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

[Frenetic Pony]

A Top Tear programmer which works for Gears 5

And of cause if you make a leave out of Triangels instead of billboards it is totally clear why it’s faster because the area of a leave is smaller and more light ray can escape faster the scene.

Not that interesting, of course RT scales well with geometry complexity. The interesting thing is Ubisoft's apparently interactive foliage tracing in that Avatar game. Of course they haven't said anything beyond that, is it fully moving all the thousands of leaves and rebuilding the bvh each frame, is it tracing some sort of proxy, what's the tracing being used for (shadows, reflections, diffuse)? Well we'll wait to find out.

 

[OlegSH]

Of course they haven't said anything beyond that, is it fully moving all the thousands of leaves and rebuilding the bvh each frame, is it tracing some sort of proxy, what's the tracing being used for (shadows, reflections, diffuse)?

I would expect them to implement all the standard optimizations here - animation throttling down to 30-15 FPS, refitting rather then building BLASes from scratch, sparse update of distant geometry, heavy leverage of instancing, and async compute usage for skinning interleaved with g-buffer fill pass.

 

[jlippo]

I would expect them to implement all the standard optimizations here - animation throttling down to 30-15 FPS, refitting rather then building BLASes from scratch, sparse update of distant geometry, heavy leverage of instancing, and async compute usage for skinning interleaved with g-buffer fill pass.

Hit shader is most likely quite small as well, perhaps just enough to fill visibility buffer.
Could be quite fast..

 

[Frenetic Pony]

I would expect them to implement all the standard optimizations here - animation throttling down to 30-15 FPS, refitting rather then building BLASes from scratch, sparse update of distant geometry, heavy leverage of instancing, and async compute usage for skinning interleaved with g-buffer fill pass.

Still impressive with the vast foliage they showed off. And animation instancing is pretty noticeable imo. Especially if the animation has any directionality to it, then it's still a very noticeable cloned pattern and you notice how the directionality seems random from instance rotation. But then, maybe you can go back to really basic sine wavy stuff and tradeoff xbox 360 era animation for RT. Still be cooler if it was better, and while there's no guarantee of that it does look like the foliage reacts directionally to impulses like explosions, so maybe there isn't heavy instancing.

 

[Dictator]

Converting alpha transparency to triangles is necessary to avoid invoking any hit shader, which would fetch texture to check for transparency and decide whether to trace ray further. That's the same problem as overdraw in rasterization. With real geometry for leaves, when ray hits the opaque geometry, you know that you don't need to trace it further, thus no overdraw and time savings.

You also get a much higher quality leaf at close distance in the end, win win

 

[trinibwoy]

Converting alpha transparency to triangles is necessary to avoid invoking any hit shader, which would fetch texture to check for transparency and decide whether to trace ray further. That's the same problem as overdraw in rasterization. With real geometry for leaves, when ray hits the opaque geometry, you know that you don't need to trace it further, thus no overdraw and time savings.

In that case would they still rasterize primary visibility? The primitive count for real leaves could be challenging for the classic geometry pipeline.

 

[OlegSH]

In that case would they still rasterize primary visibility?

It up to them, if they throttle animation heavily I guess they won't switch to RT for primary visibility, otherwise I don't know why they wouldn't.
From what I've seen so far, this foliage in the trailer seems to be made of standard billboards, converting them to higher poly geometry can be a pure optimization for RT without actually replacing primary visibility with RT.

 

[milk]

Pretty sure they are converting alpha transparent foliage to real geometry for RT, would be a pretty obvious optimization.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1348477626474663936

But is the alpha based tree using a unique alpha card for each individual leaf? What game does that at all? Thats a total apples to oranges comparison. Most game trees simulate about a dozen leaves in each alpha card at the highest LOD, let alone at a distance...

 

[OlegSH]

But is the alpha based tree using a unique alpha card for each individual leaf?

I guess manually converting 1 leaf to higher poly 1 leaf used across the whole tree was the easiest way to illustrate and test the problem and this should be perfectly fine for testing and demonstration purposes.
I have a hard time imagining how he would have tested it with more complex billboards without any kind of automation (to cut off these leaves for large cards).

 

[cwjs]

Even his fast path was 10ms -- this is obviously an academic experiment.

 

[zed]

When a top tier graphics programmer thinks that diffuse lighting in cyberpunk is prebaked (it's not), that's the best compliment to the fully dynamic diffuse RT lighting in CP2077.

well thats all good, but if one looks at that screenshot, you can see its not prebaked lighting (unless everything is turned off, bounces = 0 etc)
I did like the robot chasing you video in that twitter thread

https://twitter.com/x/status/1407039549612695560

 

[Remij]

Voxelized terrain destruction in UE5

Looks great!

 

[eloic]

Voxelized terrain destruction in UE5

Looks great!

Yeah, it looks great (if you ignore the aggressive LOD and pop-in, as well as the weirdly animated grass), but "not possible before"? What about No Man's Sky? It's the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the tunneling...

 

[Kaotik]

Yeah, it looks great (if you ignore the aggressive LOD and pop-in, as well as the weirdly animated grass), but "not possible before"? What about No Man's Sky? It's the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the tunneling...

2001 called, Red Faction wants its destroyable, tunnel-capable geometry back

 

[Remij]

Yeah, it looks great (if you ignore the aggressive LOD and pop-in, as well as the weirdly animated grass), but "not possible before"? What about No Man's Sky? It's the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the tunneling...

Does No Man's Sky have similar physics though?

 

[Malo]

Does No Man's Sky have similar physics though?

NMS has no physics for its world objects but the tunneling doesn't seem to have any physics in this demo either so as far as the terrain voxelized tunneling and modification is concerned, they're the same capabilities.

 

[eloic]

Does No Man's Sky have similar physics though?

It's the way the guy said it... I understood he was referring to the terrain thing, not specifically to the physics. He said that it's like Minecraft, maybe intentionally avoiding to mention NMS? It looks quasi identical, honestly.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Voxelized terrain destruction in UE5

Looks great!

Other than the real time procedural generation (all the world objects popping in as he moves) that's incredibly impressive.

Would love to see something like 7 Days to Die using this. Amazing game with obviously indie level of graphics. UE5 with Nanite and Lumen might allow them to have much better looking graphics, although that would entail moving the game from Unity to UE.

Maybe we'll finally have destructible worlds in a AAA game again. The last ones were on PS3/X360 that I can think of. I don't think any AAA developer has done extensive world destruction since then. The closest that I can think of is the rather anemic set piece destruction in some of the Battlefield Games. Oh and Crackdown 3, but Crackdown 3 really doesn't feel like a AAA game. It's a shame because with a AAA budget and focus on gameplay and story it could have offered something interesting. The graphics were fine, but the gameplay and story could have used some work.

Regards,
SB

 

[Malo]

None of the "objects" are destructive, it's only the ground terrain so it's not really any step forward in destructible environments that hasn't been done before. It just looks good because it's UE5 using Nanite and Lumen with the addition of physics objects so the rocks actually fall and react to the impacts etc.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

None of the "objects" are destructive, it's only the ground terrain so it's not really any step forward in destructible environments that hasn't been done before. It just looks good because it's UE5 using Nanite and Lumen with the addition of physics objects so the rocks actually fall and react to the impacts etc.

It's not a step forward from PS3/X360, but it's a step forward from PS4/XBO which regressed in a lot of areas compared to PS3/X360 for AAA developers. AA and indie were still advancing the state of gaming on consoles, however.

Regards,
SB