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


High integrity launch trailer.
So apparently the game is out now and you can try it yourself on Steam. I gave it a quick shot before I head to bed and... shocking no one more than me, it actually looks pretty good visually on average, and it's clearly the same rendering as the trailer. Where it diverges of course is that it's kind of glitchy in a lot of ways, including graphically (and there are clearly some compromises on stuff like foliage shadow update rates). Hopefully the visuals hold up in other areas but the starting area actually looks pretty good IMO.

Now the performance is... uhh... heavy, as the Steam reviews attest. I'm getting around 60 on a 4090 @ High 1440p DLSS Quality in the starting area. Heavily forested areas are probably worse. On the upside it seems fairly sensitive to some of the settings so while I doubt it'll scale way down to older GPUs, I didn't have much trouble getting it north of 100 with some settings changes.

Ark SE has always been a super janky game, both in terms of gameplay and visuals of course, and I didn't really expect this to be different. The fact that the game at least looks decent while performing poorly/middling this time around is actually kind of a pleasant surprise 😆 . We'll see how the gameplay holds up... so far that part seems to be exactly the same as Ark SE so hopefully not too many new bugs.

That said - I do expect the reception here to be pretty poor purely due to how they have handled the launch and immediate shutdown of Ark SE servers (although you can of course still run your own dedicated servers). That part has always seemed like a bad idea and people are rightfully going to complain.

arksa.jpg
 
Alright it actually looks pretty good overall... on that aspect, gotta give kudos. Hopefully they can iron out some of the glitches (flickery Lumen and shadows especially when under heavy foliage, pixelated light shafts, etc) but honestly just the lack of obnoxious HLODs from the first game is a huge visual upgrade, especially while flying.
 

Attachments

  • arksa2.jpg
    arksa2.jpg
    1.3 MB · Views: 39
  • arksa3.jpg
    arksa3.jpg
    1,007.5 KB · Views: 35
  • arksa4.jpg
    arksa4.jpg
    1.3 MB · Views: 34
  • arksa5.jpg
    arksa5.jpg
    1.1 MB · Views: 36
Last edited:
Dude, come on now.
I m actually serious

I also think Delta doesn't look impressive at all, to me this trailer felt like one of those one person projects that sometimes pops on the internet.
And I go harder, Phantom Pain may look "better", more consistent. Things may change later but for now the way some parts of Delta keeps the basic PS2 map geometry is jarring, and it's just my memory playing tricks of the water ripple effect seems less impressive?

In sum, it's too much tech for too little visuals.
Good have mercy of the GPUs that will run this.
 
That's a non-technical statement and doesn't belong here. If there are better tech implementations in the older game, point them out.

Take for example the surfaces when the camera is very low at 0:33. The surfaces exhibit low geometry with flat looking textures. Also visible at 1:07
Take now Death Stranding at 12:20. The surfaces exhibit complex ground surfaces.
Water effects at 1:59 are very standard and lighting in general looks flat. SSS appears overal absent. Physical properties of materials such as the character's skin are not very convincing.
The character detail from Death Stranding is significantly at a whole new level of realism. Of course they used high tech equipment to scan the characters at KojiPro which the new dev team doesnt have so it is understandable.
But I think it could be the environment design the problem relying too much on the maps of the original which was originally broken to small sections like rooms.
 
But I think it could be the environment design the problem relying too much on the maps of the original which was originally broken to small sections like rooms.

I think it's mainly this, in the scenes the showed. They're very 'gamey' spaces for the most part.
 
Any signs of HW RT in Ark?

A user on Resetera posted some comparison pics between GI and post-processing set to high vs Epic. (At the bottom of the post)

I wonder what's being toggled there.
Easiest way to tell if a game is using hardware ray tracing or not is to run the game on maximum settings with hardware that doesn't natively support ray tracing and check if it doesn't either "default back to lower settings" or crashes and hope that the developer won't go to the length of implementing differing codepaths on the same setting depending on the differing hardware capabilities ...
 
Alright it actually looks pretty good overall... on that aspect, gotta give kudos. Hopefully they can iron out some of the glitches (flickery Lumen and shadows especially when under heavy foliage, pixelated light shafts, etc) but honestly just the lack of obnoxious HLODs from the first game is a huge visual upgrade, especially while flying.

Trees with bark that actually looks like trees with bark!!! Yeah, the game might be janky (kind of expected from this developer) but it looks absolutely amazing at times.

Regards,
SB
 
So from what I've read the Finals is now UE5, but I don't think it uses nanite, lumen or vsm. I took a very quick look at the practice area and the performance is much much better than during previous playtests.

 
Back
Top