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

[Andrew Lauritzen]

I am running the demo on my PC in the editor and compiled. Compiled runs quite a bit better obviously, but still far from optimal.

Any reason you aren't just doing a packaged build if you are looking for best performance?

Any chance for Epic to release an optimized demo build for PC, including graphics options, Series S textures for those with less than 8 GB VRAM and DLSS? I would love to run it on my i7 9750H/2060 laptop without stuttering. I am sure I am not the only one who really, really wants a PC optimized version of this demo, preferably with all the content from the original demo on consoles.

It's a sample, so it's effectively in the community's ballpark at this point. It's pretty straightforward to change settings as desired and package whatever version of the demo you want for others to use. Unfortunately the Matrix-specific content cannot be released due to licensing things, but the rest of the city is the same.

Note that I believe XSS did compromise slightly on crowd/traffic density in addition to other settings. I don't know the details but I recall the DF video mentioning that. Honestly I'm still impressed that it managed to run the demo at all in mostly reasonable quality... hats off to the work that the Coalition did!

 

[PSman1700]

@Andrew Lauritzen Thanks for your input!

 

[Karamazov]

yeah XsS still has a traffic density that is unmatched in any game released so far !

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Regarding being CPU bound, example of the sample running at 1080p ish in editor on a threadripper/3090:


As you can see, despite what the ingame stats claim, we are heavily CPU bound. Quick and dirty testing seems to indicate that I can get almost up to 2160p on this machine before I become GPU bound. Obviously on a faster (single-threaded) CPU you would have a bit higher baseline, but I suspect on most high end configs they will be CPU bound out of the box on PC.

 

[Dampf]

Any reason you aren't just doing a packaged build if you are looking for best performance?


It's a sample, so it's effectively in the community's ballpark at this point. It's pretty straightforward to change settings as desired and package whatever version of the demo you want for others to use. Unfortunately the Matrix-specific content cannot be released due to licensing things, but the rest of the city is the same.

Note that I believe XSS did compromise slightly on crowd/traffic density in addition to other settings. I don't know the details but I recall the DF video mentioning that. Honestly I'm still impressed that it managed to run the demo at all in mostly reasonable quality... hats off to the work that the Coalition did!

I am running a packaged version as well. From this guy:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1511420495069073409

While it is a lot better than in the editor, it's still very, very stuttery. Especially the intro when the cam leads to the character but also while driving and flying, and while walking from time to time.
While you are right about that DLSS can be added by the community, I do not believe the Series S textures are included here. There's zero difference in texture quality and memory usage going from Epic/Cinematic to low in terms of texture detail. Still, the community only can do so much, I would absolutely prefer a demo that is handbuilt by Epic for PC gamers. I am really sad we PC gamers cannot enjoy the full demo, I am not understanding the reasoning either. There are license games like Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy on PC as well, so why can't Epic make an standalone demo for the PC platform just like on consoles? It should not be a problem if the matrix specific assets are not published for free-use.

Anyway, it's still a a very impressive Sample project and I am happy we got it at all. It looks gorgeous and aside from the stutters, it runs well too.

 

[PSman1700]

While it is a lot better than in the editor, it's still very, very stuttery. Especially the intro when the cam leads to the character but also while driving and flying, and while walking from time to time.
While you are right about that DLSS can be added by the community, I do not believe the Series S textures are included here. There's zero difference in texture quality and memory usage going from Epic/Cinematic to low in terms of texture detail. Still, the community only can do so much, I would absolutely prefer a demo that is handbuilt by Epic for PC gamers. I am really sad we PC gamers cannot enjoy the full demo, I am not understanding the reasoning either. There are license games like Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy on PC as well, so why can't Epic make an standalone demo for the PC platform just like on consoles? It should not be a problem if the matrix specific assets are not published for free-use.

Indeed unfortunate, they probably do not have the time for it i think. But it would be nice if they did for sure, a optimized version like the consoles. Would be something for performance comparisons which are totally out the window with this.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

I do not believe the Series S textures are included here. There's zero difference in texture quality and memory usage going from Epic/Cinematic to low in terms of texture detail.

That's because it's almost all virtual textures... lowering the render resolution will lower the amount of texture streaming automatically. I'm sure there are LOD bias settings too if you want. It's not as if they created entirely different textures for the XSS or something. You can adjust the DRAM use of the virtual texture pool by cvars I believe, although it is also adjusted by scalability. Given that, what makes you think this is a main culprit?

Still, the community only can do so much, I would absolutely prefer a demo that is handbuilt by Epic for PC gamers.

