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

[Andrew Lauritzen]

That’s actually a little scary. Resources aren’t infinite. Nanite is awesome but it doesn’t mean developers are free to do stupid things now.

I think you guys are underestimating how good Nanite's compression is compared to anything games have been using to this point. You can get significantly higher detail geometry all while being *smaller* with Nanite in many cases. Furthermore, stuff that may appear "wasteful" from a naive POV (i.e. flat surfaces) is often just compressed/removed away by Nanite automatically.

As I mentioned much earlier in the thread, it's obviously fine and important to think about various tradeoffs, but we have enough experience now to have a good indication that Nanite disk/memory size is rarely if ever the issue. Given that, being able to free up significant amounts of artist time to work on making other stuff look better is a pure win for everyone.

 

[trinibwoy]

I think you guys are underestimating how good Nanite's compression is compared to anything games have been using to this point. You can get significantly higher detail geometry all while being *smaller* with Nanite in many cases. Furthermore, stuff that may appear "wasteful" from a naive POV (i.e. flat surfaces) is often just compressed/removed away by Nanite automatically.

As I mentioned much earlier in the thread, it's obviously fine and important to think about various tradeoffs, but we have enough experience now to have a good indication that Nanite disk/memory size is rarely if ever the issue. Given that, being able to free up significant amounts of artist time to work on making other stuff look better is a pure win for everyone.

I was reacting to the dev comment about not caring about optimization because we now live in the age of Nanite. Nanite is revolutionary but it’s hard to believe that it absolves artists of any responsibility to manage resource usage. That comment was probably tongue in cheek anyway so I won’t worry about it.

 

[chris1515]

I think the artist precious time gain would make the technology a must even if it was as good looking as previous GPU geometry technology but coupled with virtual shadow maps it means added detail on the scene but the best visual feature is probably how much it reduce LOD pop in. No LOD problem at all until you need to cut Nanite for HLOD.

Another added benefit VSM are faster with Nanite than with classic geometry. I am not sure it would be a viable solution for huge and complex scene without Nanite. It is probably the first time I saw my twitter timeline of followed dev be in shock after the land of nanite demo.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1594889119876145152

Environment artist looks to be happy even for other type of graphic style than photorealism

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1595254079617384453

After if you read the twitter thread the remark of sebbbi are interesting but Brian Karis already told Nanite is not the end of the road.

 

[Inuhanyou]

I think the artist precious time gain would make the technology a must even if it was as good looking as previous GPU geometry technology but coupled with virtual shadow maps it means added detail on the scene but the best visual feature is probably how much it reduce LOD pop in. No LOD problem at all until you need to cut Nanite for HLOD.

Another added benefit VSM are faster with Nanite than with classic geometry. I am not sure it would be a viable solution for huge and complex scene without Nanite. It is probably the first time I saw my twitter timeline of followed dev be in shock after the land of nanite demo.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1594889119876145152

Environment artist looks to be happy even for other type of graphic style than photorealism

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1595254079617384453

After if you read the twitter thread the remark of sebbbi are interesting but Brian Karis already told Nanite is not the end of the road.

Holy crap. I feel stupid now. I was also under the assumption nanite was primarily for photorealistic graphics and photogrammetry primarily. If they are saying devs can just use general asset creation in any game to create things using nanite essentially trivializing polygon budgets that's a completely different thing

 

[Malo]

Doesn't Nanite switch to traditional rendering when polygons are larger?

 

[iroboto]

Holy crap. I feel stupid now. I was also under the assumption nanite was primarily for photorealistic graphics and photogrammetry primarily. If they are saying devs can just use general asset creation in any game to create things using nanite essentially trivializing polygon budgets that's a completely different thing

It’s for all! Dynamic LOD is da bomb in labour savings!

 

[jlippo]

Doesn't Nanite switch to traditional rendering when polygons are larger?

Not exactly.

It still renders clusters which may be culled, just gives them to HW rasterizer.
Also the rasterizer still only renders polygon id and stuff needed for the next phase of nanite to work. (No traditional shaders here..)

So even the HW path gets all the advantages of reduced draw calls and such.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Environment artist looks to be happy even for other type of graphic style than photorealism

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1595254079617384453

After if you read the twitter thread the remark of sebbbi are interesting but Brian Karis already told Nanite is not the end of the road.

That tweet by Andre Weissflog seems so weird to me since I've seen indie and AA developers even more excited than AAA developers WRT the potential for Nanite and Lumen. Mainly that it'll allow them to greatly decrease dev time, increase performance of their projects and massively close the gap visually with AAA studios. And many of these developers work on graphics that aren't even remotely focused on photorealism.

It's the main reason many of the indie developers who were still doing their own in house engines have dropped them in favor of moving to UE5.

