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

[Andrew Lauritzen]

In other words for me, RT lighting up texture tricks instead of actual geometry just accentuates how low poly everything is in older games and for me actually makes it look worse because now it's much harder to ignore the low poly nature of older games.

I think the PT ports like Portal and Quake are very obvious examples of this. They are technically interesting, but I wouldn't even go so far as to say they look "better" than the originals. You need good materials and good geometry to make PT really shine as well.

I personally wouldn't put Cyberpunk into the same category since it still has a lot more detail than those old games. It's just that the other stuff is looking nice now so the lack of clutter and micro-detail stands out more.

Yes, there are times when I wish the lighting were a bit better when it interacts with the high geometry in Ark, similar to how I feel with Cyberpunk 2077, except wishing the geometry was better.

I also don't want to say Ark is like a shining example of doing everything right or anything... it's clearly still somewhere in the mirky land below AA but above indy (which the original game definitely was). There are issues, and obvious ones. But I think it's worth calling out as it kind of came out of nowhere and I'm pleasantly surprised about how good it looks vs. some of the other initial crop of UE5 stuff, all things considered.

 

[RobertR1]

Is this going to be on game pass to test?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Hey look here:



New Fortnite updated has file version 5.4.0.0

Going to play around. Too bad the map changed because it'll be so hard to spot performance differences. One of my favourite things to look at is setting everything to low but turning on nanite and vsm. Very curious to see how close I can get to 240Hz or if I can spot differences. But again, the map totally changed so I have no real idea of what it would have been with 5.3

Edit: I don't think there's much on the future roadmap that you'd visually be able to spot in Fortnite. I could also look like lumen with hw ray tracing on off to see how big of a performance drop it is. Just really not sure how much of the future roadmap would be in. I'm hoping some of the cpu worker thread improvements are in

https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/tabs/94-forward-looking

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Is this going to be on game pass to test?

The previous game was on GP, so there's a chance this one will show up at some point. It may not show up until the game is futher along in early access, however.

Regards,
SB

 

[DavidGraham]

PT ports like Portal and Quake are very obvious examples of this. They are technically interesting, but I wouldn't even go so far as to say they look "better" than the originals

Quake 2 and Portal both have had their materials reworked to suit path tracing though. Portal RTX even had way more poly count than the original. So they definitely look way better.

the more of a tradeoff with ghosting and noise it will be. There's still (much) less ghosting in cyberpunk with path tracing off

It's like you said about the high poly curves, after playing with the Path Tracing and the massively more correct lighting for a while, you can't go back to the regular old "incorrect lighting". You simply can't unsee all the flaws. It kills the immersion.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Okay, so I enabled nanite, set vsms to high to have all of the grass shadows and set DLSS to performance. Textures high, draw distance epic. I was able to basically hit 200-225 fps (I'm vsynced with reflex so 225 is my cap), but essentially very close to 95-100% gpu at all times. That seems to be an improvement. I tried to get to some high points to have a long view of the map and get into tilted towers and some other spots. I think this is an improvement in performance, because I'm able to saturate my gpu at all times instead of having spots where I'm cpu limited. Overall, I can't really make the call because it's a different map (basically a remaster of the early Chapter 1 map, with a throwback art style, so it could just be the map performance.

RTX 3080 with Ryzen 5800x3D.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Quake 2 and Portal both have had their materials reworked to suit path tracing though. Portal RTX even had way more poly count than the original. So they definitely look way better.

Oh I'm well aware, I played through the whole Portal RTX. It had its moments, but overall I just think the art was very much designed for a cohesive style and the - let's face it relatively low budget - slapping minimal PBR materials on things negatively impacted that overall. I think we're deep into subjective land though so I'll just say I'm glad you enjoyed the new look.

It's like you said about the high poly curves, after playing with the Path Tracing and the massively more correct lighting for a while, you can't go back to the regular old "incorrect lighting". You simply can't unsee all the flaws. It kills the immersion.

