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

[Flappy Pannus]

I did notice they mentioned that the performance of UE5 sucks on their 3080, first I've heard of PC performance unless I missed something.

Not exactly relevant to the demo we're discussing, especially when the engine has seem numerous improvements since then and is running on far less performant hardware. Also saying that "Unreal Engine 5 always performs poorly" based on 2 demos of an engine not in any shipping game and still quite a ways from release is that level of hyperbole and conjecture I'm speaking of that doesn't really add much, there's a difference between critique and contrarian.

You can't really base a thread's merit on simply weighing the "positive" posts vs the "negative" ones - there have been plenty of posters noting the drawbacks in this demo/tech without completely dismissing the entirety of the tech here out of hand.

 

[Remij]

I'm thinking The Coalition contributed to the project because they have close ties to Epic to begin with, they've contributed MANY things to the Unreal Engine over the years.. and it's likely that the a few select studios, such as The Coalition and Ninja Theory are heavily testing and giving feedback to Epic at this moment, leading up into launch. The Coalition has proven to have an incredible understanding of the Unreal Engine and of course, the Xbox hardware. Epic likely sought their input to make the project better, not only for Xbox, but all the platforms in general. UE is meant to scale, and most optimizations will contribute to all platforms, up to a point.

Obviously the Series S was the main obstacle... and considering the output.. I think they've largely succeeded.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Obviously the Series S was the main obstacle... and considering the output.. I think they've largely succeeded.

Yeah. I mean it's not how I would like to play it, it's very noisy/blurry by comparison - but the fact it's doing this at all, even from a reconstructed 720p, is amazing.

 

[BitByte]

What are you contributing 'of note'? You're just repeating how unimpressed you are. When people point out the unique things this engine is doing, you just hand-wave them away.

And yes, that's exactly what you argued:


I mean, the entire point of realtime graphics engines is to give the impression of infinite details. UE5 isn't producing "infinite details" for the hell of it, it's giving the impression of that better than previous attempts we've seen so far through a combination of many techniques. To postulate that there's a better version of this engine (a year away from release) out there that can be far more performant....because all engine makers need to do is 'hide stuff better' is something that's just begging to be poked fun at. It's an absolutely ridiculous statement.

Your posts perhaps aren't garnering likes because you're bravely swimming upstream against the supposedly blinkered masses here, they're just generally hyperbolic and making weak arguments - if they're making any at all.

The first thing you should know is that I don’t care if people like my post or not. I don’t get off random internet strangers I don’t know or care about clicking a button to say, they liked what I post. I made that reference to likes because your post was just rubbish. You twisted what I said and made no meaningful arguments to win internet points.

Now to address the second part of your posts, please show me where I hand waved away features. Everything I criticized, I can post screen shot evidence to to back up my claims. I actually acknowledged the strong points of the demo like the strengths of nanite. It also has weakness which the epic themselves have acknowledged. I evaluated the demo as a whole and no individual component is greater than the sum of its parts. This isn’t a nanite demo or lumen demo, it’s a ue5 demo that incorporates several components. Some of those are better than others and as a whole, it’s flaws are too glaring to ignore. You accuse me of hand waving away impressive technical features while you hand wave away detrimental flaws.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

The hellblade II gameplay trailer was also absolutely bonkers and more impressive in some ways than the Matrix demo. UE5 is shaping up real nice.

HB2 was indeed impressive too, but it was also very dark, mostly scripted, and of course not a playable demo. I'm not saying the game won't look that good on launch, it likely will - but for HB2, it looked like I would have imagined a scripted sequence to look like when targeting these consoles from the outset. Definitely a leap above released titles now, but the Matrix is getting most of the attention because of course, it's an actual playable demo and allows you to roam around the city outside of the on-rails segment.

As impressive as it was, if the demo was a video of the freeway shoot-out and ended there, people would probably still be mentioning it but nowhere near the level of 'holy shit' it's garnering now*. That's largely because they drop you in a ridiculously huge city and allow you to zoom out 1000ft and then travel down to street level to look at the interactive modelling of a 3d wire fence with less pop-in than other games exhibit walking along a street (and also allow you to examine the flaws). That is something I've never seen before.

*Granted that's before the Digital Foundry video, I assumed the cars crashing after getting shot had scripted animations, but that's apparently entirely the physics system and they react differently on each playthrough. Wild.