Regards,
SB

 

[Frenetic Pony]

I think you guys are underestimating how good Nanite's compression is compared to anything games have been using to this point. You can get significantly higher detail geometry all while being *smaller* with Nanite in many cases. Furthermore, stuff that may appear "wasteful" from a naive POV (i.e. flat surfaces) is often just compressed/removed away by Nanite automatically.

As I mentioned much earlier in the thread, it's obviously fine and important to think about various tradeoffs, but we have enough experience now to have a good indication that Nanite disk/memory size is rarely if ever the issue. Given that, being able to free up significant amounts of artist time to work on making other stuff look better is a pure win for everyone.

Artist time is easily a huge bottleneck. Though I'd love to see Nanite support procedural meshes. Not only would this allow procedural worldbuilding, but I can imagine open world games full of spline meshes all baked out to unique nanite meshes might start ballooning file size a bit?

 

[chris1515]

First game using all UE 5.1 features, Fortnite is now using Nanite, Nanite foliage, Virtual shadow maps, Lumen and have option for HW-RT on PC. It means the RT fan didn't need to be worried. Funny the first games to ship with all this feature is a stylised game. It runs at 60 fps on current gen consoles. Post by @Dampf on another topic but it has its place here. The engine has enough scalability option to make future current gen consoles games with a performance mode at 60 fps, this is great.

The Next Generation of Fortnite Battle Royale is Powered by Unreal Engine 5.1

Fortnite Battle Royale is now on Unreal Engine 5.1. Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution are available in-game. Read more!

www.epicgames.com

 

[Karamazov]

the biggest next gen leap from last to new gen comes from...Fortnite !

 

[troyan]

Tried it and meh. Performance is bad. Less than 100 FPS (down to 75 FPS) on a 4090 in 3440x1440. Works only in the Battle Royal modus, and the Nanite geometry looks like someone has found the DX11 assets from Crysis 2... Which is quite ironic because Crysis 2 was critizied by using so many small triangles. Fun fact: Was never a problem on Fermi hardware...

Especially the performance is a problem. "Super People" looks much better with UE4.

 

[chris1515]

Tried it and meh. Performance is bad. Less than 100 FPS (down to 75 FPS) on a 4090 in 3440x1440. Works only in the Battle Royal modus, and the Nanite geometry looks like someone has found the DX11 assets from Crysis 2... Which is quite ironic because Crysis 2 was critizied by using so many small triangles. Fun fact: Was never a problem on Fermi hardware...

Especially the performance is a problem. "Super People" looks much better with UE4.

Performance is with HW-RT if it is the case maybe a problem with Nanite foliage usage?

 

[chris1515]

 

[troyan]

Using HW-RT doesnt make any difference.

 

[DavidGraham]

Using HW-RT doesnt make any difference.

It should make your character and other characters appear in reflections, GI would Also apply on characters and vehicles. SW-RT won't do any of this.

 

[Dampf]

Using HW-RT doesnt make any difference.

It does, the difference is even apparent in the start menu.

I feel like it enhances the image when I'm playing it versus SW-RT. But I don't know for sure as taking comparisons is extremly difficult.

Performance wise, it runs between 53 and 60 most of the time on my RTX 2060 laptop (high scalability and TSR to 50% at 1440p) with HW-RT and looks pretty fantastic, which is good but not a stable 60 FPS which I would have liked. However, DLSS might improve performance as it does run noticeably faster than TSR.
HW-RT doesn't take much performance I feel, maybe 2-4 fps, but those can be the difference between a good 60 fps experience and a wonky one. But again, this is super hard to test. The game is just very dynamic.

I wonder how the consoles run it. Could be 1440p to 4K with TSR and SW-Lumen or 1080p to 4K with TSR and HW-Lumen, all in high scalability mode.

 

[milk]

First game using all UE 5.1 features, Fortnite is now using Nanite, Nanite foliage, Virtual shadow maps, Lumen and have option for HW-RT on PC. It means the RT fan didn't need to be worried. Funny the first games to ship with all this feature is a stylised game. It runs at 60 fps on current gen consoles. Post by @Dampf on another topic but it has its place here. The engine has enough scalability option to make future current gen consoles games with a performance mode at 60 fps, this is great.

The Next Generation of Fortnite Battle Royale is Powered by Unreal Engine 5.1

Fortnite Battle Royale is now on Unreal Engine 5.1. Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps, and Temporal Super Resolution are available in-game. Read more!

www.epicgames.com

Cool. Lumen can be a game changer for the dynamic construction of buildings in that game. Though I'm curious of how well it will handle their thin walls...

 

[troyan]

Just a reminder how Tessellation looked in Crysis 2: https://www.hardware.fr/articles/838-6/tessellation-loupe.html

And this is a stone wall in Fortnite:

 

[Karamazov]

and how is you packet of chips in crysis 2 ?