Ironically I did exactly that and went back to the "regular RT" lighting . The noise and ghosting issues were just more "immersion killing" to me than the delta between the two paths. Honestly if they had a mode between the two where it had RT shadows for all lights but was otherwise running the regular path I think the differences would be narrower still.

I do agree that path tracing or similar will ultimately be something you never want to go back to not having, but Cyberpunk's already very good RT path that the assets were designed around does undercut some of the raw wow factor. "Path tracing" of course isn't a single thing, nor are the "ray tracing" techniques used before it. Neither of these in the game context is "correct" in the sense of an unbiased renderer as it's just layers of approximations all the way down. Certainly in the future I expect path-tracing-like paths to become more the norm, but we're going to be playing tricks and caching things in various spaces for the foreseeable future. The current stuff relies heavily on screen space caching, but I think we may want to move parts of that back to world space in the long run... TBD.

In any case I think we're all broadly agreed that all of this tech is moving in the right direction, even if our short term priorities differ a bit.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Played with the fortnite update a bit more. Again, RTX 3080 and 5800x3D. I set everything to high (not epic) and turned hw ray tracing on with DLSS Quality at 1440p. I was able to maintain over 100 fps ... that is I think a huge difference from before? I died on purpose early and just spectated people all over the map, and I'd say it ranged 100-115 fps. I turned off hw ray tracing and it went to maybe 120-130? Something like that. I'm actually really tempted to keep everything on high and go DLSS Balanced and see if I can frame cap to 120. I normally push for my 240 limit, but the game looks so much better with everything turned up. I'm torn.

Overall I think things have improved a lot, but with the change in map and not having a bunch of things written down, I'm not 100% confident. I'm pretty sure with HW ray tracing I wasn't even close to 100 fps before.

Edit: Game feels smoother maybe? I don't have data to back it up, so I'm not sure. I wish that settings like "Effects" had more granularity. I'm not sure of everything it changes. I think what I've settled on is using nanite, vsms high, GI set to AO only, reflections off, effects and post processing low, DLSS Quality or Balanced, draw distance epic, textures epic. If you set GI to off, the game looks very weird, even with VSMs. It just looks too bright. AO gives a more natural overall look without a huge performance hit. I think I'll get 160 fps minimum and sometimes close to my 225 cap. Seems to feel very smooth. Overall good performance for actually trying to win games, and not an extreme visual downgrade.

I'm also playing zero build, so the performance profile is probably a lot different.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

The faked GI can look pretty good from the right angles, if it wasn't for the relatively sharp shadow I'd have little idea it was faked here.

Unfortunately virtualized shadow maps still have problems at oblique angles

 

[gabdeg]

Fortnite does perform better with the update but it looks to me as if almost all of the added Nanite high-poly detail is absent compared to before. I couldn't find any actual polygonal brickwork, house cladding, rooftiles etc. anymore, it all just looked flat like this:

I assume this explains why it performs better. I didn't find anything of the same level as detail as this (older screenshot for comparison):

I guess it makes sense with them bringing the old Fortnite map back, but it's still a shame that this Nanite showcase is gone for now.

 

[trinibwoy]

Is the posterization in Jusant intentional and part of the texture?

 

[troyan]

The current map is the old orginal one. I think they have not updated the assets. It just rendering in UE5 with Lumen and VSM.

 

[gabdeg]

The current map is the old orginal one. I think they have not updated the assets. It just rendering in UE5 with Lumen and VSM.

Yeah, seems like it. I looked it up and it seems like the map will be up for a month only so it's not a big deal. Makes sense they wouldn't fully remaster it for that short a timeframe.

 

[milk]

View attachment 9963
The faked GI can look pretty good from the right angles, if it wasn't for the relatively sharp shadow I'd have little idea it was faked here.

