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The Matrix Is Unreal

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Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#221

Post by dougmwne »

boringg wrote: post #215
dave_sullivan wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN crowd's interest response has been so deadened by constant dopamine flow that they simply cannot be entertained anymore. "Meh" is the maximum level of emotional response that can be elicited. The invention of literal time travel, the invention of AGI, or the manufacture of a black hole as an energy source would all be met with mehs. Just a bunch of people dead inside. I still come here for the links and the 5%…

Your jaded view of HN may or may not be accurate but I think the general HN audience has already built in their expectation that the advancement of computer graphics will continually get better through incremental improvement not to dissimilar from chip development. Is this impressive? Yes & kudos to the people who built this. Is it life changing in any meaningful measure? Not really...it isn't a scientific breakthro…

To me, the missing significance is that nothing is pre-ordained. As entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists, we build the future. The future does not build itself. And if you are a trendline oracle, the trajectory has been better looking games that require ever more development effort and ever more hardware. That trend has been extremely stifling to creativity due to the ever increasing financial investments needed. The promises of this new engine are exciting exactly because they break that trend. It runs on existing commodity hardware and achieves much better results than everything released on that hardware so far and with less development effort. Computer graphics are not going to solve anyone’s existential questions, but they are a significant creative tool across many art forms and better tools that require less effort to achieve better results are only a good thing for the creative industry, just like cheap digital cameras and editing software democratized filmmaking.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#222

Post by DaedPsyker »

I think what I would like to note is the appropriateness in Unreal demonstrating this with Matrix. An engine and an film from the same era (if I remember, the the first full release of the engine was the year before the film).

For the technology itself, it is incredibly impressive but more than anything and something which is hard to demonstrate with a demo, is how easy it is to actually use. Nanite models are simple to make from 3d objects, this with photogrammetry would be a dream.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#223

Post by jerf »

pxc wrote: post #97

Does anyone else kinda feel like videogames look good enough at this point? This demo looks fantastic, but I don't think many visual improvements beyond it seem super exciting to me. I'll take them when they come, of course, and I'm sure that realistic 3D worlds in videogames will continue to look better and better as time goes on. But I dunno. I hope advances in videogame engines do more than just help the biggest A…

That was actually my first reaction when I saw this video. The graphics are incredible, sure. The people don't entirely escape uncanny valley, but they partially do, and everything else looks awesome. No question.

Then we get to the game portion of the demo, and... it's a half-step above a quicktime event. Now, look, yes, I get it, this isn't actually a game, and the game is an afterthought and not the main point. (By that, I mean the game itself, not the cars, not the agents jumping around, but just the underlying mechanics.) Still, consider where we've come from. Think Atari 2600 graphics and the sheer staggering number of orders of magnitude improvement in the graphics since then. Even if they did have tons of people working on this, all those people were working at levels of efficiency undreamed of in the 2600 era, by almost any objective measure you can imagine. (Even though we'd never be able to agree on one.)

Yet the game itself used in this demo is basically something you could fit on the 2600. I mean, the game itself, the mechanics. Obviously not the graphics, or even a facsimile thereof, but just the game's mechanics. It's still "point at the thing you want to blow up". No generalized conversation engine. No generalized music engine. If you'd like to be generous, call it an order of magnitude better than the 2600 could handle.

The gulf between the graphics and the games we have with them keep getting larger and larger, and it doesn't help that in a lot of ways the AAA games have been boxed into what the engines do. It's not just that "open world sandboxy combat" is the only game they want to make... it's that these huge amazing engines almost require that sort of game, because that's what the engines do. The sameyness of AAA games is forced by this graphics focus because trying to do provide anything but the simplest game mechanics with this level of graphics is impossible.

Which is why I've basically abandoned AAA and go indie now. The lower graphics capability turns out to be a positive advantage, because it means they can make games that aren't The AAA Engine Game.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#224

Post by dougmwne »

leshow wrote: post #138
dougmwne wrote: post #70

The people trying to point out that this falls short of photorealism are missing the point. This is a tech demo aiming to show off the next generation leap unreal engine 5 is making. There’s lots to be impressed about here and this was made using a ton of procedural generation using a team of just about 70 people. Here’s a great deep dive into some of the new technologies that highlights the strengths and weaknesses…

Yeah it's really cool, the problem is it barely runs at 30fps and there is no way in hell it's going to run at 60fps on a console. I never had a ps4/xbone, skipped the last console cycle and stayed on PC then recently got a PS5 where every title has an option to play at 60fps. There is no way in hell the consoles are going to be able to push this fidelity at that frame rate. Let alone their promise of 120fps that has…

Considering that the exact same demo can run on the Series S (1/3 the rendering power) with barely a visual downgrade shows that we will absolutely be hitting these visuals on Series X/PS5 as 60fps and temporally upscaled 4k. 60fps will no doubt be a major design goal of the engine, so even if their current “wow” demos are targeting 30fps, finished games will look quite close to this and absolutely hit 60fps. I agree that this is a marketing demo, but it’s a playable one and does a lot to answer prior skepticism about UE5. As end consumers, we can feel free to remain skeptical till we see the first fished game, but the aim here is to sell the engine to game devs and they are the skeptics that will need to be won over before any consumers will see finished games.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#225

