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

I was only running on a 1440p monitor. I think the default settings also have it cap the render resolution at 1440ish.

Are we sure there's no TSR happening there? Note there's some semi-complex interactions that determine the resolution scaling in editor and the logic differs from running it as a standalone game. From the video he seemed to conclude it was 4k because it "looked pretty sharp". In my experience TSR can look pretty damn close to 100% especially on high dpi displays. The best way I know of to verify the render resolution is to use "profilegpu" and go find the TSR pass in there (which will be tagged with the various resolutions). That said, part of the point in TSR and the like is that the idea of "native" isn't really something that exists so much these days; if it looks good, it looks good.

In any case the video is pretty similar to the speeds I was seeing, albeit less stutter (but they are in editor, so gonna be more).

 

I'm sure it won't hurt but I don't think it's a silver bullet for these specific cases either.

I took a quick look in the profiler while running through the startup sequence yesterday and none of it looked like IO stuff directly:
1) Was mostly PSO compiles (as expected the first time)
2) Next most common was graphics driver stalls while creating resources/adjusting pool sizes. That sort of thing is a common target for IHVs to tweak buffer sizes, defrag timing, etc. for shipped games so sort of to be expected with a non-tuned workload as well. I imagine it will get better over time in drivers as well, especially now that we've forced people onto DX12 (thank god).
3) Remainder of the stalls I saw were things like spawning/deleting a ton of actors in a frame or something, which are demo issues in things like the crowd/traffic system that can also be improved over time (these systems are not core UE per se). These were the minority though.
Nothing looked categorically scary. The PSO situation sucks in general on PC, but there are some ways to mitigate that with PSO caches for a shipping game. A bunch of these stalls are because drivers are still doing rather conservative things (i.e. recompiling every hit shader in the scene) when it comes to RT PSO linking and that will likely improve further now that we've forced the issue as well.

Admittedly UE is a giant thing at this point, and certainly there's aspects on the CPU that are non-ideal. That said, I didn't see anything fundamentally unsolvable or needing esoteric tech here. The GPU side is already running quite smoothly and will only improve further.

 

I don't think anything has changed with that: there are no plans to release that demo that I know of. I was never privy to the full reasoning behind that and I think it's a bummer too because it's a great looking demo, even today. Runs even better than it did at the time of course since the engine has come a long way since then. It sucks, but it is what it is.

The Matrix demo is a pretty good example I think, specifically if you turn off or minimize the cars and crowds stuff which is a large part of what makes it heavy. Running the "small city" level is a bit lighter on the CPU as well, but with the same visuals and similar GPU workload. Small city w/o traffic/crowds should run well on a wide variety of systems and is a good example of how to make fast, good looking Nanite scenes I think.

As for the CPU part of Matrix, I don't think it's bad, but I also imagine people will be able to optimize that stuff better in the future as well. It's a reasonable proof of concept, but any AAA open world game would be using their own tech for all that gameplay code anyways. But to be fair it's also doing a step up on what a lot of current open world games do by continuing to simulate persistent cars throughout the whole world at some level.

 

... Nanite? Not really "windows"-specific, but need support for 64-bit atomics which there's no way to do on Mac at the moment (and probably not soon, since the Apple hardware does not support it yet AFAIK.)

 

Wow that's very disappointing. I think what makes it even worse is that it was presented that the assets from the demo were released and available and that we could "dig in".
But if you slowly study the demo. More than half the assets are not even on the megascan library (and im not even referring to the architectural assets).
And the ones that are, we don't even know what they are outside of Limestone Quarry. For example I know they used acouple assets from the Iceland library just from studying the demo.

For example the Icelandic rock assembly & Icelandic Lava Outcrop asset.
Other than that i can't pin point 100% what other assets they used.
So for those of us who want to recreate parts of that level for study, it leaves us dumbfounded.
The least that could have been done is to give us a full list of all used asset that's available.
Like the mega-scan assets are already out there already. I don't understand why we are not given a full list. Even a text style format list would suffice. It really grieves me that it has to be this way. It really sucks.

 

This is a technical thread. Subjective statements like that aren't welcome - if you have criticism, explain it on a technical level.

 

That was true for the subsequent demos (and they were indeed released), but I don't recall any implications from Reverb that all the assets were going to be released even early on.

I mean no... the least most companies do with demos is release the video, especially when it's heavily pre-release stuff. I assume you're not actually implying that Epic is in some way being more closed with high quality assets than.... well I can't even think of another company that gives away as many high quality game assets offhand.

I guess it's kind of compliment in a way that you're upset at the one thing they haven't (for whatever reasons). Please do keep that in perspective though.

 

Oh by no means. they are single handily leading the indie dev revolution. I think how AAA shaders and how AAA games are created would still be shrouded in secrecy if it wasn't for them opening the curtains and giving us full access to everything.
Today i know pretty much how AAA game development is done at every level due to the advent of UE4, the AAA assets and high quality example content they have freely released. UE4 literally was the red pill of game dev.

 

...figuratively speaking...

 

It's quite remarkable that Epic builds these samples and distributes them free to essentially everyone.. so a massive kudos to them for that.

