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

[Cyan]

the improvements they made to volumetric fog are also a nice touch. It might not sound as an outstanding feature but when, for instance, Skyrim was released, the volumetric fog in the mountains was something I had never seen in a game before. Overall, the graphics of Skyrim weren't amazing, nor they needed to be, but when you saw the fog up in the mountains, it was so realistic, it was on a league of its own, and no game came close to that, at least the games I've played.

In that sense, Skyrim was a feat and an unique game that make the game even more appealing.

 

[Samwell]

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.

One reason is expectations. First it seemed UE5 will put all other engines to shame, but at this performance Ubisofts Engines and especially ID-Tech might have better visuals at a given performance.

2nd it's having the same problem as raytracing. Sure it's nice, what geometric detail you can achieve. But people don't care if the visual improvement is minor for terrible performance. We're reaching a graphical fidelity, where most people beside graphic enthusiasts don't care anymore.

 

[trinibwoy]

One reason is expectations. First it seemed UE5 will put all other engines to shame, but at this performance Ubisofts Engines and especially ID-Tech might have better visuals at a given performance.

2nd it's having the same problem as raytracing. Sure it's nice, what geometric detail you can achieve. But people don't care if the visual improvement is minor for terrible performance. We're reaching a graphical fidelity, where most people beside graphic enthusiasts don't care anymore.

Expectations were even higher for UE5 than for raytracing. The promise was everything RT does plus much higher geometric detail and at higher performance too. So far none of those promises have been delivered but potential is still there.

 

[TEEDA]

Wow nice update.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What's the light noise under the bridge? It's so noticeable it looks deliberately but I'm guessing it's an artefact?

 

[iroboto]

What's the light noise under the bridge? It's so noticeable it looks deliberately but I'm guessing it's an artefact?

Hehe, it’s an incomplete demo. The people in the background move in as T bars until a certain point and actually begin walking.

But yea I think the person probably didn’t care to resolve the issues but man it looks nice

 

[trinibwoy]

Hehe, it’s an incomplete demo. The people in the background move in as T bars until a certain point and actually begin walking.

But yea I think the person probably didn’t care to resolve the issues but man it looks nice

Lol didn’t notice the T bars. Creepy.

 

[cheapchips]

They're both prerendered. 6 hrs and 30 mins respectively. They're indicative of fun things creators can do, but not realtime visuals, even on a 4090.

 

[homerdog]

What causes this to take 6.5 hours on a 4090? Is it just the reflections and super high resolution?

Also what causes the NPCs to assert dominance? They aren't all doing it but I guess it might be a distance thing.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

They're both prerendered. 6 hrs and 30 mins respectively. They're indicative of fun things creators can do, but not realtime visuals, even on a 4090.

6 hours and still strong lighting artefacts? I would have thought 6 hours would be enough for simple ray-tracing. 74 seconds at 24fps is 1776 frames. 6 hours is 360 minutes, 21,600 seconds. 21600/1776 = 12 seconds per frame. Hmm, maybe that's an order of magnitude faster than conventional ray-marching. I don't know what Blender is like these days on high-end GPUs.

I guess quality settings aren't necessarily optimal as they are just messing around.

 

[pharma]

What's the light noise under the bridge? It's so noticeable it looks deliberately but I'm guessing it's an artefact?

Yeah, someone asked in the comment section and the response was lumen having problems with shadows.

I'm aware of the flicker problem that was present in 5.2 but that was easily fixed with a console command and the issue would be gone entirely. The 5.2 problem was caused by some of the standard hardware raytracing features conflicting with the Lumen Hardware Raytracing functionality. According to what some people said on the forum, that issue had to do with some code that Epic forgot to remove since and that's why a console command was able to get rid of it.

In 5.3 however, the issue now seems to be persistent as a part of basic Lumen rendering which sucks. I opened 2 identical scenes, one in 5.2 and the other in 5.3 and the lighting looked completely different in one versus the other which is TOO big of a difference.I've noticed that emission and SSS are pretty jacked up in 5.3 too. Hopefully this gets fixed soon.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That's a good case for debugging then.

 

[Cyan]

Wow nice update.

wtf? is that a videogame?

Intel XeSS Plugin for UE 5.3 released.

https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/16guzj7

 

[T2098]

wtf? is that a videogame?

Intel XeSS Plugin for UE 5.3 released.

https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/16guzj7

That looks amazing in the foreground!

I almost regret taking too close a look at Fort Solis though, as I can immediately see the exact same water-caustic-looking effect way off under the viaduct in the distance with the two yellow emissive 'lights' flickering away. They behave exactly the same way the emissives did in Fort Solis; the yellow light cast by them is temporally unstable, and made up of little circles of light that appear and disappear with a persistence of a few hundred milliseconds or so. The yellow light cast by them also disappears when the emissive object itself is off the screen, like at exactly 0:28 when the camera pans to the left and the yellow 'emitter' is no longer in view.

Upscaling Technology Has Become A Crutch

That’s technical true but in the context of the DLSS discussion, this is a false equivalency. Designing a game specifically for DLSS is not equivalent to designing a game for Dx12. The consequences of doing so are vastly different and I’m frankly not sure why this was even brought up. Look at...

forum.beyond3d.com

 

[cheapchips]

wtf? is that a videogame?

Nope. It's not a realtime render.

 

[troyan]

"The First Descendant" uses UE5.2 and in the login screen emissive lights run wild...

After playing Immortals and now this game i think UE5 has huge problems. Not only performance and emissive lights but the promise that Lumen helps with GI was only half true. Scenes without direct lights are looking very bad. There is still a need for the artist to do a manually job to make these scene as good as others.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

"The First Descendant" uses UE5.2 and in the login screen emissive lights run wild...

After playing Immortals and now this game i think UE5 has huge problems. Not only performance and emissive lights but the promise that Lumen helps with GI was only half true. Scenes without direct lights are looking very bad. There is still a need for the artist to do a manually job to make these scene as good as others.

Shrug, they're missing out on actual multi bounce light propagation, instead doing limited bounce feedback, which results in super bright lit areas right next to pitch black. It was never a super good idea but has been toyed around with in realtime GI as "cheap" for years.

Fortunately, as with the emissive light problem, there's solutions, that will probably take a while to implement because it's a huge codebase and all changes need to be thoroughly thought through, tested, documented, etc.

Restir, both screenspace and worldspace, along with improved path/rayguiding should take care of these concerns eventually. But even then it's not going to be a silver bullet, indeed you do need artists still. This shows what UE5 can do with good artists, even for an indie game, turns out tech still hasn't replaced them, but instead just enabled good artists to do more, faster:

 

[pharma]

NVIDIA's Ramen Shop tech demo is based on Unreal Engine 5 and makes full use of DLSS 3.5 to make Lumen Ray Tracing an RTX Global Illumination look photorealistic.

 

[ILikeFeet]

Qualcomm's Snapdragon Studios made more UE5 demos than just the ray traced shadows one, including a demo featuring lumen and nanite, running on their 8Gen2

 

[fehu]

If I understood it all, it's an indie studio in search of a publisher, they have this ip and plan to release tv series and a game, both based on UE5 and share the assets/animations.