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A first look at Unreal Engine 5

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Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#251

Post by wlesieutre »

jakearmitage wrote: post #35
_bxg1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm normally skeptical of tech demos, but normally they don't actually talk about the tech. Assuming the actual promises aren't misleading, this is extremely impressive. > Not sure how Unity can keep up with this. Unity still has a big edge on usability. Unreal is very much a AAA tool: you have to use C++, all the built-in systems have a much steeper learning curve, etc. Even as a professional dev who's tried a few t…

You don't have to use C++, you have Blueprints, which can control not only shaders, but also game logic and levels.

Blueprints felt to me like they made a lot more sense if you knew how C++ worked, but I only used UE4 a little bit to toy around with it

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#252

Post by sergeykish »

danso wrote: post #192
simias wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's funny you bring up the PS3, because my first reaction to the parent commenter and the OP video was how I remember thinking things couldn't get much better than the PS3 demos [0] – which now look comparatively primitive – but I've had that same feeling with PS4 and now PS5. But PS5 really does seem to be getting close to real-time interactive realism. But I agree with you that I expected games to be much "bette…

Final Fantasy VII Remake characters are amazing - skin tone, hair, animation. Beautiful, beautiful sets. I can't imagine anything better.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#253

Post by skohan »

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?

Real-time ray tracing is not impressive in the current generation of games because they’re optimized to maximize the quality of traditional lighting solutions. Most games use mostly static assets and lighting, because baked lighting can get a nearly photorealistic result as long as nothing moves.

Highly dynamic environments are where the technology shines, because it can achieve results which traditional solutions simply can’t. I think ray-traced Minecraft is the best current example of the potential of this technology.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#254

Post by rowanG077 »

didibus wrote: post #133
rowanG077 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly dangerous of the PS people to build non-deterministic performance into their console. Developers who try to push every ounce of power out of it will hate it. edit: Maybe deterministic isn't the correct word. What I mean is that you can design a physics system that you can ensure runs on the PS5 CPU. But then the graphics boys make an upgrade and suddenly some power is diverted to the graphics and the physics s…

It sounded like they managed to make it deterministic by keeping the power draw always the same and fixing the cooling solution to handle max load. So developer can expect it to perform identical to whatever balance they've set between CPU/GPU. That's my understanding at least.

If the developer can control the balance then it's fine. If this balance cannot be controlled by the developers then it's a nightmare. It's not clear to me this is developer controlled.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#255

Post by cargoshipit »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #175
simias wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your only commentary here is that it doesn't live up to your expectations. You wanted more. And then you wonder why AAA studios focus on graphics? > That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority You definitely aren't in the minority. r/gaming is full of people racing to be most unimpressed by a good looking game. All the HN comments pointing out flaws with "don't get me wrong, it looks decent!" could be…

It's the usual HN: pretentiousness abound. Can't even be excited about a wonderful tech demo.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#256

Post by hobofan »

VikingCoder wrote: post #204
freeone3000 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make money from this? Who would buy it? Why would anyone use it? Is there a point beyond "this is a cool thing", which is pretty well captured by Roblox and Second Life and VRChat

1) How do you make money from this? How do you make money from anything on computers? With Ads, with Paid Memberships, Paid Access to content. 2) Who would buy it? Why would anyone use it? Isn't that kind of like asking "who would buy the internet? Why would anyone use the internet?" Remember when Chromebooks were announced and everyone laughed because it's "just a browser?!" Well, imagine if you were browsing, excep…

> Do you think Roblox, Second Life, and VRChat look as good as Unreal Engine 5?

The main bottleneck is the price of asset production. Producing assets on the level of this demo videos is magnitudes more expensive than what you would see in those other platforms. So for someone to be able to turn a profit with that, there would need to be either a bigger willingness to spend, or an explosion in player base.

There are also likely technical challenges. I'd imagine that very few people have both the storage capacity and bandwidth to sustain such a system. You see people on here complaining about websites being a few MB heavy. In such a high quality 3D browser, you would need to load multiple GBs per scene.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#257

Post by chupasaurus »

fxtentacle wrote: post #36

Wow, we'll soon be down to only one game engine. Crytek has financial worries. Plus it's the most difficult to use, because it's almost all C++. Unity is very accessible thanks to C# scripting, but has bug issues (and no source code). Unreal Engine looks amazing, is cheap or free for indie studios, and has source code included. If they can make UE slightly easier to develop for, they'll dominate the market.

You forgot to mention the greatest editor there is, UnrealEd. Unity has a good one, Crytek has a horrible one.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#258

Post by lmilcin »

flipgimble wrote: post #145

Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass w…

Just looking at demoscene, it is possible to create amazing results with very little resources if you have right people and infinite time and resources to polish couple of seconds of it.

This rarely transfers to a product that has a lot of content to be built, an actual budget, good but not star developers and conflicting requirements.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#259

Post by driverdan »

davidhyde wrote: post #141
driverdan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind it's contending with YouTube compression too. A lot of the artifacts you see around the character and other moving objects are likely compression artifacts.

The video was hosted on Vimeo which is generally less aggressive with quality and banding but this is still a good point.

I didn't realize the provided link was for Vimeo. I had watched the video earlier on YT.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#260

Post by rowanG077 »

iMark wrote: post #134
rowanG077 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly dangerous of the PS people to build non-deterministic performance into their console. Developers who try to push every ounce of power out of it will hate it. edit: Maybe deterministic isn't the correct word. What I mean is that you can design a physics system that you can ensure runs on the PS5 CPU. But then the graphics boys make an upgrade and suddenly some power is diverted to the graphics and the physics s…

Mark Cerny's tech talk emphasised that performance is determistic: 'So how does boost work in this case? Put simply, the PlayStation 5 is given a set power budget tied to the thermal limits of the cooling assembly. "It's a completely different paradigm," says Cerny. "Rather than running at constant frequency and letting the power vary based on the workload, we run at essentially constant power and let the frequency v…

It's clear from the presentation that it's not possible to run the CPU at full power and the GPU at full power at once. This means the CPU will be stealing performance from the GPU or vice versa when the system is pushed to it's limits. This means the things you can graphically do are directly connected to how much the CPU is loaded. This will be very hard to optimize for. Since seemingly unconnected physical pieces of hardware are influencing eachother.

The only way I can see this going well if this balance is fixed by the developer. E.g. the developer specifies I want 60% of the power budget to go to the GPU and 40% to the CPU. If this is handled dynamically by the PS5... oh boy.

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