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

It would be about 720p internal res I presume

 

You can see how much RAM the process is using in the video.

 

This.

 

Played a bit with Lumen, did not download high res Assets to check out Nanite.

I'm not impressed from the lighting - it looks flat shaded for the programmer art test scene i've made.
However, i did not find anything hinting they would use a volume grid of probes like i have assumed.
But there is a surface cache, which we can visualize:



They call it automatic surface parameterization. Well, i worked on that for years but seems Epic is fine with... bounding boxes and triplanar mapping? No wonder it lacks some detail.
So i guess they project a texel on those texture cards to the model (precomputed), and then trace from there, using those texels also to cache irradiance and looking them up for ray hits. (Still guessing, did not read the manual)
Well, this GI is quite meh, but for selfish reasons i'm happy about that.

But i am very impressed about the reflections. Software tracing in action gives really good results, although character is missing while its shadow is visible.
This is new and was not in the older demo where reflections were blurry.

Edit: I'm also impressed from the soft shadows. Some SM method i think.

 

The compiled binary seems to run much better (ofc )



6-7 GB VRAM / 3-5 gb RAM at native 4K

 

You probably need a scene with more lateral and verical Occlusion - an indoor one in a building for example. Or one with multiple Light sources.Or one with dynamic objects which would only be covered in screen space in Software Mode.

A Single sky Light and sun Light with very little Occlusion out of screen space will not Show big differences - much like how staring at an object in screen space with SSR vs RT will not Show large differences as well.

Epic themselves describe the high end HWRT Mode as meant for high quality indoor lighting.

 

For someone who played Warzone for a year on the last gen Xboxes, this looks fine to me.

 

Worth remembering that there are 1) the UE5 editor and the demo running inside it and 2) the standalone demo built from the project inside the editor.
The 1) does require all that - 64GBs, SSD, etc.
The 2) seem to run just fine off an HDD while consuming about 5GBs of VRAM (1440p) and 4GBs of RAM.

 

I love that we have progressed far enough that 125 MB/s is considered low speed.

 

Yep, it's the new "shadow map raytracing" (SMRT): https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/VirtualShadowMaps/
It's not perfect, but it's pretty good middle-ground in practice given the data limitations of shadow maps (one layer, etc).

 

Lumen is demanding, they could use Ray intersection hardware for accelerating ray intersection detection against the signal distance field.

 

Based on no. of pixels I was going a bit too far. 480p is 16% of 1080p. 600p upscaled to 1080p would be around the same % as 1080p to 4k.

But that's assuming everything scales linearly, which is probably wrong.

Edit: why was I going that far with scaling when the S is around a third of the X. I really should have gone to bed earlier.

 

They can't. There are no SDFs in DXR 1.1 BLAS, only AABBs and triangles.

 

I find this demo less visually impressive than Lumen in the land of Nanite. Looking forward to Siggraph papers. Also curious to see ramifications on hardware RT support/performance with such high geometry counts.

 

They can use intersection shader on AABB and a custom shader when it hit the primitive.

 

What is your GPU?

 

There is pretty long list under "Limitations of Software Ray Tracing" chapter in documentation. UE5 can use sw ray tracing where it works and then add rest with hw ray tracing. It seems to be a hybrid

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Lumen/TechOverview/

 

Ye sony, ms, amd, nvidia and intel all made stupid decisions based on a single quick engine test by a random forum user.

 

Impressive, looks better then last years ue5 demo for sure aswell.

 

Something surprising and good in UE5. OpenXR support is great. Nanite and lumen don't support vr yet.

https://uploadvr.com/unreal-engine-5-early-access-vr/