Sixty dollars to walk and drive around a fictional digital city.
Unreal Engine 5, [UE5 Developer Availability 2022-04-05]
- Thread starter mpg1
- Start date
Sixty dollars to walk and drive around a fictional digital city.
This content is for developers! They put together a more technically challenging demo scene that wasn't effected by whatever deal they signed for promotion with partners like sony. The expectations from non devs around here are ridiculous -- if you (everyone, not singling you out) want to look at technical demos and discuss technical topics, I don't think it's reasonable to flood it with feedback about what looks better as a player or whatever. There will be polished ue5 games released in a year or two.
Its weird that some do not understand this.
Because it's not using the same settings (at all) for starters! If someone wants to create a "similar to XSS" settings version of the demo, it's really not that hard. You could do it yourself if you want to learn a little about UE, which is ultimately the point here.
I know you're not interested in that, and you are of course welcome to lament that no one has yet done that for you, but I don't buy the logic that this means Epic doesn't care about PC. At best you can argue Epic is more interested in providing a useful starting point for other developers to make awesome PC *games* than showing off demos directly to PC gamers.
Basically, this. The purpose of this stuff is to demonstrate to developers what is possible. The details around tweaking and cooking a shipping game are something that Unreal developers are very familiar with already, and there are plenty of online resources available for people to learn.
Honestly I get the initial feelings, but if you're truly invested in this please focus some of that energy into learning enough to go tweak some of the settings in the demo to your own liking. Note that there's also a Small_City map in there that is a bit lighter on the CPU/VRAM, but otherwise the same rendering quality.
I don't know all that much about the UE5 engine, but I am already in love with it's TSR feature after playing with it in Ghostwire Tokyo! 
DavidGraham
Veteran
Any details on the ray tracing implementation in the demo? The released videos were very light on details on that regard.
It's stock UE5 Lumen in the sample - I believe the details here are relatively up to date: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/lumen-technical-details-in-unreal-engine/. The sample is set to use hardware RT if available by default.
I am running most settings in GameUserSettings.ini on 1, except for Global Illumination at 3, reflections at 2 and effects at 2 with TSR at 50% at 1440p (so 720p), I assume that comes pretty close to what the Series S is using. I still can't get such a smooth experience like on that console, far from it even though I have a more powerful machine.
For sure, if I could get really invested, I could for example tone down some textures by hand (although video memory doesn't seem to be a culprit here as regardless if that over memory budget message appears or not, its still stuttering and CPU limited) and probably there's a way to make it less intensive on the CPU without sacrificing too much in terms of NPC/traffic density/view distance. I could install the SDKs, tune it specifically to my machine and compile the demo myself. Sure. But that means I'd have to learn hours worth of new stuff just for a demo (and probably wait hours while compiling).
Ultimately I'm an end-user that just wants to experience the magic of this demo. I don't own a console, except for a Switch. I think Epic does great things for the PC community, I like UE, Nanite and Lumen look awesome and I really like that Epic is giving all this stuff away for free, don't get me wrong. I just wish Epic would care a bit more about users like me, very interested in graphics tech but also don't want to turn into a mini-developer just to enjoy a state of the art demo without stuttering.
I hope you know what I mean. Epic does great work here. I am just a bit worried about the performance/experience of future games based on what I have seen here. I understand it's a sample project for devs, but this is right now the only way to see how my PC might handle future games.
The Series S is running the full map though.
Have you turned down the traffic/crowd density? That's going to be a big part of the CPU overhead, which is probably where the bottleneck is. Does the small city map run better? How loaded is the GPU when you are testing?
I'm not sure if the demo you are using was compiled in "shipping" config either, but that can sometimes be important vs. "development". If you can use the ~ console ingame then it was probably compiled in development mode.
To be clear, I think the real intention is not so much to make every end user into a developer, it's more that developers (professional and hobbyist) take the sample and make it even better, and then engage their audiences with those games.
I know it's tempting, but this gets to the core of it: I would not use random amateur folks loading up UE for the first time and doing "play in editor" as a proxy for how a polished, shipping game would perform in the future. UE5 does make it easier than in the past to get stuff up and running, but there's still some level of expertise (and hardware targets!) required for the polish.
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You cant base that on this sample release. That is your problem. There is no reason to doubt an equal-to-console modern pc wouldnt be able to atleast run what the consoles do. Theres plenty of UE5 demos done by individual users which show even more impressive visuals on mid range hardware running very well.