I'd be lying if I said that I was happy with how they've handled things on the PC side thus far though, despite that. I know there's likely good reasons why something like "The Matrix Awakens" wasn't released as a full compiled demo on PC with the Keanu and Carrie Ann Moss assets. I think as things get more and more realistic.. it gets far riskier to having assets like that on a platform where people can very easily misappropriate said assets. Who knows.. it could get pretty touchy in the future with some actors perhaps not wanting their "digital double" easily accessible and mod-able by any kid with a PC. I'm sure those assets were never created with the intention to be released to the public in the first place and it was all for publicity with the Matrix movie release. I understand why it would be on consoles only. I get it. Hell, the reason why they have us play the demo as some new character and not Keanu or Carrie Ann, is likely because it was always built to be an open world sample and they cleverly designed the whole thing to serve multiple purposes. Can't blame them for that.

As a PC guy and someone who's very interested in graphics and real-time graphics.. I've always LOVED tech demos.. and being able to run the latest and greatest on my PC was always something I looked forward to after getting new hardware. Demo's purpose-built to show off what the most advanced hardware can do. However, now it feels like Epic focuses more on the consoles and other industries than anything else. Sure.. a lot of that work ties back into the PC side of things... but it's no longer what drives/motivates it forward. (IMO)

I draw a lot of parallels between Epic now and how Nvidia has evolved over the years. Nvidia primarily designed GPUs for Personal Computers to play video games.. eventually they branched out into sciences.. then into servers, creating and accelerating entire software stacks to solve ever greater science problems... and then into an all encompassing force accelerating every industry known to man with more and more specialized hardware through the Cloud, utilizing AI and ML/DL. They've expanded out into other industries, and now it's the work they do in those other industries which primarily influences their designs and trajectory in the personal computer space, and not the other way around. Their purpose is far greater than video games.

Epic designed an engine to build their video games for PC.. eventually they branched out into consoles.. then they made their engine open, accelerating the adoption of their engine, while at the same time expanding their feature-sets to solve problems in other industries (movies, TV, ect)... and then now into an all encompassing force that accelerates and streamlines workflows in many different industries. They've expanded out into other platforms and industries, and now it seems the work they do in those platforms/industries is what primarily influences their actions and designs on the PC side of things.. and not the other way around. Their purpose is now greater than just video games.

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what it feels like to me. I mean, you can't blame Epic for expanding and doing what they are doing.. but it definitely feels like PC gets very little attention from them these days, with various issues specific to the platform continuing to grow without any indication that there's any attention on it whatsoever. This isn't the thread to get into that however.

Sure, the case can be made that Unreal Engine is entirely 100% better because of the work Epic has been doing to support these other platforms/industries.. hell, I think that's undeniably true. But it's another case where PC gets put on the backburner because there's other platforms and industries which have taken the attention, who have platform holders pushing for marketing deals and this and that... so here we are.

It would be nice to see a phenomenal looking demo designed primarily targeting the highest end PC platform, compiled and optimized, and released to the public to show off the engine and hardware features in the best light, like we used to back in the day. I know tech demos aren't free to make and don't grow on trees.. but damn.

 

Well the tools are at you disposal and UE5 runs better on PC than consoles so feel free to develop an awesome looking demo !

 

Give him Epic ressources ?

 

it's a dev tool, not a drag and drop program, you can create/recreate whatever you want, of course it requires skills. (something i would not try myself as all i can create in Dreams are cubes and spheres of color )
With metahuman, skills and patience you could even recreate a Keanu model.
We've already seen awesome stuff from "amateur" people with the UE5 preview.
Anyway we should get our first UE5 games using lumen/nanite this year, and they'll certainly look just as good or better !

 

OK, but you should have directed that to @Dampf , as well.

 

Well atleast if we look at the packaged matrix demo, that's definately not true. Even a Series S runs it far smoother and stable than any High End PC, not to mention lower end hardware like mine. I don't know what happened there. Frankly speaking I am quite worried about UE5 performance on PC and judging by comments on YouTube under recent videos running the demo on PC I'm far from being the only one.

 

Well it's known the consoles demo got specific optimisations obviously, on PC it's not a demo it's just the release of the assets from that demo. There nothing to worry about though. Real games will perform as they should on PC.

 

In my humble opinion, it should perform well enough of the box if its packaged, given many developers these days seemingly do not care about optimizations anymore especially on PC.

I can already see the stutter fest of various UE4 games repeating. This is what we get if the engine does not handle what should originally be the developers job.

 

it stutters a lot on console too when driving or flying fast with 100% traffic/NPCs

 

But far, far less than on PC. Also PC defaults to 50% and stutters even then. Anyway, those minor stutters on consoles here and there are fine for what is essentially a tech demo. But on PC it's extreme. Keep in mind a 5900X for example is much stronger than the consoles CPU and does not deliver that uptick in performance in the packaged demo, far from it. Not only that but it also stutters way more.
The consoles are between a 1700X and 3700X, try running it on hardware that is similar equipped and you will get disaster.

Anyway, I would love to be optimistic about this that this will be much better in real games but given the recent stutter-fest of nearly ALL recently released UE4 games (@Dictator knows what I am talking about) I am just not. So far Epic has not yet given any sign that would change with UE5, so I have no reason to believe it will be gone.

Still the UE5 stutters feel different compared to the the shader compilation on UE4, they do not vanish over time. I assume there are two kinds of stutter in UE5, CPU streaming stutters and shader cache stuttering.

But as Andrew said earlier, GPU wise the engine is pretty much performing as it should. So I assume the error must be in the CPU related pipeline.

 

What a lame take. Ok yea, I'll just develop my own tech demos and games. Thanks Epic! I don't need developers anymore.