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

I feel that was more a by product of the time in that "gritty realism" was in vogue with American media in general. The correlation is there because UE3 was heavily adopted by American studios.

Guilty Gear Xrd as an example was made with UE3, it's clearly a completely different design from an art stand point from what you're describing. This similarly applies to other Japanese (or even Korean) developers who used UE3. They weren't looking to for the "gritty" and "tacticool" appeal.

It was both. I do see UE3 getting the blame for the "piss filter" when many games in other engines, including many PS2 games that came out much earlier also had that muted colors aesthetic. People forget that many films of the time also looked like that. It was simply trendy at the time.

Simultaneously, though, many double-A and low budget titles stuck very closely to the engine default shaders, lighting and asset samples, which were very gears-like, and many even tried to emulate that vey look, so there was definetely a UE3 "look".

But devs that invested more in figuring out their own solutions, and extending the engine also did exist. Other notable examples include the Mass Effect triology, Mirrors edge, Bioshock (especially infinite)...

Funily, I think Batman Arkham games benefit a lot from what that engine's strenghts, and it has that GoW art style itself: everything is super barroque and overly detailed through Z-brush extravaganza. Everything is dark, gritty, mossy, and wet. Anong other things. Yet, it rises above the mediocricy by executing it all so damn well. I consider Asylum and City as the epitome of what UE3 was. They encapsulate all the technical and artistic trends that were popular that generation and specially on that engine, and do it with flying colors.
 
@milk All true. I think the "engine look" generally went away with UE4. UE4 titles have huge variety in how they look. UE5 will likely be the same.

Also UE5.3 must be releasing soon.




Or maybe it's out today.

There are a bunch of improvements/options added to nanite, lumen and VSMs that aren't shown in the highlights video or on the main updates page, but they're in the release notes.
 
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  • Lumen Reflections support more than one bounce when hardware ray tracing (HWRT) is enabled with Hit Lighting, and the Max Reflection Bounces setting in the post process volume is set to 2 or greater. This can prevent black areas in reflections when there is enough performance budget to allow it.
  • Lumen Reflections can now be used without Lumen GI, for games and applications which use static lighting but wish to scale up in reflection quality beyond reflection captures. Standalone Lumen Reflections only work when HWRT is enabled, and it will enable Hit Lighting automatically, as Lumen's surface cache optimization is not available when Lumen GI is disabled.
  • We made significant Lumen HWRT optimizations, including enabling async compute for HWRT by default on consoles.


Sounds good.
 
Nanite can now be enabled in landscape actors, at parity with normal landscape rendering. Nanite Landscape meshes are rebuilt in the background in order not to disrupt user workflow while in the editor. Nanite Landscape does not improve landscape resolution, but it allows the user to leverage Nanite runtime features such as GPU culling, automatic geometry streaming, and LODs, and it generally boosts runtime performance, especially for demanding features such as VSM.

So I guess landscape was not Nanite before? I don't think I was aware of that. If it improves runtime performance I'm all for it.

Also as a general comment. These release notes are insane. Is there another software package with release notes this extensive?

Also if you keep scrolling you get the full notes for each engine system instead of just the highlights and there are even more details. There's just too much in here lol. Little improvements everywhere.

Nanite​


New:

  • Add an option on Static Mesh for WPO not to write velocity. We default to writing velocity, but the option can be useful if we know that we have "static" WPO for things like camera-facing impostors where we don't want that to generate motion vectors.
  • Added support for Spline Mesh Component with Nanite. This is experimental.
  • Improved visual quality of selection outlines of Nanite in the editor. There are no more jittering, or occlusion issues.
  • Implemented instance culling hierarchy and support for Nanite instance culling based on this. The feature is disabled by default (r.SceneCulling), and may be considered Beta for this release.
  • Added a new show flag to enable/disable the visualization of Nanite streaming data (Show -> Nanite -> Streaming Geometry). When disabled Nanite meshes will only be rendered at the quality level that is always resident in memory.
  • Added new Explicit Tangents option to Nanite mesh settings. When enabled, the tangents are stored explicitly on disk instead of being derived implicitly at runtime. While this comes at a small additional storage cost, it can be preferable in cases where the implicit tangents are not precise enough.
  • Optimized CPU overhead of Nanite streamer
Improvement:

  • Implemented performance improvements to NaniteStreamOut.
  • New sliding window vertex cache for pixel programmable. 20% faster masked foliage rasterization in forest scene.
 
