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

[chris1515]

I don't think there's a consensus, and I don't think there should be. There still aren't many UE5 games out, especially not AAA ones. On top of that, UE5 is not a fixed engine. UE5.4+ are going to have major rewrites to things like the render thread to improve cpu occupancy. Games coming out are from a variety of UE5 versions from 5.0 to 5.3. Only Fortnite is 5.4, but we don't know which improvements it includes. There's a tendency to look at a couple of games and say, "Engine x is good/bad." But there's a lot to the skill, resources of the developers that impact the game, probably more than the engine.

And 5.4 will be the first version where they find a way to reach 60 fps with Lumen using HW raytracing on consoles in typical scenes(At least PS5 and XSX and maybe XSS).

https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/c/1264-lumen-hardware-ray-tracing

Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) mode in Lumen has a number of quality and feature improvements over Software Ray Tracing (SWRT), but is not currently practical for 60fps gameplay on next-gen consoles. Performance improvements for HWRT are underway with a goal of achieving 4ms per frame in typical scenes, which would match the budget for Lumen SWRT running at 60fps.

EDIT: They have too in 5.4 many others features and improvements like virtual shadow maps performance improvement, Nanite dynamic displacement, improvement in Nanite - Spline Mesh(in beta in 5.3), Nanite - Optimized Shading debut, Next Generation Terrain Solution, Heterogenous Volumes - Deferred Rendering...

 

[Scott_Arm]

And 5.4 will be the first version where they find a way to reach 60 fps with Lumen using HW raytracing on consoles in typical scenes(At least PS5 and XSX and maybe XSS).

https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/c/1264-lumen-hardware-ray-tracing

Well, in some version 5.4 or higher. Any of those future things could be coming in 5.4 or a later release. I think some of the render thread stuff is probably in only because they demoed some of the changes at that UE conference.

Edit: If I had to guess the UE 5.4 Fortnite is using includes some of the procedural and world building stuff, because of LEGO fortnite. The map is procedurally generated. Every time you create a new island it creates a new seed/key. The map is supposed to be 20 times bigger than the BR map.

 

[chris1515]

Well, in some version 5.4 or higher. Any of those future things could be coming in 5.4 or a later release. I think some of the render thread stuff is probably in only because they demoed some of the changes at that UE conference.

Next year we will have 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 the goal was to have three versions per year. I hope it will be there next year.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Next year we will have 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 the goal was to have three versions per year. I hope it will be there next year.

Oh, and Fortnite 100% has motion matching for animation now, and I think the layering and blending enhancements from the forward looking roadmap. Those things were confirmed by a dev.

 

[Remij]

Quick question : whats the consensus on UE 5 ive heard opposing views from it's great to it sucks

IMO, Unreal Engine 5 was announced just a bit too soon. Some major features and performance improvements were just over the horizon which would have helped shape a more positive direction from the start.. essentially a tech tale as old as time itself. It's a new paradigm, and as usual people have a hard time understanding what it all means, and establishing best practices around it while it's also undergoing improvements/updates.

Basically, it seems rough right now, but the potential is obvious.. In time it's going to truly shine.

 

[DegustatoR]

In time it's going to truly shine.

UE4 track record was a bit weird in this regard as it started out kinda rough, then it shone for some time and then it somehow ended up as a big dumpster fire which hasn't been resolved by UE5 even just yet.

 

[Scott_Arm]

 

[Scott_Arm]

@DegustatoR Honestly don't get where that dumpster fire comment comes from. Yah, there's shader comp stutter, and threading issues, but what exactly makes the engine a dumpster fire?

Edit: For example, I played Sifu which is a recent UE4 game. It's amazing. If the engine was a "dumpster fire" how would that be possible?

 

[Remij]

UE4 track record was a bit weird in this regard as it started out kinda rough, then it shone for some time and then it somehow ended up as a big dumpster fire which hasn't been resolved by UE5 even just yet.

It's unfortunate that a lot of negative press was generated about the engine before things really started making a difference to get it moving in a better direction. A lot of the negative talk coming from overbearing angry PC gamers.. but the trends were becoming clearer and clearer as games continued to push the engine further. Once the bottlenecks really started to show then it was free game. Then you have UE5 come out and on top of that stuff it's exponentially increasing the workload.. and the discourse goes further in that direction.

