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

Well, I assume it's not free. There is no such thing as a free lunch. And if they did do this, what stops people from demanding a real game or a bigger game etc.
The buck stops here

 

It's gotta be pretty damn close to free. Andrew already said it's trivial to do if you have the skills and there are legions of people at Epic with the skills. Then you just bob it in the free games section of Epic Games Store and you're done.

It would certainly encourage more users to download the Game Store client and get eyes on all the other free content on offer, thus drawing them in to the Game Store ecosystem.

Seems like a ridiculously low hanging fruit to me.

 

Why? What are the downsides? You think any developres are going to ditch UE5 because internet chatter from amateurs running a tech demo said it wasn't smooth??

I can also point to Unity, which has known issues being smooth on consoles, but that didn't stop devs using it because it was the right engine for them. That's the ultimate choice. The only people who 'suffer' are potentially PC hardware people who may (read, won't) see some potential customers get consoles instead in the belief that consoles will run future games better. That's not gonna happen though, and UE will sell to devs wanting to make games regardless how Joe Gamer perceives it. So why invest in extra work for no gains?

 

Andrew basically said (I am to lazy to go back and quote) try to lower car/people setting to 50%. Dampf said he did it and still was not happy. Then Andrew asked about compiling a shipping version and then I think Dampf looked at youtube videos instead and was still not happy, he might have done the compiling part, but was still not happy Then Andrew said that devs was expected to replace AI and what not routines in the demos.
This might be trivial to do, but it still might take a bunch of time/resources at the same time. If you want to release something for "commercial" consumption then you need to polish which means QA, I assume. Again more time and resources, that indicates to me that it's not even close to free.
Now your conviction that it would drive people to use the store, that might be true, but all of this is an investment and is the ROI there and is this a correct value proposition?
Dampf claimed that he would pay 60 dollars to have a pc demo that did run as smooth as the xss version, I highly doubt that and even if he did fork over 60 bucks, how many more would actually do that?
Also I am not in marketing, so for all I know, people are even more sheep than I give them credit for and they might end up flocking to epic store and lock themselves into it for a small demo, that is even more of a walking sim than Death Stranding ;P

 

Dont even give them the ideas

 

But Epic don't cater only to devs, They are a development studio in their own right and have a games store that they are trying to position to compete with Steam. That means good will from the user base is important. At the moment I see some of that good will slipping away - unjustifiably of course, but reality isn't always fair. And for something as trivial as simply pre-compiling the demo at settings which are attainable on normal systems and hosting it on the Game Store, that situation could be reversed, and they would very likely bring additional users onto their Game Store to try it out. As I said, from a business perspective it seems like a no brainer to me.

But it's not commercial consumption any more than the existing map is because they're not charging for it. I'm not suggesting they need to hand optimise for the PC, or inject a settings menu etc... I'm saying they literally just compile the demo at reasonable settings and host it. And it can be billed as exactly that. "Hey guys, to save you learning to compile the demo yourself, or searching to find one online that someone else has done, we've done it for you. There are two versions - one for lower end systems, and one for higher end systems." You shut down the negative chatter, you gain good will from the gaming market, and probably most importantly you get more footfall on the Games Store. I do get that it goes slightly against the principle of pushing people to learn to do this themselves, but I think that those who want to learn will do so anyway, while there are many more who don't have the time or inclination to learn to use UE5, but would still potentially line Epics pockets by purchasing games through the Games Store.

 

The consumers of game engines are developers, not gamers. Epic does plenty of stuff to earn goodwill from devs -- I think they're the most pro-user game engine. I'm personally glad to be working at a unity based studio for various reasons, but I can't say customer support or openness with users or any other pro user policies are among the reasons.

Edit:

The moment they do that they open themselves up to a lot of customer support, continuous build support, in the weeds pc optimization, etc. Even with a well made engine it's just not trivially easy to make a game run on everybody's PCs (well, it's not easy to make it run on any platform, but at least consoles are a fixed target.) Plus even if the demo is perfect, if they're saying "this demo will run well" and players running bonkers setups on their computers complain that it stutters because they also have a crypto miner running or whatever, epic has to manage the conversation and clarify -- I guess epic definitely has the resources to do it if they want, but it's definitely not a small ask, and they don't seem to want to be in that business outside of the games they support. When/if fortnite swaps over to nanite and lumen we'll get a reference pc product.

 

If the many, many free titles given away aren't enough to bribe someone into using their store, I doubt a tech-demo will make the difference.

 

Guys, guys! Someone compiled the demo in shipping mode instead of development. CPU wise, it runs A LOT better. After some shaders have been compiled, it stutters much less while flying/driving.

I will keep you updated!

 

Huh?

Imagine that... why would Epic want to "risk" themselves by saying "this demo will run well"... and not being able to back it up? Essentially, you're saying if Epic released this demo "officially" on PC... and it still performs like trash... then they have to actually answer for it... meanwhile.. as a "sample project" they don't have to concern themselves.. because it's not an "optimized official release".

You don't see a problem with that.. on a platform they fully support?

