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

[chris1515]

Yah, I suppose even if they could make things were perfectly by doing deformation and animation with mesh shaders, they'd still want a more general compute solution that would be portable to other platforms that don't use directx or vulkan mesh shader apis

Basically all the GPU without Mesh/primitive shader would be excluded. Having as a base minimum PS5, Xbox Series, RDNA 2 GPU and Nvidia 2000's and 3000 series is probably not a good option commercialy.

After the cluster idea work faster on the software rasterizer for triangle less than 4 pixels than the HW path using primitive/mesh shader on UE5. Don't forget primitive and mesh shader continue to use the hardware rasterizer.

Give flexibility to dev and they will use it. We begin to see it with Nanite or the frosbite hair rendering with line primitive software rasterizing using compute based analytical AAA.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

From their tweets it appears that RT on all hardware isn't yet fast enough for the primary ray and current BVH implementations also offer problems that need to be overcome. So, any RT using current PC RT will focus on secondary rays.

Regards,
SB

It seems to be more about lack of flexibility than raw number of rays per second.

 

[chris1515]

A controversial tweet by the ex Call of Duty director of R&D graphics teams now at ROBLOX.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1394156309889445889

https://twitter.com/x/status/1394158280813932544

https://twitter.com/x/status/1394313739046834180

https://twitter.com/x/status/1394334740451233792

https://twitter.com/x/status/1394352086851063811

https://twitter.com/kenpex/status/1394352835127484417

GPUs got so BAD at this that now we are all excited because people are saying, effectively, fuck this hardware we'll software raster. See Nanite, Dreams, or even I dunno, hair for Fifa, or even the crazy shading/occlusion etc tricks of COD. All SW patches to the HW

 

[pjbliverpool]

A controversial tweet by the ex Call of Duty director of R&D graphics teams now at ROBLOX.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1394156309889445889

https://twitter.com/x/status/1394158280813932544

https://twitter.com/x/status/1394313739046834180

https://twitter.com/x/status/1394334740451233792

https://twitter.com/x/status/1394352086851063811

https://twitter.com/kenpex/status/1394352835127484417

I'd say Metro Exodus is a good case study of why the statement "we don't need RT, we can do lighting with tricks" is wrong.

They clearly did all they could with lighting tricks in the non enhanced version, and switching over to full RT still provides a hugh uplift.

Conversely, look no further than Lego Builder or even Minecraft RTX for how you can make a low geometry game look stunning with high quality RT lighting.

 

[chris1515]

I'd say Metro Exodus is a good case study of why the statement "we don't need RT, we can do lighting with tricks" is wrong.

They clearly did all they could with lighting tricks in the non enhanced version, and switching over to full RT still provides a hugh uplift.

Conversely, look no further than Lego Builder or even Minecraft RTX for how you can make a low geometry game look stunning with high quality RT lighting.

Minecraft and Lego builder does not look realistic. For games trying to looks realistic or hyper realistic polycount and geometry casting shadows is very important too. Imo geometry is as important as lighting. Same in RT having higher geometry count gives better result.

Geometry is part of the ligthing system because it cast shadows. Brian Karis told PS5 UE5 demo with geometry not casting shadow looks like normal maps.

Image posted by the guy from Love, Death, Robots 2. Lighting is great because it is pathtracing offline rendering but geometry details is perfect too and it helps the lighting to shine.

At least after Unreal Engine 5 I think future GPU generation will improve HW rasterizer efficiency with triangles less than 4 pixels and improve shading efficiency too(quad merging or other stuff).

 

[pjbliverpool]

Minecraft and Lego builder does not look realistic. For games trying to looks realsitic or hyper realistic polycount and geometry casting shadows is very important too. Imo geometry is as important as lighting. Same in RT having higer geometry count gives better result.

Lego Builder (RTX) doesn't look realistic? Have you seen it?