 

[Remij]

HB2 was indeed impressive too, but it was also very dark, mostly scripted, and of course not a playable demo. I'm not saying the game won't look that good on launch, it likely will - but for HB2, it looked like I would have imagined a scripted sequence to look like when targeting these consoles from the outset. Definitely a leap above released titles now, but the Matrix is getting most of the attention because of course, it's an actual playable demo and allows you to roam around the city outside of the on-rails segment.

As impressive as it was, if the demo was a video of the freeway shoot-out and ended there, people would probably still be mentioning it but nowhere near the level of 'holy shit' it's garnering now*. That's largely because they drop you in a ridiculously huge city and allow you to zoom out 1000ft and then travel down to street level to look at the interactive modelling of a 3d wire fence with less pop-in than other games exhibit walking along a street (and also allow you to examine the flaws). That is something I've never seen before.

*Granted that's before the Digital Foundry video, I assumed the cars crashing after getting shot had scripted animations, but that's apparently entirely the physics system and they react differently on each playthrough. Wild.

I'd forgive you for thinking that, because I saw many instances where the cars looked to roll and flip in the exact same manner.

Also, I think that every car flips when you shoot it's tires out lol... I don't remember seeing any cars that just veer off and crash.. although I guess that's just for "cinematic effect"

 

[pjbliverpool]

When this demo lands on PC it'll be interesting to see how my Pascal handles it given its use of hardware RT. I assume it will fall back to a compute based path but that I'll lose some of the non Lumen RT based effects.

On paper the 1070 is a more powerful GPU than you XSS and I have a more powerful CPU, but a much slower SATA SDD.

Will this be the first "game" to allow the next gen features of the weakest console to offer a clearly superior experience to a faster "last gen" machine?

 

[Remij]

When this demo lands on PC it'll be interesting to see how my Pascal handles it given its use of hardware RT. I assume it will fall back to a compute based path but that I'll lose some of the non Lumen RT based effects.

On paper the 1070 is a more powerful GPU than you XSS and I have a more powerful CPU, but a much slower SATA SDD.

Will this be the first "game" to allow the next gen features of the weakest console to offer a clearly superior experience to a faster "last gen" machine?

The assets are coming, but are we sure the demo proper is coming?

 

[pjbliverpool]

The assets are coming, but are we sure the demo proper is coming?

Good question. Perhaps @Dictator can shed some light on that. I had assumed it would be something similar to Valley of the Ancients where all the scripted elements were included as well, albeit that the demo may need self compiling.

 

[iroboto]

When this demo lands on PC it'll be interesting to see how my Pascal handles it given its use of hardware RT. I assume it will fall back to a compute based path but that I'll lose some of the non Lumen RT based effects.

On paper the 1070 is a more powerful GPU than you XSS and I have a more powerful CPU, but a much slower SATA SDD.

Will this be the first "game" to allow the next gen features of the weakest console to offer a clearly superior experience to a faster "last gen" machine?

Lack of more recent features may hurt its performance possibly. No conservative rasterizer. Etc etc.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I'd forgive you for thinking that, because I saw many instances where the cars looked to roll and flip in the exact same manner.

Also, I think that every car flips when you shoot it's tires out lol... I don't remember seeing any cars that just veer off and crash.. although I guess that's just for "cinematic effect"

It's because when you shoot the tires it applies a force to the car to cause them to flip, but it's just applying a force and the physics engine does the rest.

 

[Scott_Arm]

The assets are coming, but are we sure the demo proper is coming?

I don't know if the Matrix demo is coming to pc. It sounds the like open world is going to ship as a project when the engine is officially available, but all of the matrix brand stuff will be stripped out.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I know it’s not a game and that’s irrelevant to my complaints. UE5 delivers poor performance on next gen consoles. 100% of the time it’s been shown, it’s delivered poor performance. I’ve moved 2 of my projects from UE4 to UE5 just to mess with nanite and lumen and even on my 3080, the performance is simply not good enough.

