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

[Xbat]

I think so too but the only alternative im hearing is that epic is so incompetent that they didnt think about any scenario outside of showing off a pretty demo.

I think its a silly notion on the face of it. Hence my earlier sarcasm

I think that there will be a happy medium in graphic quality and storage needed that will look very much like the same quality except at zoomed in levels.

Epic wanted to show off what there tech could do for all there customers including non game developers.

 

[SlmDnk]

If Epic doesn't have a reasonable solution for game size this tech is dead in the water, I'm positive it would of been part of there design.

I highly doubt they went through all this trouble and didn't put any emphasis on game size.

https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2125236

 

[Love_In_Rio]

Tim Sweeney isn't a typical CEO, he started out developing his own games and works on the Unreal engine. The man understands technology and certainly has a better insight into UE5 than anybody here unless we have some Epic engineers floating around.

Andrew Lauritzen was credited by Brian Karis in working for Nanite, but he doesnt post a lot lately.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2125236

I supposse the engine will convert the original model in the max usable by the engine and that will be what is saved in the game file. That and maybe they have their own compression method above Zlib/Kraken.

 

[Xbat]

I supposse the engine will convert the original model in the max usable by the engine and that will be what is saved in the game file. That and maybe they have their own compression method above Zlib/Kraken.

That's what I suspect. I also suspect big AAA games will still do a lot of optimising and what they do current gen. It's mainly AA and indie devs who will benefit greatly from Unreal V.

 

[Entropy]

If Epic doesn't have a reasonable solution for game size this tech is dead in the water, I'm positive it would of been part of there design.

I highly doubt they went through all this trouble and didn't put any emphasis on game size.

The twitter post that is referenced as a response tacitly admits that this is something of an issue. (It says that developers will design to existing limitations without saying anything about what that actually means. Well, duh.)
Of course it will be handled. Businesses need to sell their product, and other than the initial phase of the new console gen, excessive size will be an argument against purchase. What consequences that will have remains to be seen.
It would have been interesting to hear a number attached to the demo - "these two minutes have a storage footprint of xxxGB". The absence of that angle when they were beating the huge poly count drum hard, was rather conspicuous.

 

[chris1515]

They did an amazing stuff about the technology. They tried to ask to dev what they think it is. And it seems the biggest innovation is not the software REYES renderer but the compression and data format they used. This is a fun site created about this and the proposal of dev about the UE 5 secret sauce.

https://www.mousefingers.com/nanite/NaniteTech.html

https://twitter.com/x/status/1261648521431785475

https://twitter.com/x/status/1260734555532611584

This is probably a huge upgrade and Epic will take years of advance compared to all engine.

 

[jlippo]

I supposse the engine will convert the original model in the max usable by the engine and that will be what is saved in the game file. That and maybe they have their own compression method above Zlib/Kraken.

Yes, there is no reason to keep object in its original format.
I would also expect there to be lossy retopology and compression during import.

Internal format should allow varying level of detail to be loaded from single object and be highly compressible.

They did an amazing stuff about the technology. They tried to ask to dev what they think it is. And it seems the biggest innovation is not the software REYES renderer but the compression and data format they used. This is a fun site created about this and the proposal of dev about the UE 5 secret sauce.

https://www.mousefingers.com/nanite/NaniteTech.html

https://twitter.com/x/status/1261648521431785475

https://twitter.com/x/status/1260734555532611584

This is probably a huge upgrade and Epic will take years of advance compared to all engine.

Getting something like this to be production ready must be huge amount of work.
I really doubt it's as simple as many of us are suggesting.

I cannot wait to hear more about their tech in future and hopefully we will find about possible dead ends the research found along the way.

 

[John Norum]

Not exactly, even 6 months ago there were solutions that are way faster than PS5. Gigabyte launched an SSD that is capable of reaching 15GB/s, it's called AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD 8 TB.
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-Performance-Advanced-Solution-GP-ASACNE6800TTTDA/dp/B081BSF14V

Other less exotic solutions include the Viper VP4100, Corsair MP600, and AORUS NVMe Gen 4, all of which already provide 5GB/s speeds.

All those drives have advanced thermal solutions with big fans, copper heatsink. I wonder how could Sony cooling down its SSD in a little warm box

 

[PSman1700]

Not exactly, even 6 months ago there were solutions that are way faster than PS5. Gigabyte launched an SSD that is capable of reaching 15GB/s, it's called AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD 8 TB.
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-Performance-Advanced-Solution-GP-ASACNE6800TTTDA/dp/B081BSF14V

Other less exotic solutions include the Viper VP4100, Corsair MP600, and AORUS NVMe Gen 4, all of which already provide 5GB/s speeds.