Yes, but it already defaults at 50% for both mass AI and traffic. On the consoles, it's using 100%. So on my PC it already looks much less crowded with NPCs and traffic than on consoles and still stutters heavily. When I turn it completely down to 0%, the stuttering is gone indeed but then it looks like a ghost town.
You are right, it was packaged in development mode. Sometimes I use commands to tweak settings on the fly. Do you think shipping mode would really run that much better?
Really? Are these demos downloadable? Could you perhaps share one? I have seen some, but these are almost always without AI or just static rocks. So not really representative of real game performance.
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I'm not sure if that UI necessarily equates to the same thing. They may have broadened it to allow you to go higher on PC/in the sample, but I'd have to compare side by side.
Hard to know for sure, but it made a non-trivial difference on consoles and when I compiled the shipping version earlier in this thread I wasn't really seeing significant stutter after the shader compile stuff happened. There's still the odd bit (mostly graphics driver memory stuff as I noted - part of the legit downside of PCs comparatively but IHVs can usually find ways to tweak it), but it wasn't nearly as significant as what people seem to be reporting.
Sure... but I wouldn't necessarily take the CitySample as super representative of a real shipping game AI/performance either. It's obviously better than nothing, and a proof of concept that stuff at that "level" is doable, but I would not really expect a AAA developer to directly use MASS and the other gameplay stuff from the sample directly.
Honestly the main difference I've noticed in the sample is the car and crash physics seem... different. I don't know the details there but things felt a little better tweaked on the console demos; presumably that changed due to underlying physics changes between the demo and release, but I'm not sure.
Neither is Matrix tech demo. You are comparing pc vs console using the matrix demo on Xbox and this UE5 sample on pc done by individual users. As pointed out above this will never be like-for-like. It is way too premature to judge the future of unreal engine based on this sample or even the matrix demo on the console. We can assume that if you have RX6700/RTX2070/RTX3060 and higher you will be very ok with games releasing based on UE5. In special whenever youve got hardware RT acceleration going for it.
Definately possible, but yeah once you compare it side by side it's pretty clear console's 100% is a lot more crowded than PCs 50%.
I've come across this article with a video in it that looks pretty similar to my stutters:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Unrea...-stuttery-on-an-Nvidia-RTX-3090.612680.0.html
Are you getting similar stutters (especially while driving at 3:50 mark?) This person is also using the same packaged version I use. Note how GPU usage drops as soon as the stutters occur. On my end GPU usage is pretty low to begin with (given how low my settings are that's to be expected), CPU usually in the 60-70s though with MSI Afterburner, in Task Manager it can show up to 100% even.
These stutters are also not getting better over time, so it's seems to be more related to the CPU rather than shaders.
I really wonder if the difference between PC and console right now is the absence of DirectStorage. I assume DirectStorage could really, really help with that, even in its current CPU decompression and especially later with GPU based decompression implementation. I assume the Matrix Demo on consoles is already using the decompression hardware blocks? That could explain everything.
I think the bigger issue here is one of perception. I absolutely get and support Andrews position that the point of this is to encourage and allow PC users to start working on their own projects, and I've no doubt it will be successful.
But at the same time there's a lot of Internet chatter like that in this thread building up about the potential performance issues of UE5 on PC. I'm certain it's unwarranted, but nevertheless it can't be the kind of chatter that Epic wants spreading.
It would be trivial for Epic to compile and host a couple of optimised versions of this demo (high end and medium) that would shut all this chatter down in a matter of hours. Feels like a no brainer to me.
But at the same time there's a lot of Internet chatter like that in this thread building up about the potential performance issues of UE5 on PC. I'm certain it's unwarranted, but nevertheless it can't be the kind of chatter that Epic wants spreading.
It would be trivial for Epic to compile and host a couple of optimised versions of this demo (high end and medium) that would shut all this chatter down in a matter of hours. Feels like a no brainer to me.
And the people that this open source UE5 release with assets is targeting, will make a decision on wether to use UE5 based on none dev impressions? I mean what are the options? Roll your own, Unity, Godot or license somebody else's engine?
UE5 is just a download away, any dev would do their own tests....
DavidGraham
Veteran
But it doesn't look like it benefiting greatly from the RTX hardware for example. The 3090 is powering through by sheer brute force, performance would be much higher if RT cores were engaged heavily.
Yeah that's part of the problem.
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