperbolic and making weak arguments - if they're making any at all.

 

I did notice they mentioned that the performance of UE5 sucks on their 3080, first I've heard of PC performance unless I missed something.

They seems a bit unused to some of our social norms, but that don't mean they might not be able to contribute. We got enough fanboys like me to drool over how gorgeous it is, we need people who are critical of it too and not just in awe.

 

Yeah that part in particular I thought was very good. You really don't want to be loading content and rendering models for those interiors so the shortcuts they're doing whilst maintaining perspective shift is excellent. If it allows filling of large skyscrapers and buildings with "interiors" that cast light as well then I'm all for this method of fakery.