I agree that both geometry and lighting are very important, I just disagree that geometry, or at least 1 tri/pxl geometry is more important than a fully RT based lighting system.

I actually think there are ways we can fake high geometry on modern systems in a more convincing way than we can fake life like lighting. Look at the geometry in HFW for example. It's extremely dense. Do you think it would benefit more from increased geometry to the tune of 1tri/pxl or a fully path traced lighting system? For me it's the latter by a significant margin.

I don't mean to appear negative towards Nanite, I think it's awesome, but probably as much for how it simplifies the development process as for the actual result itself.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

Doesn't UE5 solve both of these problems anyway?

 

[chris1515]

Lego Builder (RTX) doesn't look realistic? Have you seen it?

I agree that both geometry and lighting are very important, I just disagree that geometry, or at least 1 tri/pxl geometry is more important than a fully RT based lighting system.

I actually think there are ways we can fake high geometry on moderns systems in a more convincing way than we can fake life like lighting. Look at the geometry in HFW for example. It's extremely dense. Do you think it would benefit more from increased geometry to the tune of 1tri/pxl or a fully path traced lighting system? For me it's the latter by a significant margin.

I don't mean to appear negative towards Nanite, I think it's awesome, but probably as much for how it simplifies the development process as for the actual result itself.

Again Lego doesn't try to reproduce humans on screen or anything with complex geometry. It is a bad example.

We can't use pathtracing on HFW. The choice is not between HFW geometry density with pathtracing and UE5 level detail with Lumen. The choice is more last gen level of geometry plus full hybrid raytracing and HFW level or better UE 5 geometry with software GI like Lumen and other tricks.

 

[JoeJ]

Doesn't UE5 solve both of these problems anyway?

One could rephrase the question like this: "Do we even need HW raytracing and improving HW rasterizer for small triangles?"

Again Lego doesn't try to reproduce humans on screen or anything with complex geometry. It is a bad example.

Additionally, like Marbles it uses almost orthographic projection, so no need for LOD, and a best case for temporal accumulation techniques.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Again Lego doesn't try to reproduce humans on screen or anything with complex geometry.

Neither of which mean it can't look realistic. Stand in front of a flat wall in real life. No humans, no complex geometry. Does it look real? Sure does.

The choice is not between HFW geometry density with pathtracing and UE5 level detail with Lumen. T

I didn't say it was. I simply used that as an extreme example in response to the tweet you posted that said 1 tri/pxl is more important than Ray Tracing.

I think in reality the correct balance between geometry and lighting will vary from game to game, but IMO on current generation systems we're generally closer to where we want to be on the geometry front without Nanite than we are on the lighting front without some form of RT. Nanite improves things of course, but IMO it's greatest value is in how it simplifies the development pipeline.

 

[chris1515]

Neither of which mean it can't look realistic. Stand in front of a flat wall in real life. No humans, no complex geometry. Does it look real? Sure does.



I didn't say it was. I simply used that as an extreme example in response to the tweet you posted that said 1 tri/pxl is more important than Ray Tracing.

I think in reality the correct balance between geometry and lighting will vary from game to game, but IMO on current generation systems we're generally closer to where we want to be on the geometry front without Nanite than we are on the lighting front without some form of RT. Nanite improves things of course, but IMO it's greatest value is in how it simplifies the development pipeline.

I think Nanite is a great idea but alone is nothing the great things in UE5 is Nanite and virtual shadow maps because geometry cast shadows. Cascaded shadow maps is the biggest problem of the HFW trailer with horrible shadow popin and probably part of the geometry not casting shadows.

Again geometry is part of the lighing system this is why it is so important. We never have enough geometry until 1 tri per pixel if it is needed or subpixel tri for things like hair or vegetation.

Part of the "flat" lighting problem is the fact normal maps don't cast shadows.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I have to admit, I didn't think that geometry was as big of a problem as it is until I saw the UE5 demos. Normal maps, parallax mapping etc looked "good enough" for me. Seeing UE5 has changed my mind. I still think ray tracing is important and worthwhile right now, but nanite looks like it brings great visual benefit, more than I would have expected.

