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

Looking at game like spiderman I suspect efficiency is exactly what current gen has been focusing on. The gdc talks about spiderman are fascinating. They include details about streaming, world building, packaging data etc. It's also probably why sony has chosen to use spiderman as an example when they talk about ps5 streaming.

 

What do you mean with quad merging? Being restricted to quads means no realtime, usually.

My simplest assumption is this:
They build something like an octree over the high poly meshes (picking octree because of this SVO rumor). Fast enough to claim 'import and display instantly', but not realtime.
They put triangles in the leaf nodes.
They place pixel splats into the internal nodes, which area weighted center and color of texture average. Still fast enough for the claim, even with devil in the details like turning normal variance into roughness.
Store that crap on disk, ready to stream and display at runtime.

At runtime, they use distance to model to see which tree levels are necessary and stream them. Triangles and texture remains untouched at some distance.
Then they traverse the tree and splat nodes that match pixel size, and triangles if close enough. (Just a guess: Traversal state can be cached so need to traverse always only one level either up or down, because distance changes gradually.)

If so, totally simple and easy. Nothing complicated. It is not really the efficientest LOD solution i can think of, but obviously it works.
Do i miss something? (EDIT: I mean, why 'subpixel triangles'? Makes no sense?)

 

I think the answer to this would be found by looking at PC games and dissecting how many of them already use some kind of streaming. if they use some kind of streaming surely they could benefit from orders of magnitude faster streaming? Just imagine what grand theft auto, witcher 3 or many other titles could do given ability to pull a lot more assets on demand.

 

I guess they rely on hidden surface removal a lot.
Reproject previous frame of static / slow geometry, erode Z to avoid false positives, make Z pyramid, cull the trees against that.
Should get rid of most stuff and help with streaming too.

 

I think there's more to it than just that, such as rendering the protagonist traditionally.

 

About the squeezing through gap in demo being trick to give more time to load. It's not according to people who worked on the demo

 

Yep. And quite possibly, virtualised geometry could decrease the need for fast streaming. It all depends on how much data needs to be streamed. We're facing a future where maybe Sony picked a solution to current-technology, but moving forwards, engines will move to a different tech. So similarly to 360 being designed to be fast at forward rendering, and then come a cropper with deferred rendering, we might see PS5 better at games that chug through assets conventionally to begin with but then find its speed advantage lost when games don't need anything like as much data because they are super-efficient at reading it.

That's one plausible scenario among quite a few.

 

Have you got the size in bytes?

 

So what does the engine do exactly? Creates its own decimation?

 

Oh and something else.....we have different texturing tools but as far as I know, none can handle millions of polygons efficiently to texture.
Sure you can polypaint on Zbrush, but other software like Substance that have dedicated texturing tools?
And what happens with the UVs? We usually have a low poly version to unwrap the UVs so we can add textures. But with a 30million polygon model from Zbrush, how do you effectively unrwap the UVs so that they dont get warped and how do you create the textures for the model?

 

Bottleneck will likely be the PCIe 3/4 bus, with traffic between NVMe SSD to RAM, and RAM to VRAM. There's always the option of scaling down.

 

PS5 and XSX both use a PCIe 4.0 bus for communication with their SSD's.

 

would be interesting if both GeForce and radeon's come with nvme slots on the back of their boards

 

Given the previous discussion with regards to how the performance of SSDs drop with heat that doesn't sound like the best idea to put one on the back of a GPU.

 

How about an SLI/XF-like bridge to a PCIe SSD card?

 

I mean that would be cool. Didn't some fire gl cards have the ability to add a sata drive to them ?

 

There's Radeon SSG. Starting to get expensive methinks. On the other hand, 2TB could probably go a long way if people install things appropriately i.e. console ports taking advantage of SSD installed locally vs older games installed elsewhere.

 

Finally a semi-official source.

It’s not just “Fast SSD”. It’s a robust platform for streaming assets in near realtime.

In Cerny’s presentation, he mentioned clearly that the platform can take regular (2 priority level), higher speed SSD in addition to Sony’s 6 priority ones. The system has additional arbitration logic for these off-the-shelf 2-priority SSDs. Because these units can’t prioritize requests in finer granularity, they need to be even higher speed than Sony’s SSD to make up for the difference. Over time, these off-the-shelf SSDs should drop in price.

The end goal is developers can rely on its consistent performance to experiment and rev things relatively quickly. And be assured that there are enough systems out there to run their final products.

EDIT: Like Epic, they can also use the feature to implement nextgen ideas for their games.

 

Just treat it as a large cache right ? install the game to a regular ssd or nvme drive and have it load into the 1TB or 2TB drive or whatever size that's connected to the video card as your playing