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

https://www.pcgamesn.com/making-unreal-engine-5


An obvious one was just how such results are achieved and whether or not they come with performance costs. Turns out that, in Nanite’s case at least, the opposite may be true. “Nanite has very different performance characteristics than traditional rendering pipelines and is able to make more efficient use of the hardware to achieve micropolygon detail,” vice president of engineering Nick Penwarden tells us. “In fact, enabling Nanite on existing scenes can be a performance win. I can say that the GPU time spent rendering geometry in our UE5 demo is similar to the geometry rendering budget for Fortnite running at 60fps on consoles.”

Lumen on the other hand “does have a runtime performance cost – it’s not free. We will offer several scalability options that developers can use to tune fidelity and performance to fit their specific needs.”

Many details about Lumen

Lumen supports all the development buzzwords – diffuse interreflection, infinite bounces, indirect specular reflections – at scales ranging from kilometres to millimetres, and all dynamic. For developers, it’s as simple as moving a light source in the editor, and lighting will immediately appear as it does when the game runs. This will save buckets of time and energy over waiting for a lightmap to bake, and enable more precise on-the-fly adjustment of lighting for effect.
 
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Ticking a box to convert assets to use nanite is interesting. That either means baking assets to whatever format Nainte uses* is super quick or it creates a nanite copy when you import assets into UE5?

*I'm going to bet on it using some form geometry images for Nanite assets. Failed to find bake times for these but they are not large assets.
 
Ticking a box to convert assets to use nanite is interesting. That either means baking assets to whatever format Nainte uses* is super quick
Not at all. It likely means you want to use Nanite and spend time turning them into Nanite assets. Similar to "Use Global Illumination" tick box for lighting in Unity. Switch it on and it spends time baking lightmaps for you.
 
Or does it mean that you don’t actually have to use light maps anymore when you flip that switch? Because that would be more interesting obviously but also perfectly possible?
 
And it's also just the geometry. Not the lighting which he implied is significantly more expensive.
Currently we do not even know if texturing is done by the software rasterizer.
Ticking a box to convert assets to use nanite is interesting. That either means baking assets to whatever format Nainte uses* is super quick or it creates a nanite copy when you import assets into UE5?

*I'm going to bet on it using some form geometry images for Nanite assets. Failed to find bake times for these but they are not large assets.
Most likely something similar to how you currently use virtual textures for asset.
Check box and it takes a bit for texture to convert.
 
It's funny that Sweeney's clarification imediatly renders the whole linked article absolutely silly since it had jumped to the wrong interpretation without giving it a second thought

How? I read the article and the author seems to conclude that Fortnite isn’t some powerhouse that’s the epitome of high end graphics on the XB1 or PS4. So, if the geometry budget is that light (relative to the increased performance of next gen hardware) on the PS5 with UE5, it bodes well for next gen development as a whole. Well at least for those devs that use UE5.
 
How? I read the article and the author seems to conclude that Fortnite isn’t some powerhouse that’s the epitome of high end graphics on the XB1 or PS4. So, if the geometry budget is that light (relative to the increased performance of next gen hardware) on the PS5 with UE5, it bodes well for next gen development as a whole. Well at least for those devs that use UE5.

The article interpreted that nanite takes as much compute as fortnite's geometry processing in absolute terms, but unreal dev actually meant it, as sweeny clarified, in relative terms, which still bodes well, but not as well as the original article's interpretation.
 
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
08:00 - 08:45 EDT
13:00 - 13:45 BST
Unreal Engine for Next-GenGames

In this presentation, Nick Penwarden, VP of Engineering, and Marcus Wassmer, Engineering Director, cover the features in Unreal Engine that will be crucial to the success of developing the next generation of games, and reveal innovative features being developed that will revolutionize game development.

Then, Jerome Platteaux, Art Director, provides an in-depth look at how Epic created the “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” UE5demo.

Great for: All existing and potential users of UnrealEngine

Part1:
Nick Penwarden
VP of Engineering, Epic Games

Marcus Wassmer
Engineering Director, EpicGames

Part2:
Jerome Platteaux
Art Director, Epic Games

Free to register. There is over 50 sessions total, but this was the only one I could find about UE5.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/events/unreal-fest-online-2020

Tommy McClain
 
So it actually ran below 1440p on average, Epic:
naniteedjod.png


Lumen still WIP, has some quality and performance considerations (30hz budget, light leaking, etc..), Epic:
lumenacjm8.png


I honestly do not know how they will get around light leaking or offer up mirror reflections at all (that seems at odds with using screen-space, voxels, or SDFs). Perhaps their final version will combine the sdf and voxel tracing with some form of triangle ray tracing to clean up light leaking.
 
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