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

Meh, that's just a matter of taste, so it's kind of useless to discuss.
Personally, I liked the early DXR demos, such as the Reflections and the SOL, way more than uniformly lit scenery in the Ancients demo.
There are tons of games with great geometry, Metro Exodus mentioned here many times is one for example, it uses tesselation with displacement maps extensively almost everywhere - on ground surfaces, on walls, on trees, on hair, on characters, on enemies, even ropes are tesselated to fine levels, that's super highly detailed game, yet nobody here paid attention to this while discussing the game and that speaks a lot :D
So better wait for some real games before judging what is more visually pleasing, personally I would take both any time and I don't see any real reasons why there should be any compromises.
Metro exodus has a much lower perceived level of geometry than HFW, R&C and especially UE5 footage. Those Nvidia demos look superior to all of this of course, but they have no relevance to actual games.
 
Hard to determine which is more important between geometry and RT. Judging current examples though, I find games with high geometry/high quality art to look better than last gen geometry/art with RT added on. R&C and HFW look more pleasing to me than Metro enhanced and Cyberpunk for example.

The artistic styles in those games are far too different to be useful as a comparison. I agree with you though. Style, geometry and textures are much more in your face than the subtle benefits of GI and precise shadows that bring the whole scene together.

The point isn’t that we should increase geometry and be happy with shitty or baked lighting. The point is for any given level of geometric detail current lighting techniques are inadequate. It’s not an either/or situation. We need better geometry, better textures and better lighting.
 
Those Nvidia demos look superior to all of this of course, but they have no relevance to actual games
So are the Ancient and Lumen demos.
Take a look at the new Horizon game, do you see a lot of canyons there?
How would they improve their foliage with Nanite which doesn't support it? I don't see many things which can be siglificantly improved with Nanite in this game.
If Nanite was implemented in the game, it would have had much lower "perceived" visual impact because Horizon has never been built around Nanite in the first place.
 
The artistic styles in those games are far too different to be useful as a comparison. I agree with you though. Style, geometry and textures are much more in your face than the subtle benefits of GI and precise shadows that bring the whole scene together.

The point isn’t that we should increase geometry and be happy with shitty or baked lighting. The point is for any given level of geometric detail current lighting techniques are inadequate. It’s not an either/or situation. We need better geometry, better textures and better lighting.
In the scope of this generation though. Developers are going to have to decide which areas to allocate more rendering budget. In that sense I’m not sure which will end up being the better choice. Different styles for sure, but when I look at the difference between R&C on PS5 and the previous entry on PS4 for example, I see a bigger leap than between non RT and enhanced edition RT Metro or non RT and all RT Cyberpunk.


So are the Ancient and Lumen demos.
Take a look at the new Horizon game, do you see a lot of canyons there?
How would they improve their foliage with Nanite which doesn't support it? I don't see many things which can be siglificantly improved with Nanite in this game.
If Nanite was implemented in the game, it would have had much lower "perceived" visual impact because Horizon has never been built around Nanite in the first place.

They only showed a small clip of one particular area. One of the developers stated there will be many different biomes. There was a canyon/desert like area in the first game so its certainly possible there will be one in the sequel.
 
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Did you watch the Nanite stream with Brian Karis? Valley of the Ancients is HEAVIER than Lumen in the Land of Nanite. Nanite is 2x the millisecond cost in Valley of the Ancients than Lumen in the Land of Nanite. Hence why the performance target for Epic settings is 1080p 30 and not the sub 1440p 30 average that Lumen ran at. This is all readily available information on their wiki or from the livestreams.

Also I think GameGPU's average framerates there are not representative of the game experience, an RTX 2060 will actually have lower framerates throughout the demo than what they report (If I recall, GameGPU does benches of a number of cards and interpolates the results of others based upon these significant points). Their RTX 2060 numbers look inaccurate while their RTX 3090 or RX 6800XT numbers look right.

That would explain it - as the latter half of the demo is at first lighter but then MUCH heavier as you get over to the golem.

Yeah and thats also the most impressive part of the demo there, and why so many think this years demo is more impressive.
 
So are the Ancient and Lumen demos.
Take a look at the new Horizon game, do you see a lot of canyons there?
How would they improve their foliage with Nanite which doesn't support it? I don't see many things which can be siglificantly improved with Nanite in this game.
If Nanite was implemented in the game, it would have had much lower "perceived" visual impact because Horizon has never been built around Nanite in the first place.

There are multiples biomes like desert, mountain. They can improve trunk of tree, terrain.
 
In the scope of this generation though. Developers are going to have to decide which areas to allocate more rendering budget. In that sense I’m not sure which will end up being the better choice. Different styles for sure, but when I look at the difference between R&C on PS5 and the previous entry on PS4 for example, I see a bigger leap than between non RT and enhanced edition RT Metro or non RT and all RT Cyberpunk.

R&C on PS4 is a completely different game. Your comparisons aren’t very scientific.

If previous generations are anything to go by, developers will spend most of their performance budget on more detailed worlds, fancier particle effects, etc. I’m not expecting raytraced shadows and reflections everywhere. Baked GI will probably still be a thing too.
 
