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A first look at Unreal Engine 5

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Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#301

Post by yodon »

chupasaurus wrote: post #273
yodon wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did. It's called Fortnite. It's been fairly distuptive.

UE4 supports dynamic multiple maps. Fortnite maps are static ones, even though they could be done using that feature.

The hard part of the multiverse is the business model. Features like dynamic maps are just that, features. If you have a business model that works you can bring all the tech features to play. If you bring the tech to play without a business model you just crater spectacularly. This is why Fortnite is important.

It may not be the feature list you thought the multiverse would launch with but in hindsight it will be the feature list that the multiverse did launch with.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#302

Post by utexaspunk »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #244

What a magical demo! That made my day. I had largely written off console gaming as a never-ending sequence of brain-dead first person shooters. I'm glad to see real innovation in the graphics space - coupled with advances in AI and NLP, I think we could see a crop of incredibly realistic and meaningful games in the next few years. IMHO, a key innovation that still needs to occur is a shift away from flunky and unintu…

That was my first thought- it's a shame all we have to interact with such a complex, richly rendered world is a couple of analog sticks and some buttons.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#303

Post by rasz »

nsxwolf wrote: post #195
Spivak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But real games have always and will continue to use the same tricks. This demo could be put directly into a Tomb Raider game and would be fantastic.

The Tomb Raider-esque parts where the character is jumping and climbing didn't look right. She's missing some kind of "weight" or something in her animation that makes it look like she's not really doing those things. Lara Croft's animations are much more convincing.

looked pretty realistic .. for a spider-woman

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#304

Post by bob1029 »

rasz wrote: post #246
skohan wrote: post #96

The real-time GI is amazing. Ray tracing is going to be a game changer, not only in terms of visual quality, but also because it's one of those rare times in computer graphics where the more advanced solution is actually making it easier on graphics programmers by replacing a bag of dirty tricks with a unified, physically based solution. One interesting note: they say the GI is "instant" but you can actually see that…

Ray tracing is a scam to push more hardware we dont need. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNRp9Y33xWE Can you spot the difference worth >2-3x performance drop?

IMO, ray tracing is a scam as currently presented by Nvidia, et. al. GPUs are not the correct way to approach this problem. RTX is an approximation at best and a complete joke at worst. That said, I do believe ray tracing is the future and can become the standard way in which we engage with all 3D graphics concerns.

Contrast the GPU with the newest generation of x86 CPUs. They have more cores than you can typically use, provide ridiculous amounts of pipelined throughput, and have specialized vector instructions which can dramatically accelerate common 3D graphics tasks (i.e. matrix multiplication).

Most practical ray tracing algorithms are trivially parallelized (e.g. just throw each scanline at a thread) and also exhibit properties which can leverage the deep stack depths and OoO execution enabled by modern CPUs. Ray tracing is inherently a recursive activity with a profound number of potential branching opportunities. x86 has absolutely no problem dealing with this kind of scenario. This is exactly what it was built for. GPUs on the other hand require yet more specialized hardware that has its limitations baked-in at the transistor level. x86 does not have these same kind of limitations.

Consider the hypothetical benefits of having your entire graphics pipeline implemented within 1 cache-coherent memory domain and on top of a single instruction set. Imagine no Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan/drivers/etc are involved to ruin your day. What if you could fit all of your required scene, texture and model data into L3 cache? How many times can you fill L3 from RAM per second on a 3950x with reasonable memory configuration? How many times per frame at 60fps? I feel we need to take some time to look at the emerging opportunities with the new hardware that is coming to market.

I worry that the developer community is so out of touch with the hardware aspect (e.g. 22ms hello world) that we are basically saying "lol no just use GPU magic graphics rectangle" and calling it a day. I feel like specialization of ASICs is fundamentally taking us in the wrong direction now that we are able to put so many general purpose cores onto a single package/die in a very cost-effective manner. Maybe this is why AMD is taking so long to bring a proper Nvidia killer to market. At some point there has to be a certain # of cores where someone raises their hand and asks "why do we still need a separate GPU?".

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#305

Post by SeanBoocock »

fxtentacle wrote: post #203
gamblor956 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Unity and Unreal Engine offer their source code on Github... Both engines have bugs, and one of the biggest complaints about Unreal Engine is that any feature not used by Fortnite is half-baked until Fortnite uses it. With Unity, the biggest complaints are about the relatively transitory lifetimes of some of their biggest-marketed features, like rendering pipelines or networking code.

No, Unity only has the C# part on GitHub, but it also has a huge proprietary C++ code base.

Indeed. However, they do offer a commercial license to big developers/publishers will full source access. Substantially cheaper than the non-royalty, commercial Epic license too (but at the AAA level they're both rounding errors).

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#307

Post by skohan »

gfxgirl wrote: post #295
ksec wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the industry, so pure speculation. Unreal Engine's old business model were exactly that, get you excited with demos and sign up ( paid ) for their engine. And it was the same with UE 3 and UE 4. But in 2015 all that changed. It was open sourced on Github, it has a very sustainable revenue model due to the explosion of Mobile Gaming, the Gaming industry as a whole is now bigger than Movies and Music industry co…

FYI though, It's not open source. Open source has a meaning and Unreal doesn't fit that meaning. https://www.google.com/search?q=open+soruce+definition

It would technically be "source available", no?

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#308

Post by ksec »

simias wrote: post #161
ksec wrote: post #8

In the past, I have always looked at Demos from Games and thought this is very good and getting close to movie quality. But that "close to" remained "close to" for quite some time. Even though It is improving every year but you can still tell it is gaming graphics. Even if some of the shots are not real time and pre rendered, they are still gaming like. That Unreal 5 Demo was the first time ever I thought this is Hol…

At the risk of sounding a bit negative I personally find that graphics have plateaued since about the PS3. Sure, there are more polys, sure, there are higher res textures, sure, there are more complex and dynamic lights. But you don't really have the kind of gap we used to have between, say, the PS1 and PS2 for instance. Diminishing returns and all that. The problem is that, in my experience, this eye candy only matt…

I agree that Story telling and Game Play is still the top priorities. Look at Nintendo! I enjoy Zelda,( not exactly the best graphics looking game ) more so than most "photorealistic" game in recent years. ( I will also admit I am now a lot older and dont have time for serious gaming )

But still, the graphics in UE5 is stunning. The last time I was stunned by 3D Graphics was Crysis, and that was I think over 10 years ago.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#309

Post by impalallama »

ben7799 wrote: post #299

It mostly looks amazing but also very uncanny valley. The development process improvements sound most promising. I was amazed until the the character started climbing the rocks. Seems like no one at Epic has ever climbed a rock in their life.. it sent the whole demo back to PS1 land. It doesn't even look like a super hero rock climbing, just looks totally wrong. Almost no part of the body ever looks angled correctly…

I Noticed that they panned up within seconds of showing water because (I assume) of how wacky the fluid dynamics look.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#310

Post by ordinaryradical »

gridlockd wrote: post #211
artsyca wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web developer making rounded corners on divs using all sorts of kludges

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdqjcMmjeaA

Read the parent again with this playing in the background for peak webdev irony.
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