We just need a few of these big titles to release in a good state, and discourse will begin to change. Hopefully lol.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Engines are tools. They affect the products of course but they are both moving targets and the games themselves add/change/remove/configure the tools to a significant extent.

Only Fortnite is 5.4, but we don't know which improvements it includes.

It has that version number presumably because whenever they took a merge from the engine branch that went into the current released versions was after 5.3, but that doesn't mean it's on some release version of 5.4, which won't come for a while (IIRC) and will include stuff that isn't in current Fortnite.

Some games just directly use released versions of the engine. Others use arbitrary points between releases and/or cherry pick specific fixes and features they may need beyond that. Fortnite is much more the latter than the former in practice.

tldr it may have some bits that were not in 5.3, but it certainly doesn't include everything that will be in 5.4 (least of all because there's still stuff to develop there!). And again in reality engine versions or sort of arbitrary QA points, but what version features fall into ends up being relatively arbitrary... it's all a lot more continuous than it may feel from the outside just looking at the marketing around engine releases.

 

[Scott_Arm]

@Andrew Lauritzen I assumed that's how it worked. It does have some things from the "forward looking" roadmap like motion matching, but I never assumed it was a feature complete 5.4, as it will be when released to the public.

 

[Remij]

Fortnite apparently just had 6.6M concurrent players across all of its modes with the advent of these new game modes. That's just insane. The LEGO mode in particular is driving huge engagement numbers.

Props to the teams at Epic.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Fortnite apparently just had 6.6M concurrent players across all of its modes with the advent of these new game modes. That's just insane. The LEGO mode in particular is driving huge engagement numbers.

Props to the teams at Epic.

It’s actually 7.6 million which is why I find it hilarious that old gamers refuse to acknowledge Fortnite of being significant.

https://fortnite.gg/player-count

I logged in earlier in the day and there were 2.2 million active players on Lego Fortnite.

 

[DegustatoR]

@DegustatoR Honestly don't get where that dumpster fire comment comes from. Yah, there's shader comp stutter, and threading issues, but what exactly makes the engine a dumpster fire?

Edit: For example, I played Sifu which is a recent UE4 game. It's amazing. If the engine was a "dumpster fire" how would that be possible?

There was a worrying amount of completely broken games on UE4 in the last several years, and no, it was not just the PC shader compilation issue.

 

[Scott_Arm]

There was a worrying amount of completely broken games on UE4 in the last several years, and no, it was not just the PC shader compilation issue.

And why do you blame the engine instead of the developers when there are other working stable games on UE4/5?

 

[Malo]

It’s actually 7.6 million which is why I find it hilarious that old gamers refuse to acknowledge Fortnite of being significant.

I don't think it's about acknowledgement of it's significance, but rather that it might not interest older gamers as much.

 

[DegustatoR]

And why do you blame the engine instead of the developers when there are other working stable games on UE4/5?

Because I have issues believing that guys behind the Ego engine or the guys behind the Serious engine suddenly forgot how to do graphics properly once they've switched to UE.

 

[Samwell]

And why do you blame the engine instead of the developers when there are other working stable games on UE4/5?

If it would be one developer, than you can blame the dev. But it's pretty standard and probably 50% of demanding UE4 games had middle to terrible problems and it's not much better with UE5. UE is a great engine on the consoles, but unfortunately due to the stuttering problems it messed up it's reputation on PC. You even see quite a few people in forums, which won't buy UE4/5 titles anymore before reading technical tests, because you can throw a coin whether the technic is alright.

UE5 is already getting the reputation around the internet, "oh it's UE. looks great, but no surprise the performance sucks". It can't be in Epycs interest, that this is the players standard opinion for their engine. Epyc really ignored the problems way too long, but it's good to see they're trying to improve now.

 

[Karamazov]

 

[GhostofWar]

I'm not convinced they captured that on the ps5 honestly, performace is a little too good and there are none of the artifacts in the volumetrics and the whole image doesn't quite look soft enough like they are running at a higher resolution.