Not to get too coy, but the community can do literally all the same things the Epic team did here. That's the whole point in releasing the entire engine and demo as open source for free. I must admit to not having a ton of sympathy for people not being willing to learn a few things about Unreal and tweak a few settings on different PC configs when all of the hard work has already been done and given away for free.

To be clear I get your feelings as an end user, but this is an engine sample for developers primarily to help them learn how to build their own games. Please try and keep that in mind.

 

[pjbliverpool]

On that note is there anyone here that could give a quick dummies guide to compiling our own version from the editor?

I downloaded one precompiled version but I'm pretty sure it's running maxed out at native res (or more). I'm only running a 1070 so would like to play around with the upsampling to get more playable frame rates.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

And just for fun I cooked CitySample (Big_City) in shipping on my personal PC (12900k w/ 3090, 32GB RAM) just to see how it performs. It actually performs a bit better than on the threadripper (as expected given the CPU boundedness there), running around ~40-50fps while flying around. GPU around 90% loaded. First minute or so was stuttery the first time I ran it, but after that it is quite smooth, even when moving pretty quickly. Presumably driver shader/PSO cache stuff given the symptoms. It's possible to pre-cache PSOs for a given machine/driver (see https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/SharingAndReleasing/PSOCaching/) but it's kind of annoying and I'm lazy

I'm sure it could be optimized more if desired, but overall it seems to be running okay here. Obviously this is a very high end machine, but others have been reporting issues on similarly high end stuff, so I just wanted to double check that it was working ok in a cooked/shipping build here, which it seems to be.

 

[Karamazov]

I wonder if Epic tried to run nanite/lumen on last gen consoles ?

 

[Dampf]

I wonder if DirectStorage/SFS could help eliminating all these stutters, given it drastically reduces CPU load in streaming scenarios. Really hope games won't be so stuttery in the future. It already was a pretty big issue with UE4 games.

 

[techuse]

I wonder if Epic tried to run nanite/lumen on last gen consoles ?

Lumen would be far too slow. I wonder if nanite could work though.

 

[DavidGraham]

running around ~40-50fps while flying around. GPU around 90% loaded

At 4K native?


Here the 3090Ti running the demo from the editor at 4K native and doing 45 to 50 fps at 70 to 80% GPU utilization.

 

[Dampf]

It looks so good though... The combination of Lumen and Nanite is really a game changer.

 

[Slifer]

Not to get too coy, but the community can do literally all the same things the Epic team did here. That's the whole point in releasing the entire engine and demo as open source for free. I must admit to not having a ton of sympathy for people not being willing to learn a few things about Unreal and tweak a few settings on different PC configs when all of the hard work has already been done and given away for free.

To be clear I get your feelings as an end user, but this is an engine sample for developers primarily to help them learn how to build their own games. Please try and keep that in mind.

In that case, do you have any updates on the Lumen in the Land of Nanite demo? I understand not releasing it till now because its used the old level streaming workflow and you are trying to push the new workflow of world partition.
But with nanite being a new tech we need every single available example to show us how to use nanite and get good performance.

The valley demo and matrix demo were great but they were heavy. The valley demo were heavy specifically because there were alot of overlapped nanite meshes that wasn't combined in the right way according to Brian Karis.
He said that the valley demo was 2x more nanite heavy than the lumen in the land of nanite demo.
Which makes sense since that demo ran 1404p at ~40fps.

We need that demo. Why? It demonstrates great performance WITH nanite and shows us how to achieve amazing visuals while still having amazing performance, on consoles and large assortments of PCs. Both on the GPU and CPU standpoint.

So Andrew, can you find out what's going on with the release of that demo? Can you push on the behalf of the community for that Demo?
I know Epic Games are no gatekeepers and are trailblazers in not being gatekeepers of knowledge, it would be a shame if they started regressing now.

 

[Karamazov]

what we need is Neo flying in that land of nanite demo !

 

[Pressure]

@Andrew Lauritzen Does the sample have any special Windows dependencies since it doesn't work in macOS?

 

[Karamazov]

another impressive thing mentionned, in the chase demo that is not present in the PC release, because of copyrights, is that during the cutscenes and action sequences, all is happening in the megacity, it's not a vertical slice with only portions of streets rendered and carefully placed cameras to hide popins.
So imagine the level of details a smaller scale game would reach.

 

[Lurkmass]

@Andrew Lauritzen Does the sample have any special Windows dependencies since it doesn't work in macOS?

Metal API lacks support for atomic operations on textures in comparison to D3D12 or Vulkan so nanite remains unusable on Apple systems ...

 

[SlmDnk]

It looks so good though... The combination of Lumen and Nanite is really a game changer.

Good?

Those screenshots look terrible.