There was a canyon/desert like area in the first game so its certainly possible there will be one in the sequel.
And you still don't need something like Nanite to make them look great, the same as with other biomes, It's just that assets have to be good enough for target resolution.
Simply open UE5 editor and play with the maximum pixels per edge setting in the Ancient project, you will quickly spot that there are diminishing returns after a certain point (below 8 pixels in native res on my 5120x1440 display, would be something closer to 16 pixels in 4K due to narrow FOV with standard proportions), so seems to be perfectly feasible even for last gen engines without any modifications (i.e. with classic LODs).
Most of developers had enough of time to evaluate Nanite like systems for their projects, so it's not like Epic has caught anyone with pants down)
 
Yeah and thats also the most impressive part of the demo there, and why so many think this years demo is more impressive.
you and who is second person ? :d don't worry, last year demo as you said would also run on pc don't need to bend reality that this year was most impressive when even devs explained why they used lower quality assets
 
R&C on PS4 is a completely different game. Your comparisons aren’t very scientific.

If previous generations are anything to go by, developers will spend most of their performance budget on more detailed worlds, fancier particle effects, etc. I’m not expecting raytraced shadows and reflections everywhere. Baked GI will probably still be a thing too.
There was an argument that current asset quality and geometry was good enough and we just need more RT. Metro would be a perfect example of that.
 
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you and who is second person ? :d don't worry, last year demo as you said would also run on pc don't need to bend reality that this year was most impressive when even devs explained why they used lower quality assets

Last years demo ran on a laptop, so theres that, il take Epics engineers over anything else because they actually work on those projects. Somewhat lower quality assets, but a world you can roam freely in, and the latter part with the large mech is much more impressive then the static on-rail world in last years demo.

There was an argument that current asset quality and geometry was good enough and we just need more RT. Metro would be a perfect example of that.

HZFW has this typical last gen assets vibe to it (hence its a cross gen game), more assets dont equal 'next gen' or whatever that means anyway. Whats so 'next gen' about rift aparts fidelity?
 
Dont think they saw it coming, the UE5 demo being run nicely on other platforms.

We’ve still not seen it! Until you can show us all the mighty demo running on the meagre laptop, you’re flapping your gums!

You also keep changing your story on what exactly should be compared.
 
There was an argument that current asset quality and geometry was good enough and we just need more RT. Metro would be a perfect example of that.

Ok, I definitely don’t subscribe to that school of thought. We still have a long way to go on character and world detail.
 
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i remember playing ridge racer 1 on PS1, the whole game would fit in the main ram and pressing start race was instantaneous.
Honest question, i hear here and there that the whole 2021 UE5 demo fits in ram, but even in videos where the demo is played on a beefy PC with 32GB of ram (not counting 3090 VRAM) it still takes several seconds to switch between the two worlds, why is that ? the demo fits but there might still have decompression happening on the fly ?
 
i remember playing ridge racer 1 on PS1, the whole game would fit in the main ram and pressing start race was instantaneous.
Honest question, i hear here and there that the whole 2021 UE5 demo fits in ram, but even in videos where the demo is played on a beefy PC with 32GB of ram (not counting 3090 VRAM) it still takes several seconds to switch between the two worlds, why is that ? the demo fits but there might still have decompression happening on the fly ?

Id hazard a guess the demo isnt actually fully loaded into the main ram/vram. Someone else might chime in and know more about that.
 
Honest question, i hear here and there that the whole 2021 UE5 demo fits in ram, but even in videos where the demo is played on a beefy PC with 32GB of ram (not counting 3090 VRAM) it still takes several seconds to switch between the two worlds, why is that ?
I have the same question. +10 years ago, most games i've played would had fit into RAM, and still i had to wait and see reloading my level on every death. Pretty annoying, and still happens with many new games.
I guess the answer is a mix of 'loading the whole game at startup would take too long', but also 'not willing to tackle working systems'.
Seemingly the bottleneck here is not disk speed (because OS caches files to RAM already), but data transformation / initialization. Probably often left single threaded and poorly optimized, which is somewhat understandable.
Only with open world / streaming there comes a real need to optimize those things.
Id hazard a guess the demo isnt actually fully loaded into the main ram/vram. Someone else might chime in and know more about that.
IDK but streaming behavior could be changed in editor to try it out.
 
We’ve still not seen it! Until you can show us all the mighty demo running on the meagre laptop, you’re flapping your gums!

You also keep changing your story on what exactly should be compared.
i remember playing ridge racer 1 on PS1, the whole game would fit in the main ram and pressing start race was instantaneous.
Honest question, i hear here and there that the whole 2021 UE5 demo fits in ram, but even in videos where the demo is played on a beefy PC with 32GB of ram (not counting 3090 VRAM) it still takes several seconds to switch between the two worlds, why is that ? the demo fits but there might still have decompression happening on the fly ?
Monitoring VRAM usage on a 3090/10900K/3.5 GB/s Nvme - 5 second load time
Right before entering portal: 4339 mb
In portal load (white screeen): 3386 mb
Right after portal: 4604 mb

You can see it dump VRAM and reload it in real time and count up even. But of course, not anywhere using all of the VRAM possible on the 3090. It could probably load much much quicker if it had dual allocation there for the dark world cached.
 
i remember playing ridge racer 1 on PS1, the whole game would fit in the main ram and pressing start race was instantaneous.
Ah yes, easilly testable on PS1. Thats how the majority of games were. Any game that wasnt streaming information would continue to run normally if you opened the disk tray. Only the music would stop.
What a headache these times were for the devs.
 
Monitoring VRAM usage on a 3090/10900K/3.5 GB/s Nvme - 5 second load time
Right before entering portal: 4339 mb
In portal load (white screeen): 3386 mb
Right after portal: 4604 mb

You can see it dump VRAM and reload it in real time and count up even. But of course, not anywhere using all of the VRAM possible on the 3090. It could probably load much much quicker if it had dual allocation there for the dark world cached.

This is virtual geometry and virtual texturing there is absolutely no reason to use tons of RAM and in the amount there is the datastruture they use for Nanite and Lumen. This is impressive.
 
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