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

I'd love to see a comparison between TSR/FSR2.2/DLSS, I miss those from Digital Foundry, it'd be interesting to see how good TSR is now. But all their PC guy does now is whinge about how games are a bit buggy and don't have totally pointless stuff like fancy options menus.

In the past few weeks he's made 2 videos on an extensive mod for Control and another video looking at Cyberpunk overdrive. It's not simply endless videos on #stutterstruggle.

And lol at 'a bit buggy', come on man. DF is primarily about a channel dealing with technology that exists in actual products, while TSR improvements would be interesting to see at some point, it's ultimately more relevant to their userbase to see how technology in in shipping games is actually being implemented. DF would be receiving a lot of flak, and rightfully so, if they continually forgoed looking at major releases like Jedi Survivor in lieu of making another video at the state of reconstruction tech - hell they got some grief for not covering TLOU before now. He's one dude. I'm sure TSR will get more coverage when it's in actual games and can be compared to DLSS/FSR, but I don't really see the point of a seperate video covering it when it's main usage right now is in demos unless it brings something truly revolutionary to the table.

Maybe if we had more outlets that actually provided this level of analysis you would get a more positive mix in DF's PC coverage, but it's not Alex's fault that publishers have deemed fit to release games lately that fall so far short, so often, and other channels give the most threadbare analysis to the actual software which we purchase hardware for. "Too much critique of the state of PC games" is really the least of PC Gaming's problems right now.
 
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Unreal Engine 5.2 Matrix Demo with High Quality Reflections via JSFILMZ (Youtube)

Render time 2 hours 45 minutes but looks glorious. Imagine GTA looking this good one day
Roughly 0.25 fps on a two grand GPU...

For 30fps, we'd need a 120x performance increase. We'd also need the price down at console levels, to a quarter, say (I know, retail price isn't production price, etc.). Roughly 500x reduction. That'd be a halving 9x...if we double performance every 1.5 years, that's 13+ years away. Okay, we can use reconstruction etc. to save rendering effort, but to scale up like this, the Cloud seems the only platform that can scale to that level of performance.
 
but to scale up like this, the Cloud seems the only platform that can scale to that level of performance.
Again, something is definitely wrong in that video, he is either rendering at an insane resolution (16K?), or using the UE5 path tracing mode with crazy amount of samples.

Here is the 5.1 demo running at 90fps max settings, native 4K on a 4090.

 
Again, something is definitely wrong in that video, he is either rendering at an insane resolution (16K?), or using the UE5 path tracing mode with crazy amount of samples.

Here is the 5.1 demo running at 90fps max settings, native 4K on a 4090.


This is what Shifty said, it is above realtime rendering quality. The guy said it 2 hours and 35 minutes to render on a high end PC. There is nothing wrong he does RE reflection above realtime rendering quality. First it is render at 6k

In the comment he said he can reach nearly same quality in 5.3 and I suppose non native 4k
@Joshua Smith yea 5.3 will also add new lumen reflection setting
 
A game called Brickadia has integrated PhysX 5 in UE5.1 engine, instead of Chaos, citing huge performance uplifts with PhysX 5 over Chaos in large simulations.

In the Open Alpha, we had upgraded the physics engine in Unreal from PhysX 3.4 to PhysX 4.1 for significant performance improvements with brick collision. Our bricks are now also directly integrated with PhysX for collision detection rather than going through the slow abstraction layers in the engine. Did I mention that we like PhysX?
So what do we do about the fact that Epic deleted PhysX from the engine?
Yes, you read that right - a key component we've relied on simply disappeared from the engine. It was replaced by their custom "Chaos" physics engine, which at least in our tests, currently runs at significantly worse performance for the kind of simulations players will undoubtedly create in a physics based sandbox game.
Luckily, we're not bound by sanity as an indie developer, so the solution is obvious: We just have to put PhysX back in the engine! Oh, and they just released a new version, so let's upgrade it to PhysX 5.1 also while we're at it.
It was all worth it in the end, because we now have a branch of Unreal Engine 5.1 that can switch between Chaos and PhysX 5.1 with a single build setting. The PhysX version runs several times faster in large simulations, and our brick collision code can now work again. The engine also compiles faster without the Chaos code in it, improving iteration times. As far as we know, we're currently the only ones with such a branch.

 
That level of environment detail is what I'm hoping GTA 6 can come close to.

Rage has great streaming. It'll be interesting to see how that, coupled with art megabucks, competes with Nanite. One of thr impressive things about the Matrix/City/Menace demos is how little in the way of art resources went into them, relatively speaking.
 
In the past few weeks he's made 2 videos on an extensive mod for Control and another video looking at Cyberpunk overdrive. It's not simply endless videos on #stutterstruggle.

And lol at 'a bit buggy', come on man. DF is primarily about a channel dealing with technology that exists in actual products, while TSR improvements would be interesting to see at some point, it's ultimately more relevant to their userbase to see how technology in in shipping games is actually being implemented. DF would be receiving a lot of flak, and rightfully so, if they continually forgoed looking at major releases like Jedi Survivor in lieu of making another video at the state of reconstruction tech - hell they got some grief for not covering TLOU before now. He's one dude. I'm sure TSR will get more coverage when it's in actual games and can be compared to DLSS/FSR, but I don't really see the point of a seperate video covering it when it's main usage right now is in demos unless it brings something truly revolutionary to the table.