Since when have tech demo's been treated like official retail products? These are free products and come as is. There's no "post launch" support for tech demos. That doesn't mean that they can't put some effort it to compile a demo with some optimal settings to release to the public. It's funny that they can seemingly provide that support for consoles.. but not PC.

Seems like they can't be bothered anymore. Every tech demo we've seen so far from UE5.. has been running on consoles in a relatively smooth state. We've seen these "projects" running on PC... which have always exhibited terrible performance and stuttering in comparison.. and Epic aren't going out of their way at all to allay doubts and fears people are having... and given the issues that seem to plague every UE4 game released these days... I think PC gamers would appreciate that.

 

Literally happening in this thread

 

Its not even a tech demo (pc) to begin with. If it was, it'd be running much better.

 

If it's happening already then why not improve the situation for near zero effort? There will be lot fewer people complaining if there's a readily available pre-compiled version available on Epic Game Store that actually runs well on medium-high end PC's. Of course people will always complain and want more, but you can vastly reduce the amount of complaining by simply giving the market what it's asking for. And if that can be done for near zero cost then if makes good business sense to do it.

 

Note after the first few minutes of flying around. You could still maybe hit the odd one if you find a new material somewhere of course, but generally it should improve a lot from the first launch.

Yes although this is shader *compilation*, which is a CPU task, and thus creates a CPU stutter. None of these stutters are on the GPU side.

Like I said, I don't see any evidence of that being a primary issue here. If you fire up UnrealInsights you can look for yourself what the stutters are on your machine. Since you're using a development build already you should get even more info out of it.

But yeah at a high level... try a shipping build, or if you're really curious use one of the profiling tools like insights and see. As I said I imagine the IHVs will smooth out some of the allocation/release stutters a bit over time as well with profiles, as is normal for PC games. That's a *real* difference on PCs... since the game itself doesn't have direct control over memory allocations/deallocation/residency, there's this dance that happens between the game, OS and graphics driver. Usually that dance requires some tweaking and heuristics, especially when a new workload comes out. On consoles that part is much simpler.

Anyways I've said my bit here I think. The tools are available if people want to dig deeper, but I already posted my experience/analysis in my 30 minutes of screwing around earlier in the thread.

 

How would you draw any sort of conclusions like this without detailed profiling on the different platforms? Especially when almost everything is CPU bound on a 3090 to start with...

 

No it isn't. I'm referring to the developers of these tech demos... not the consumers. It's not even a tech demo.. it's a sample project. Which developers in this thread are treating this like a tech demo?

My point was since when do developers treat tech demos like product release which require post launch support? You stated it would "open them up" to all sorts of required support.. That's a BS excuse.

 

Yes I've got my hands on a shipped build, CPU performance is a lot, lot better. Night and day difference. Only stutters in the first minute or so, then hitches are rare even when flying, just like your experience.

But now apparently my VRAM is limiting me, as GPU performance does seem to get worse over time. Those textures are clearly more suited for 8 GB cards and the Series X/PS5, my 6 GB are always maxed out even at 50% res.

Maybe that is something I could personally optimize for my machine. If there'd be a way to automatically reduce all 8K and 4K textures to 4K and 2K, then that would be ideal. I tried setting the LOD MipBias to 1 which should reduce 4K textures to 2K in the editor, but it strangely has no impact on my video memory. If there is no automatic function, I could try reducing the textures by hand using texture stats, may take a bit long but it could be worth it at the end.

I must admit the thought of having a hand optimized version of the Matrix demo on my machine made by myself is getting me quite excited. Maybe it's enough to motivate me to get more invested with UE!

 

Ah that's good to know! I was curious how much of that was responsible for the difference in my experience vs. some other random factor. Glad to hear you got it working better in any case!

Well that's another legit advantage of the console UMA architecture - it's not "VRAM vs CPU RAM", you can fluidly use as much for graphics vs. other stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if the Matrix demo in particularly used more than 8GB for GPU resources, but I don't know the final breakdowns.

As I mentioned, almost everything in that demo are virtual textures. They only get loaded based on the mips that are required to render the given view. Thus dropping your main output resolution (as I believe they get LOD biased by default with TSR/DLSS/etc to still be sampled at the mips like they were rendered at full resolution) will drop your texture memory footprint. Alternatively I'm sure there's a virtual texture-specific LOD bias and/or pool size.

There's definitely no need to mess with the source assets. Just like Nanite, things only get streamed as they are needed.

 

I'm sure you know the real issue here: support (a base level of which is always required). It's easy to release things to consumers. It's hard and expensive to support them.

Honestly I've spent the last few days helping *developers* understand how to make Nanite/VSMs work (the biggest stumbling block seems to be a large number of folks using >2 year old OS's) - on my own time I might add. I can't imagine how many resources it would be if Epic dropped a demo that didn't work on some decent chunk of high spec consumer PC's due to setup/software things.

Developers barely understand what SM6.6 vs feature level XYZ vs 64-bit atomics vs agility SDK vs what-UE5-calls-SM5-vs-SM6 and all of the related mess actually means. Hell I barely understand it because it's super confusing. I would not want to try and explain what it means to consumers which is why the de-facto requirements have basically shifted back to just saying "these gpus, this OS, this driver version".

 

In other words, it's not worth the effort.