Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A first look at Unreal Engine 5

unrealengine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 695 posts

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#561

Post by random_ind_dude »

seanwilson wrote: post #519
random_ind_dude wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graphics look good because of two things: Quixel and global illumination. Quixel is Swedish company that Epic acquired in 2019. Quixel does high-resolution scans of actual physical objects(photogrammetry) and makes them available as textures in Unreal Engine. The sheer rock faces that you see in the demo are Quixel megascans of actual rocks. The other thing that makes the graphics look impressive is global illumi…

What makes this stuff possible now though? New global illumination algorithms? Better scanning techniques? Or mostly better hardware? I don't know how it compares to other games to be honest. If it's a big jump though, I'd be interested to know what's being done different and why it's being done now.

It was possible to use Quixel assets in UE4 as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fC20NWhx4s

The assets used in the UE5 demo are available in Quixel's website.

https://quixel.com/megascans/collections?category=environmen...

The 8K cinematic assets that Epic used in the demo are between 1 and 2MB in size. So I suspect it's more to do with PS5's SSD which has a bandwidth of more than 5GB/s and 16GB of GDDR6 RAM, which allows more textures to be streamed from the hard drive and held in the RAM.

PS5's GPU supports raytracing, which Epic said they didn't use in the demo. So the dynamic lighting must be something new they've developed for UE5.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#562

Post by nineteen999 »

brauzi wrote: post #140

Wow, how soon until AR/VR is the standard in gaming?

As soon as the majority of the audience clamor for it? Ie. possibly never.

Only a minority of gamers/audiences really want to experience VR or binocular 3D and are a prepared to wear cumbersome headsets or 3D glasses right now. I think the hardware has to improve a lot for it to become accepted as standard.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#563

Post by bigfoot675 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #396
_bxg1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a programmer who wants to write code, you have to use C++

For a non-programmer getting into games, C++ isn't that much larger leap than C#. Also, as others said, you have blueprints. They're not bad - though hopefully there will be some investments made into ergonomics of their use.

Ehh this is debatable. After searching for a memory bug in a AAA game C++ codebase for hours, you might feel differently

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#564

Post by Pfhreak »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #547
Pfhreak wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked for fiascos, not negatives. I think it's absolutely fair to be critical or disagree with the approaches of Epic. It's one thing to say they made a decision you thought was wrong, it's another thing to call them a 'fiasco', that's all.

What you may consider a problem I may consider a fiasco. It's a very subjective term. fiasco: a complete failure, bomb, bummer, bust, catastrophe, clinker, clunker, debacle (also débâcle), disaster, dud, failure, fizzle, flop, frost, lemon, loser, miss, shipwreck, turkey, washout What I've said was searchable. Please excuse me if I didn't feel like spending an hour on a single comment. If you want to know you can fin…

They didn't buy any of those games though?

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#565

Post by sterlind »

slx26 wrote: post #455
sterlind wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All sorts of rendering tricks had to be played before RTX. Now that we have real-time ray tracing, models are becoming more important than shaders (see e.g. Minecraft. It looks like a real world made of Legos - the blocks make it look artificial.) Maybe once real time photorealism is cracked, we'll move to a completely Newtonian global physics for some games, with some analogue of "atoms" the way RTX models "photons.…

not exactly what you are saying, but you might be interested in teardown https://youtu.be/Wc_QC25RM44

Almost exactly what I was looking for! I can't fathom how a single person manages to make a game like that. He mentions a physics solver in that video.. I wonder if he'll talk about how it works

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#566

Post by throwaway17_17 »

rland wrote: post #450
Priem19 wrote: post #400

While this is completely amazing, a caveat: graphics are way less important than we think it is. I still remember every nook and cranny from Tomb Raider 3's jungle level, and when I think about it I imagine being deep inside a real jungle. It didn't matter that everything looked jagged; my imagination could go wild. This is probably a flawed opinion, but sometimes I think the more realistic games become, the less wor…

I have a sister opinion to this take, which is that artstyle is far more important than graphics, and there is a very important difference between the two that is often ignored by large game studios. \* Your graphical capability can push a hundred million triangles, but choosing the color, composition, and visual coherence of those triangles is more important to how people interpret your world than anything else. Hum…

I am super late with this reply, but it can not be stressed enough that artsyle is far more important than ‘graphics.’ You referenced Portal, which is an excellent example. I’d cite ARC Stystem Works’ Guilty Gear and Dragonball Fighter Z as equally excellent. They don’t follow the real world intuition principle you mentioned (which I think is a great point) but they put 100% of their ‘graphical’ effort into ensuring that the art style of the subject matter is conveyed consistently and as envisioned.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#567

Post by ekianjo »

esoterica wrote: post #430
hombre_fatal wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video that reignited Xbox360 vs PS3 forum battles around the internet.

That was the Killzone 2 trailer, not the Killzone: Shadow Fall trailer the parent posted.

The Killzone 2 trailer was completely fake (i.e. not running on actual PS3 hardware) at the time it was released, and the real-time version of it running on PS3 later unveiled looked much, much worse. This was debunked at the time.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#568

Post by pistachiopro »

johncoogan wrote: post #350

Does anyone have any theories as to how Nanite actually works? I've never heard of virtualized micropolygon geometry before and it sounds a bit buzzwordy. Do we think they are just loading the full model into GPU memory, or are they baking down various LODs and normal maps at compile time through some automatic process? Either way, it's a huge workflow improvement. It's just unclear what's actually happening...

I wouldn't be surprised if it has something to do with "Geometry Images." Like REYES, the goal is to target pixel-sized polygons, but it handles tessellation differently. Brian Karis, the programmer speaking in the video linked this old blog post of his from his twitter when talking about inspirations for the technology: http://graphicrants.blogspot.com/2009/01/virtual-geometry-im...

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#569

Post by ekianjo »

skohan wrote: post #186
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…

I think raytracing has the potential to be a big leap forward. Real-time lighting and shadows are still incredibly limited, and most games are only able handle dynamic shadows from a hand-full of light-sources at a time. I think we don't see the difference yet because baked lighting gets a really good result, but I think after we live for a while in a world where every flickering candle, and every emissive texture in…

Raytracing with anything resembling real environments with very large amount of details is not for tomorrow. Maybe 10-20 years down the road. So far most tech demos for current Raytracing happen with low-polygon use-cases.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#570

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> They don't really spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don't look particularly good.

Even CGI water looks typically very fake (except from afar), because we don't really have very good models for water/liquids. That's certainly not the priority for games either.

Post reply on HN