Maybe if we had more outlets that actually provided this level of analysis you would get a more positive mix in DF's PC coverage, but it's not Alex's fault that publishers have deemed fit to release games lately that fall so far short, so often, and other channels give the most threadbare analysis to the actual software which we purchase hardware for. "Too much critique of the state of PC games" is really the least of PC Gaming's problems right now.

Yeah the Overdrive thing is hilarious, I love how over the top he is for Nvidia marketing. Functionally it's not really different from what UE5 is doing with "Lumen", in fact they're both limited to 2 bounces currently, and 99% of the time you can't tell them apart, but "Overdrive" runs ten times slower. Definitely needs a 20 minute video gushing over it.

As for his takes on most PC games, they have gotten terrible. He doesn't care about what it's like to actually play the game, evidenced by the "terrible port!!!" of Final Fantasy VII remake having "Very Positive" on Steam from 13k review, pretty much the same for the "super problematic" Resident Evil 4, Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam from 50k reviews. His reviews don't match up at all with people's experiences, and so aren't informative to anyone. All he does is gush over marketing material and whine about about things at such a high pitch you can't get any information at all.
 
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As for his takes on most PC games, they have gotten terrible. He doesn't care about what it's like to actually play the game, evidenced by the "terrible port!!!" of Final Fantasy VII remake having "Very Positive" on Steam from 13k review, pretty much the same for the "super problematic" Resident Evil 4, Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam from 50k reviews.

FFVII, especially at launch, was a "disappointing" port, as it was actually described by DF. For one, atrocious shader stuttering that was only partially remedied by forcing it into DX11 mode (which breaks HDR & Vsync). It also had forced dynamic res that was only fixed via a mod, an utterly incomprehensible decision.

Secondly...Alex didn't even do the review.

As for bringing in Steam reviews to this (?):

For a technical review, I want to see opinions backed up with actual data, not the "I don't know what people are complaining about, I used Rivatuner and downloaded this replacement oodle.dll and it fixed everything" idiots. I don't go to Steam reviews/forums for accurate assessments of most things, let alone on a technical basis.

DF actually gives context as to what it's like to actually play the game, through visual comparisons and real frametime measurements, on properly maintained and configured systems. If you want a review of the actual game in terms of its gameplay/story, then read Eurogamer's review. DF is reviewing the game on its technical merits.

As for your offence that he dare take some issue with RE4 - it's a good port overall, but that's especially in the context of how awful most other ports have been lately. It shipped with a lot of real, concrete issues that anyone who's doing an accurate technical review at launch should mention, such as:
  • Forcing a very subpar reconstruction method in FSR and not giving a choice for DLSS, especially when a mod reveals just how much of a visual downgrade that is. In 2023 that is ridiculous.
  • Still not fixing the broken TAA.
  • The game actually crashing to desktop when running out of vram.
  • Ray tracing still at a very low resolution.
  • Bizarre vram texture behavior when higher settings can actually lead to worse textures.
  • And yes, the same awkward menu design as past RE's.
There are all perfectly valid critiques. The console ports received plenty of critique too for their broken hair strands lighting, awful xbox deadzone problems, and PS5 flickering at launch too - at least 2 of those were eventually fixed, glad they were brought up then.

I want to know this stuff, considering the nature of this forum I would think most of here would too. Steam's review scores of the game as a whole are completely irrelevant to these being mentioned or not. If you purport to be giving a technical review of this game and don't mention these issues, you're doing a poor job.

The final conclusion to Alex's RE4 review btw, even with these issues, was "The PC version of RE4 is good enough, and fluid to play at the right settings, but Capcom still really needs to work on their PC porting efforts".

His reviews don't match up at all with people's experiences, and so aren't informative to anyone.

And yet your go-to example of 'information' is an aggregate of Steam review scores, please. You can go to Steam reviews to get a vague gauge if a game is worth your time, sure (or want to see a game being review bombed because it 'went woke' I guess). You sure as fuck don't go there if you want to actually learn about any technical shortcomings/advantages a game may have. We go to outlets like DF because unlike people pulling theories and fixes out of their ass or just think stuttering is 'fine', we don't - if you're not that sensitive to this kind of stuff, then sure, DF isn't for you I guess.

All he does is gush over marketing material

He's gushing over the tech that's implemented in an actual, shipping game. When we have examples of Lumen that give similar/better results in actual, shipping games, and they also run well, he'll probably gush over those too. You'll have to make due with his and John's nearly 35 minute review of Fortnite's UE5 upgrade in the meantime I guess.

Maybe every new Cyberpunk RT upgrade coverage doesn't need to be 20 minutes long, perhaps - but it's largely about covering a new rendering tech, the kind of thing you're complaining that Alex doesn't do enough. That raises the question as to the amount of time for a video dedicated to any potential improvements in TSR, as exhibited by graphic demos, should be then, surely?
 
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