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

Very impressive stuff. So with the ability to turn off Nanite and lumen, how are assets handle? Are there now 2 versions of all assets?
 
Then it very well might be a bug. It was odd to me too that High straight up disabled VSM on foliage instead of lowering quality.

Grass uses contact shadows in Fortnite. Certainly possible those get turned off on high as a side effect of the shadows setting, but seems unintended. Will forward that on and check next week. I can imagine wanting to turn those off at lower scalabilities but feels like High should keep them at least.
 
Here is a similar scene, a bathroom with blue tiles, which give a general bluish interior lighting after the sun light bounces inside, it applies to everything in the room, except the player! The scene is using SW-Lumen here.
Maybe I'm not looking at the same thing, but there definitely appears to be a bit of a blue color cast on the player in the Lumen version to me. Look at the grey areas in particular. Again note that the hero lighting will wash out the color cast a bit, but still looks fairly visible to me 🤷‍♂️

Sorry for asking again, but what is the difference between HW-Lumen and SW-Lumen in this game then? For GI specifically.
I don't know the details of Lumen settings or implementation in Fortnite, hence not being able to answer those questions. More details are likely forthcoming though.

I wouldn't worry about the small probs, the major issue is the terrain pop in and out while flying (for example, the ice cliffs). I understand the terrain is not Nanite though.
The terrain is Nanite actually (otherwise VSM performance would be very bad), but it's the same geometry that is used in the non-nanite version. It's Nanite just to make it faster cluster culling and get the other benefits essentially. The pop-in of ice and stuff like that is probably because those aren't actually part of the terrain and instead are props that are getting removed in the HLODs. I'm sure this can be tuned better in the future.

Very impressive stuff. So with the ability to turn off Nanite and lumen, how are assets handle? Are there now 2 versions of all assets?
I'm not entirely sure for the displacement mapped stuff, but for the majority the non-nanite platforms use the Nanite-generated fallback mesh (see https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/nanite-virtualized-geometry-in-unreal-engine/).

I'm a little disappointed in the use of tessellated geo + existing height maps to generate meshes for a lot of those surfaces but it's understandable considering the scope of the assets. Obviously those assets are not the most flattering case for vsm or nanite -- but I'm sure over the next 6m-1y the real potential of this change will start to be more obvious to the average player.
Agreed, it would be great to see more specifically-modeled "hero asset" type things in the future selfishly, but I can understand the production constraints that come with dealing with such a gigantic library of legacy assets, while still also dealing with platforms like mobile and switch. At least the basic tech is in there now and enabled; this should provide the technical underpinning for them to branch out and do more aggressive stuff on the art side in the future.
 
I created a starter island. It uses the correct map but for some reason nanite and lumen are disabled :(

I wanted to walk around and test performance and visual differences with the options.
 
I created a starter island. It uses the correct map but for some reason nanite and lumen are disabled :(

I wanted to walk around and test performance and visual differences with the options.
Yeah, same. Finally figured out how to spawn the main island but it seems to be an old version, no new features are enabled.
 
Here is a similar scene, a bathroom with blue tiles, which give a general bluish interior lighting after the sun light bounces inside, it applies to everything in the room, except the player! The scene is using SW-Lumen here.


Sorry for asking again, but what is the difference between HW-Lumen and SW-Lumen in this game then? For GI specifically.


I wouldn't worry about the small probs, the major issue is the terrain pop in and out while flying (for example, the ice cliffs). I understand the terrain is not Nanite though.

That's definitely just hero lighting, it's a competitive mp game, so, whatever.

The H-LOD transitions are super noticeable though. In between, with individual cluster transitions it's fine. Not pixel perfect movie stuff, but not noticeable unless you're really looking for it and thus a huge jump over normal lod pops. But the sharp H-LOD stuff stand out.

Still, it's spectacular to see dynamic GI running on a Series S at 60fps, like... wow.
 
That's definitely just hero lighting, it's a competitive mp game, so, whatever.

The H-LOD transitions are super noticeable though. In between, with individual cluster transitions it's fine. Not pixel perfect movie stuff, but not noticeable unless you're really looking for it and thus a huge jump over normal lod pops. But the sharp H-LOD stuff stand out.

Still, it's spectacular to see dynamic GI running on a Series S at 60fps, like... wow.
Sure it's nice but we already got that with Metro Exodus and that was using hardware RT even. I am still disappointed UE is still not doing HW RTGI at 60fps on consoles when we know it has being done by a small team in an open world game.
 
Unfortunately, the UE5 is leaving a lot of performance on the table. The 4090 is barely doing 4K60 native at max settings and SW-Lumen in freaking Fortnite! I don't think that's acceptable. The 4090 flies in Metro Exodus at 4K native, heck it even flies in some path traced games at 4K.

And when it comes to HW-Lumen, it runs similarly to SW-Lumen but at a higher quality, So on PC, activating HW-Lumen should be a no brainer.

UE5 needs more acceleration to extract more performance from the hardware, otherwise, other engines will surpass UE5 in terms of raw performance.
am still disappointed UE is still not doing HW RTGI at 60fps on consoles when we know it has being done by a small team in an open world game.
 
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Sure it's nice but we already got that with Metro Exodus and that was using hardware RT even. I am still disappointed UE is still not doing HW RTGI at 60fps on consoles when we know it has being done by a small team in an open world game.

Because you can't have Nanite and HW-RT on consoles at 60 fps, we know it since Matrix Awakens demo. If you want to have HW-RT and 60 fps you need to take another engine. Nanite plus Lumen is heavy on PC too but I suppose in the future they will continue to optimize.

The console aren't powerful enough for HW-RT Lumen + Nanite. If you want to see this, you need to wait for the arrival of mid gen consoles if they arrive or PS6/next Xbox generation.
 
Because you can't have Nanite and HW-RT on consoles at 60 fps, we know it since Matrix Awakens demo. If you want to have HW-RT and 60 fps you need to take another engine. Nanite plus Lumen is heavy on PC too but I suppose in the future they will continue to optimize.
I don't think that rule is somewhere inscribed in a marble at Epic studio! Like you said they'll optimize their engine. I remember when they first released Fortnite on PS4 the game was still only 30fps.
 
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This is Xbox Series S
 
I don't think that rule is somewhere inscribed in a marble at Epic studio! Like you said they'll optimize their engine. I remember when they first released Fortnite on PS4 the game was still only 30fps.

But for the moment the reality is HW-RT Lumen is 30 fps on consoles and this is not like they did not tell people in releases notes of version 5.0 and 5.1.
 
Very impressive stuff. So with the ability to turn off Nanite and lumen, how are assets handle? Are there now 2 versions of all assets?
Yes.

Pretty sure they use tesselation baking to create some of the nanite versions.
Should be quite fast to get decent quality.
 
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