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I got a message from a dev a few days back mentioning that epic sped up HW-Lumen reflection hit lighting by 80% in their measurments on their AMD GPU in the UE5 Main Branch. I am not sure if that is 5.3 exactly what they referenced, but whatever the latest is that they used it ran quite a good deal better apparently.

edit: this is great news as I think surface cache reflections look really questionable on a lot of materials! Let us hope a lot of PC ports start adding those for UE5 games.
 
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So I guess landscape was not Nanite before? I don't think I was aware of that. If it improves runtime performance I'm all for it.
Nanite landscape was added for FN Chapter 4 as it's pretty important for virtual shadow map performance. I think the new stuff is cleaning up and expanding the feature set and making it work better with things like landscape sculpting and similar in the editor.

Also as a general comment. These release notes are insane. Is there another software package with release notes this extensive?
Yeah it's important to be detailed when the documentation is primarily for other developers who may have code changes or other more deep integrations into the systems.
 
Fornite got a demo version, but for a separate title probably Lords of the Fallen. Immortals of Aveum was started on UE4 and looks/feels like it.

Early access for UE5 was in 2021 and it was released for developers in April 2022. So we're probably a couple years away from big AAA games being released that were developed for UE5. Anything else would have started production in UE4. There's going to be a feedback cycle of developers talking with Epic and Epic responding and building changes into UE5 to satisfy developer requirements. Maybe we'll see a game in late 2024. It's possible. But I think real showcase UE5 games are probably going to be 2025.
 
I do sorta enjoy this guy proclaiming that every point release of Unreal is a huge deal :LOL: Clickbait titles aside, his videos are pretty decent high level overview of some of the new stuff for non-developers.

Got some bad news for this guy about what Apple lets you do on the Vision Pro though... namely no custom rendering at all. https://developer.apple.com/visionos/.
 
I do sorta enjoy this guy proclaiming that every point release of Unreal is a huge deal :LOL: Clickbait titles aside, his videos are pretty decent high level overview of some of the new stuff for non-developers.

Got some bad news for this guy about what Apple lets you do on the Vision Pro though... namely no custom rendering at all. https://developer.apple.com/visionos/.

What I learned form his vid is that Valorant is UE. I want them to update to UE5 and add nanite support. I know they won't because they want their game to run on pcs from the bronze age, but I can dream.
 
What I learned form his vid is that Valorant is UE. I want them to update to UE5 and add nanite support. I know they won't because they want their game to run on pcs from the bronze age, but I can dream.

Fortnite is surely an example in a similar vain to Valorant. All the UE5 trimmings on fast enough hardware and potato settings for everyone else. Whether it's cost/resource effective for anyone other than Epic to do is the question. I don't think Epic have done a 'scaling Fortnite to everything' presentation since the move to UE5?
 
Fortnite is surely an example in a similar vain to Valorant. All the UE5 trimmings on fast enough hardware and potato settings for everyone else. Whether it's cost/resource effective for anyone other than Epic to do is the question. I don't think Epic have done a 'scaling Fortnite to everything' presentation since the move to UE5?

It's probably not worth the effort in a game like Valorant. It's strictly competitive and people want best visibility not best graphics, and for the playing field to be level. So the graphics are very stylized and you can get hundreds of fps on low end machines.
 
I don't understand all the hate arround UE5. It's an awesome step up compared to last gen, but then it's still up to devs to use it right, it won't do all the work for them.
I think despite it easing the development process by making geometry and realtime lighting cheap it still hasnt changed the status quo, itll still take big studios to make wonders with it atleast from what ive seen mid to small studios still havent made anything substantialy different from past generations and at even lower resolutions so i think people are questioning what was the point because the image quality kills the purpose if im gonna light and shadow billions of polygons at 720p then the purpose is defeated cause the opposite is true i could make the same game with less polygons and a good bounce lighting solution on another engine and it wont look much different at higher res.. ''demon souls remake'' atleast thats what ive observed.
 
I don't understand all the hate arround UE5. It's an awesome step up compared to last gen, but then it's still up to devs to use it right, it won't do all the work for them.

The first batch of games hasn’t delivered quite the increase in geometric detail and GI that was promised. We haven’t seen the best of UE5 yet.
 
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