I think the shadows, despite indeee being too sharp for the kind if bounced light they are trying to emulate, ground the character way better than lumen alone could, and add that extra depth and dynamism. I think the extra shadows are the best part of the "fake GI"

Unfortunately virtualized shadow maps still have problems at oblique anglesView attachment 9965

Do you mean shadow acne? I dont see it... The jagged silhouettes vould do with somw work though. I have the impression later versions of UE5 also improved the filtering on that. The very first version had some pretty shamelessly blocky shadow edges.

Is the posterization in Jusant intentional and part of the texture?

I think so. Yeah...

 

[Globalisateur]

So I have being playing The Talos Principle 2 on PS5. The game is awesome as expected and I have no complaints about it.

The game is using UE 5.2 and overall I have being very disappointed by the graphics. So yes compared to the first it's very big, beautiful thanks to the artstyle with plenty of details and running at very stable 60fps in the performance mode.

But at what cost! I believe most of the problems come from FSR2. Compared to the first game, sure the resolution looks a bit sharper but it's shimmering everywhere like crazy. The vegetation, some textures at a specific distance, the smearing / ghosting each times there is some transparency and then those awful reflections that disappear as soon as you move the camera down!

In motion (and even standing still for the shimmering) and overall it's an incredibly unstable image. I would have prefered a lower resolution with the image stability (and IQ) of the first game. FSR2 (mainly) ruined next-gen graphics for me. It's not next-gen to me. I almost prefer the more consistent graphics of the first game.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Unfortunately virtualized shadow maps still have problems at oblique anglesView attachment 9965

Assuming you mean the aliasing, yeah the reality of any shadow map technique is you can always push it far enough to expose the sampling rate. VSMs are effectively "16k" shadow maps at their core. For a directional light, it is a clipmap of 16k shadow maps but in a given clipmap level (~cascade) it's still limited by that 16k virtual resolution at a given distance from the camera.

That said, mostly this sort of thing is expected to be blurred out a bit, and VSM has various controls for that. The most physical is the light source angle itself, which I assume Jusant sets very low to try and get razor sharp shadows to fit the art style. The other is a less physical texel dither that adds some random sampling of a fixed texel radius in light space to just try and hide these sorts of patterns. The tradeoff is that if you set that too high you'll introduce light leaks in other places (as the situations are fundamentally ambiguous), but given that the resolution in Jusant actually appears to be pretty high they could probably just tweak that a bit and soften these sorts of edges a little more.

Fortnite does perform better with the update but it looks to me as if almost all of the added Nanite high-poly detail is absent compared to before. I couldn't find any actual polygonal brickwork, house cladding, rooftiles etc. anymore, it all just looked flat like this:

As far as I understand, it's literally the Ch1 assets, and the various problems those entail as well when used with new rendering tech. I don't think the performance difference would be largely due to stuff like the buildings, but more likely due to things like much simpler trees and less scatter. Obviously some amount of engine improvements have gone into it as well but I don't know the details of how much is from which.

 

[Scott_Arm]

The good thing with Fortnite is the map will switch relatively soon to compare how performance changes.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Robocop (UE5) benchmarks:

RoboCop: Rogue City Benchmarks & PC Performance Analysis

Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it's time now to benchmark RoboCop: Rogue City and examine its performance on the PC.

www.dsogaming.com

As per the recent trend the game is heavy on max settings (although not as heavy as some other recent UE5 games I think - certainly playable without upscaling). But you gain huge amounts of performance back at lower settings - near double going from Epic to Medium!!

The game also looks gorgeous going by those screenshots. I didn't manage to catch the timed demo in time, but really wish I had.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

Is the posterization in Jusant intentional and part of the texture?

Just part of the texture

Edit - A preview of The Witcher 4!!! (ok it's an artist portfolio piece but it sure looks like it could be the witcher 4)

 

[QPlayer]

If The Coalition makes the UE 5.X version, is it likely that MS will distribute this Xbox specific engine version to the mutiplatform developers?

What low-level coding needs to be done in Lumen to make code much faster on current consoles with good quality?