Nanite does solve a bunch of other problems too, like cpu use and memory consumption. Or at least they claim big improvements there. I'll be very happy to not play games and have my fps mysteriously tank when I face a particular direction because of some weird draw call/submission bottleneck.

 

[manux]

I have to admit, I didn't think that geometry was as big of a problem as it is until I saw the UE5 demos. Normal maps, parallax mapping etc looked "good enough" for me. Seeing UE5 has changed my mind. I still think ray tracing is important and worthwhile right now, but nanite looks

Nanite does solve a bunch of other problems too, like cpu use and memory consumption. Or at least they claim big improvements there. I'll be very happy to not play games and have my fps mysteriously tank when I face a particular direction because of some weird draw call/submission bottleneck.

HW ray tracing is an option in UE5 to increase quality at the cost of perf. There is a pretty long list of limitations in sw ray tracing when looking at UE5 documentation. It seems to be very scalable engine able to use a lot of features available in modern gpu.

 

[chris1515]

I have to admit, I didn't think that geometry was as big of a problem as it is until I saw the UE5 demos. Normal maps, parallax mapping etc looked "good enough" for me. Seeing UE5 has changed my mind. I still think ray tracing is important and worthwhile right now, but nanite looks like it brings great visual benefit, more than I would have expected.

Nanite does solve a bunch of other problems too, like cpu use and memory consumption. Or at least they claim big improvements there. I'll be very happy to not play games and have my fps mysteriously tank when I face a particular direction because of some weird draw call/submission bottleneck.

But raytracing is very important this is the future. the problem is not RT, this is the power of the current hardware. I am sure when series Nvidia series 6000 and AMD series 9000 series arrive and maybe PS6 and Xbox Series 2 RT will be much more important with full hybrid raytracing for AAA games with UE5 level of geometry for rigid, skinned geometry, translucent material, tesselation and probably different method to render hair and vegetation.

EDIT: AND RT simplify the work of lighting artist too. And RT reduce game size too no lightmap.

 

[DegustatoR]

Doesn't UE5 solve both of these problems anyway?

Does it? Can it render say proper reflections with cone tracing?

 

[manux]

UE5 supports hw ray tracing for higher quality. It's not either or proposition.

Lumen uses Software Ray Tracing through Signed Distance Fields by default, but can achieve higher quality on supporting video cards when Hardware Ray Tracing is enabled.

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

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Those lego blocks don't seem reallistic to me either. Due to my kids I still come across new legos fairly often and they definitely don't look like colored mirrors.

Is that demo's purpose to show photoreallistic graphics though? It looks more like a reflections showcase than anything else.

I'd say Metro Exodus is a good case study of why the statement "we don't need RT, we can do lighting with tricks" is wrong.

They clearly did all they could with lighting tricks in the non enhanced version, and switching over to full RT still provides a hugh uplift.

Metro Exodus is definitely not the best you can do with rasterization trickery. There are good examples, such as Demon's Souls.

How much better Exodus looks with RTX perhaps speaks more of the 10+ year old 4A engine than how much better RTRT looks than state of the art rasterization lighting. Their engine was definitely a benchmark when Metro 2033 came out, but not so much when Exodus released.

 

[DegustatoR]

There are good examples, such as Demon's Souls.

Demon's Souls have dynamic global illumination?

 

[chris1515]

UE5 supports hw ray tracing for higher quality. It's not either or proposition.



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

Out of the fact the API need to improve I think hardware power need to improve to fully exploit Nanite running at the same time than RT.

 

[cwjs]

Metro Exodus is definitely not the best you can do with rasterization trickery. There are good examples, such as Demon's Souls.

What rasterization techniques in particular do you think produce similar results in a wide range of cases to a raytracer?