PC essentially already surpassed ps5 in that area but is expensive, end of the year we see 7gb/s consumer drives though.

This looks interesting also, Optane that exceeds the aorus drive in speed

https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/01/09/intel-pcie-v4-support-optane-ssds/

Doubt any game will be optimized for such a drive though, bar star citizen where consoles dont have to be considered.

 

[John Norum]

Doubt any game will be optimized for such a drive though, bar star citizen where consoles dont have to be considered.

Maybe Flight Simulator 2020, to be maxxed it needs 150GB on a fast SSD. it streams a lot of giant assets

 

[PSman1700]

Maybe Flight Simulator 2020, to be maxxed it needs 150GB on a fast SSD. it streams a lot of giant assets

Now i see the point of add-in ssd drives. Maybe even ’cartridges’ where you buy the game on a drive.

 

[Recop]

But that is not the whole story. He mentioned that the way the SSD is integrated into the system is beyond what Windows offers currently. And I do believe that the optimized file system, the additional interrupts and the integration into the graphics pipeline all combine to make it very effective.

Indeed : https://wccftech.com/tim-sweeney-ex...-architecture-is-way-more-efficient-than-pcs/

 

[John Norum]

Now i see the point of add-in ssd drives. Maybe even ’cartridges’ where you buy the game on a drive.

I was thinking the same thing, when the cost will be low; a little nice cartridge would be lovely and fast

 

[Pressure]

Not exactly, even 6 months ago there were solutions that are way faster than PS5. Gigabyte launched an SSD that is capable of reaching 15GB/s, it's called AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD 8 TB.
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-Performance-Advanced-Solution-GP-ASACNE6800TTTDA/dp/B081BSF14V

Other less exotic solutions include the Viper VP4100, Corsair MP600, and AORUS NVMe Gen 4, all of which already provide 5GB/s speeds.

That's just four 2TB drives striped in RAID-0 using bifurcation though.

 

[Remij]

Ok so what about the whole issue of Latency on the PC side? How is this going to be mitigated in the future? Will it be possible on PC to write to VRAM directly from storage without going through system memory in the future?

Let's say the PS5 is able to stream in data fast enough that they only need 1 second of gameplay loaded into RAM.. on PC with say 2-3x the physical memory, with Gen4 NVMe SSDs @ 5GB/s or faster, could they not initially load say the 3-4 seconds worth of gameplay assets into RAM and thus reduce the streaming requirements of the SSD? The latency adds up over time right?

Also, block sizes will likely be bigger for next gen games I'm assuming. 64K/128K block size transfers far faster with less latency, right?

 

[John Norum]

Indeed : https://wccftech.com/tim-sweeney-ex...-architecture-is-way-more-efficient-than-pcs/

DX12 Ultimate feature:

DirectStorage – DirectStorage is an all new I/O system designed specifically for gaming to unleash the full performance of the SSD and hardware decompression. It is one of the components that comprise the Xbox Velocity Architecture. Modern games perform asset streaming in the background to continuously load the next parts of the world while you play, and DirectStorage can reduce the CPU overhead for these I/O operations from multiple cores to taking just a small fraction of a single core; thereby freeing considerable CPU power for the game to spend on areas like better physics or more NPCs in a scene. This newest member of the DirectX family is being introduced with Xbox Series X and we plan to bring it to Windows as well.

 

[Arwin]

That text however focusses basically on hardware compression support and not necessarily on reduced latency although this may come eventually of course.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing SSD connectors on GPUs again though in the near future as that could solve most of this for PC. [emoji16]

 

[Dictator]

Ok so what about the whole issue of Latency on the PC side? How is this going to be mitigated in the future? Will it be possible on PC to write to VRAM directly from storage without going through system memory in the future?

Have a larger batch of system RAM reserved. System RAM to VRAM is faster than SSD to Unified RAM, and it has less latency.
PC games requiring 16 GB of RAM would be a very expected next generation difference I think.

 

[Billy Idol]

Why would you need lvl1 or 2 though? The way Unreal 5 works, scaling down the assets doesn't affect the performance much, since now it is tied to the pixel count on screen unless we are talking about a model like the character that will use traditional rasterization in the scene. Or are we talking about memory size of the in game assets sitting on the drive?

To reduce disk storage - performance seems ok.

It seems that it is unrealistic to expect movie quality assets to be downloaded or stored locally on consoles for each game. They were talking about billions of tris...which need to be stored.

Hence I was thinking if it is rly necessary to get movie lvl assets, or if a slight reduction to fit the 50-100 gig per game storage would still be a huge gain in terms of visual quality and workflow reduction.