Post by DynamicStatic »

shock-value wrote: post #146
leshow wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's really cool, the problem is it barely runs at 30fps and there is no way in hell it's going to run at 60fps on a console. I never had a ps4/xbone, skipped the last console cycle and stayed on PC then recently got a PS5 where every title has an option to play at 60fps. There is no way in hell the consoles are going to be able to push this fidelity at that frame rate. Let alone their promise of 120fps that has…

IMO 4k/60fps as a goal is overrated. 3k upscaled to 4k using a newer generation upscaler is not going to look much worse than native 4k, especially when viewed on a TV at a typical distance from one's couch. And 60fps, while crucial in some genres, is not altogether that important in others (particularly narrative-focused single-player titles, for which Unreal Engine is often used especially among non-major publisher…

If I am running a game at under 60 fps or less I probably will assume something is wrong. I feel pretty bad if I sit and stare at a low fps game too long. 4k I do not give a rats ass about however.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#226

Post by dougmwne »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #217

This is super impressive and a huge leap toward photo realism. The draw distance and content streaming using nanite is nuts. Next I want to see what kind of tech demo they can make run smoothly on a mobile device at 120Hz. I.e. does the tech scale downward too? Or is there no point to it unless you require extreme scale and fidelity.

I have not seen any info on this, but I did see that they are moving Fortnite to UE5. Since that game needs to run on a huge range of hardware, including on mobile, I think we can deduce that a large range of performance scaling is going to be a primary design goal of the engine.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#227

Post by dougmwne »

mikehollinger wrote: post #204

Tech demo aside, the city model is remarkably detailed. When we went exploring different alleys and flying over buildings we couldn’t find a “forgotten” corner. Does anyone know what the asset for the city is from or will be used for? The thing is massive and seems to be bespoke art.

It is largely built from Epic’s huge library of photogrammetry assets. This is open for any dev to use.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#228

Post by phreeza »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #194
dougmwne wrote: post #70

The people trying to point out that this falls short of photorealism are missing the point. This is a tech demo aiming to show off the next generation leap unreal engine 5 is making. There’s lots to be impressed about here and this was made using a ton of procedural generation using a team of just about 70 people. Here’s a great deep dive into some of the new technologies that highlights the strengths and weaknesses…

The HN crowd's interest response has been so deadened by constant dopamine flow that they simply cannot be entertained anymore. "Meh" is the maximum level of emotional response that can be elicited. The invention of literal time travel, the invention of AGI, or the manufacture of a black hole as an energy source would all be met with mehs. Just a bunch of people dead inside. I still come here for the links and the 5%…

I think people were pretty blown away by the mRNA vaccines for example.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#229

Post by boringg »

dougmwne wrote: post #221
boringg wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your jaded view of HN may or may not be accurate but I think the general HN audience has already built in their expectation that the advancement of computer graphics will continually get better through incremental improvement not to dissimilar from chip development. Is this impressive? Yes & kudos to the people who built this. Is it life changing in any meaningful measure? Not really...it isn't a scientific breakthro…

To me, the missing significance is that nothing is pre-ordained. As entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists, we build the future. The future does not build itself. And if you are a trendline oracle, the trajectory has been better looking games that require ever more development effort and ever more hardware. That trend has been extremely stifling to creativity due to the ever increasing financial investments needed.…

I don't disagree with you I disagree with the follow-up comment from the previous poster about it being 'meh'.

Nothin is pre-ordainer for sure, that said there certainly seem to be fairly clear directions in technology. I think what was missing from my understanding is that this is a much more efficient use of resources for a better engine. Sounds like a leap forward in graphics engine (now developers will be captured on the Unreal Engine - great business model for the company).

It still isn't a eureka moment that the other poster was really hoping for. Its very impressive but I am not going to swoon over the achievements. That doesn't make me "dead inside" because I can't get fully amped up for this post and I think that the poster missed how people might view look at this development which is why I added my own comments.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#230

Post by ses1984 »

wongarsu wrote: post #203
ses1984 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really need that much bandwidth between cpu and gpu? On a pc the the gpu has its own memory and the memory bandwidth of for example a 3070 is greater than the memory bandwidth of Xbox. Would this demo not run on a pc? I understand that pc hardware is more expensive but it was also my understanding that performance ceiling is actually much higher than consoles, especially after the next gen of pc hardware comes…

CPU and GPU are good at different tasks, but transferring any amount of data across the PCI bus is pretty expensive, forcing you to use both in a suboptimal way. If you have fast enough data transfer between them then you can do SIMD-like tasks much faster on the GPU, while doing a lot of tasks that naturally involve branching faster on the CPU, using whichever processor is faster and has spare capacity instead of wh…

Ok but in practice what can you do on console that you can’t do on pc?
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