I can see these argument about performance, but I'm not sure I'm ready to call what performance will look like when there haven't been any games shipped and the engine is still in preview. It sounds like they have some targets for release that haven't been achieved yet, but I'd guess it's always going to be more demanding that UE4. It gets hard to compare something like nanite vs a traditional lod approach. How much do you care that you can zoom in on a chainlink fence and see that each link is made of polygons? How much do you care that there isn't visible pop-in (though I expect when you have trees and grass with foliage we'll see pop in again)? It's kind of like the DXR thing. Some people look at Metro Exodus with ray tracing and they say the performance hit isn't worth it because of diminishing returns to visuals. At some point the decades long rasterized pipeline is going to have to change if visuals are going to make a big advancement. Nanite, to me, looks like a good first step in the right direction. Hopefully they can get dynamic geometry working. Lumen sounds pretty heavy, and I think that's probably where you'll see compromises made for games. I'm not sure if nanite supports other gi approaches, like baking, but I wouldn't be shocked to see that direction taken if possible for a lot of games. As for the temporal super resolution, we just know that's how things are going. Brute forcing will only exacerbate diminishing returns from hardware, and we'll see more and more stochastic sampling approaches with reconstruction. I'll be interested in seeing comparisons between TSR, DLSS, FSR etc. I think metahumans are a huge advancement, but the animations of faces etc is still going to come down to the limits of how much money companies can spend doing facial capture or detailed "hand crafted" animation. I expect Hellblade 2 will show us exactly what UE5 is capable of in that front.

If you look at UE4.0 in 2014 to UE4.27 now, the changes have been huge. I expect by the end of the this gen UE5 will have made significant alterations to nanite, lumen, metahumans, chaos physics etc.

 

[zed]

How much do you care that there isn't visible pop-in (though I expect when you have trees and grass with foliage we'll see pop in again)?

Yeah to me this is very underrated, no popin is huge, a major improvement. But I havent seen this in the flesh, so havent tested it (just going off the video)
WRT the foliage, I assume its anything thats dynamic (foliage/flags etc) and not specifically foliage, Or is it just foliage?

 

[lethal01]

Yeah to me this is very underrated, no popin is huge, a major improvement. But I havent seen this in the flesh, so havent tested it (just going off the video)
WRT the foliage, I assume its anything thats dynamic (foliage/flags etc) and not specifically foliage, Or is it just foliage?

IT's really not gone yet, if you're looking for it you will see it every 10 seconds but it's still a lot better.

 

[techuse]

Lack of more recent features may hurt its performance possibly. No conservative rasterizer. Etc etc.

Pascal has conservative rasterization. Nvidia introduced that feature starting with Maxwell.

When this demo lands on PC it'll be interesting to see how my Pascal handles it given its use of hardware RT. I assume it will fall back to a compute based path but that I'll lose some of the non Lumen RT based effects.

On paper the 1070 is a more powerful GPU than you XSS and I have a more powerful CPU, but a much slower SATA SDD.

Will this be the first "game" to allow the next gen features of the weakest console to offer a clearly superior experience to a faster "last gen" machine?

Didn’t this already happen with Halo Infinite?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Yeah to me this is very underrated, no popin is huge, a major improvement. But I havent seen this in the flesh, so havent tested it (just going off the video)
WRT the foliage, I assume its anything thats dynamic (foliage/flags etc) and not specifically foliage, Or is it just foliage?

I think nanite doesn’t support dynamic/deforming meshes right now, and most foliage moves but there would be other things, like animated characters. In the digital foundry video they show the cars are split into sections so the can swap out parts that need to deform from static nanite meshes to dynamic meshes.

 

[zed]

I think nanite doesn’t support dynamic/deforming meshes right now, and most foliage moves but there would be other things, like animated characters. In the digital foundry video they show the cars are split into sections so the can swap out parts that need to deform from static nanite meshes to dynamic meshes.

Thanks mate.
Often foliage doesnt need to deform, its basically nearly in the same spot, no scaling just moved/orientated slightly different
With cars everything (except wheels etc) is moved/oriented from the base root node, so maybe they can do a single calculation per frame to get the new nanite data, but with eg a tree you'ld have to do this for each leaf?

@Ta Lethal01 so there is still pop in, its just been greatly improved

 

[Karamazov]

LoD popin is too hard to notice, but you can definitely see the shadows pop on characters, maybe because they are not nanite ?


BTW, nice crash !

 

[Karamazov]

Dare to count the number of cars ?