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NX Gamer: Unreal Engine 5 - A taste of what's to come | Tech Analysis
- Thread starter Equanimity
- Start date
As the video highlights this is [speculated to be] a good demonstration of massive amounts of data being streamed from SSD and what that can enable. We will need further concrete details from Epic in that regard (how many GB/s came flying off the SSD in the last segment etc.).
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Thanks for the video. Great job breaking down what you are interpreting from the footage.
I'm over the moon. A massive increase in geometric detail was my number 1 hope for next gen, and it seems like that will be delivered. The leap could be huge from this gen.
I'm over the moon. A massive increase in geometric detail was my number 1 hope for next gen, and it seems like that will be delivered. The leap could be huge from this gen.
Some replies i've read were like " Not impressed, looks like Tomb Raider, i can play that today" and my favourite " the flying was just a video"...
God i hate people sometimes... My head wanted to bang on my desk so hard after reading that...
It's one thing to simply don't know any better but to flaunt their ignorance hurts to read.
Edit- ha you changed your mind.
same here... gonna be a nice breakfest + NX Gamer finally back with a video.
I still need to rewatch this one.
😰
Tech discussions on this forum is always a mess. When I see people say "I'm not impressed" I just roll my eyes at their ignorance and go discuss things on 3D graphics forums where people know the scope of what they're actually looking at. One thing is loading a scene in your favorite DCC app and using V-Ray proxies or other instancing/replication systems to offline render billions of polygons, another things is seeing Unreal Engine 5 handle this crazy scene complexity in real time.
I really feel like UE4 didn't have much of an innings compared to UE3, which was everywhere for so many years.
A pretty major point besides the GPU requirements. To the more technical folks here, do you guys expect PC requirements having harddrive speeds like newer SSDs in there or will all that fall to Ram or GPU vram?
Man when he switches to Uncharted 4, one of the best looking games this gen. Holy shit it looks so bad in comparison.
But-But! Diminishing Returns! Next Gen will not look much better!
You know what? This is bigger than the PS3 to PS4 jump, IMO.
Maybe even bigger than PS2 to PS3. The geometric detail and lighting is just insane.
But-But! Diminishing Returns! Next Gen will not look much better!
You know what? This is bigger than the PS3 to PS4 jump, IMO.
Maybe even bigger than PS2 to PS3. The geometric detail and lighting is just insane.
Agreed, I was thinking just this after watching the UE5 vid.
Which is a shame, as UE4 manages to ditch the 'UE Look' that everything based on 3 seemed to have.
We do not know that though as we do not know the Demos memory footprint :/
I think that is something we need to know before we start positing about it.
If anything, we learned that it is utilising much less texture memory than normal games presumably - no large normales and texture mips for that and no geo LODs. And virtual texturing as well.
The UE3 look was obviously down to asset creation as there were games that didn't look like that, UE4 has an asset store but the games that use it have a "UE4 look" as well.
The main reason you don't see UE4 as much as UE3 is because last gen it was the western devs that used UE3 and its easy toolsets allowed them to have a smooth development, which further allowed them to learned from it and eventually develop their own engines or move to an inhouse engine within a publisher. Japanese games on the other hand were still fiddling around with their own engines last gen and were using archaic developing methods from PS2 days which caused issues with PS360 generation of development, so much so that they had so many games in development hell and didn't really get the time to put in developing a robust engine for this gen...which is why you see so many Japanese developers going UE4 this gen. The only Japanese developer that didn't have engine related development issues last gen ended up having their own engine again this gen i.e. Capcom (eventhough Phanta Rei ended up being a failure).
Would that still mean you could stream even higher geometric density with higher SSD speeds? Anyway, extremely exciting tech. I'm over the moon.
We do not know at all how the memory load is for nanite, so I have no idea. We had a shorter conversation with Epic (Tim sweeney), but they (He) only mentioned nanite scales with Compute Power and they said nothing about other axes it scales along.
Nice spot on the UC4 shadows.
For me the game changer is Nanite I'm fascinated to know how this dynamic LOD system works from such high polycounts.
For me the game changer is Nanite I'm fascinated to know how this dynamic LOD system works from such high polycounts.
I really don't think this scene would not be possible outside of PS5. I am pretty sure we will see this level of fidelity across PC and Xbox too.
Epic mentions there is a software and a hardware path for Nanite, and it's using the software path most of the time because its usually faster than using primitive shaders. So on PS5, it will use primitive shaders as the hardware path.
Now, primitive shaders is a pretty old technique from the GCN days and there is newer technique called mesh shading, which should be a lot more efficient in theory. On PC and Xbox, Nanite could be using mesh shaders instead of primitive shaders and maybe that solution is always faster than the software path. That could make up for the lack in I/O speeds on PC and Xbox.
But that's just a guess. Maybe I'm wrong and this really isn't possible outside of PS5. I'm sure we will see soon enough.
Epic mentions there is a software and a hardware path for Nanite, and it's using the software path most of the time because its usually faster than using primitive shaders. So on PS5, it will use primitive shaders as the hardware path.
Now, primitive shaders is a pretty old technique from the GCN days and there is newer technique called mesh shading, which should be a lot more efficient in theory. On PC and Xbox, Nanite could be using mesh shaders instead of primitive shaders and maybe that solution is always faster than the software path. That could make up for the lack in I/O speeds on PC and Xbox.
But that's just a guess. Maybe I'm wrong and this really isn't possible outside of PS5. I'm sure we will see soon enough.
It was so jarring to see UC4 against the UE5 demo in that video. The Nanite demo makes, UC4 which is one of this generation's best looking titles, look dated and almost hideous in comparison. That was pleasing to me, we are going to get a genuine leap again this generation.
Mesh shaders and Primitive shaders are the same thing. The concept was first coined as Primitive shaders some years back by AMD.
You really believe someone was playing that flying section?
I am not saying that part was just a video but it looks like a scripted scene.
Putting aside some of this mesh shader/primitive shader stuff - I'm not sure there's any difference there - triangle draw rate is one possible bound with this system.
Another is data access though.
One won't compensate for the other. You'd just have different side effects depending on where the bound is in a scene and the resources available in the hardware you're running on.
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That's all very different from 'could this run outside PS5'. Of course yes, Epic has said as much. Would it run exactly the same way? It depends what the needs of this demo are and what's available on you're running on.
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It is a scripted scene because they didn't have the flight controls but what does that change anyway? The scene is still being rendered in real time exactly as it would if someone is controlling it.
And I was shat on for daring to mention Hallblade II in the UE5 thread because it had similar asset quality to this demo...
Fanboys are fucking insatiable.
Fanboys are fucking insatiable.
They are using virtual texturing and apparently parsing geometry data as a texture to reduce the footprint, and also applying virtual texturing there.
If anything this reduces the amount of data you need to load and keep in the memory compared to the traditional approach of loading the entire texture set and all different models lods.
Sure,having the ssd loading data with a 1-frame delay sure helps, but the whole idea around the demo seems to be: here's what you can do with this new hardware when you use it to render just about what you actually need.
Games have already been using virtual texturing, partially resident textures, and on-demand loading of baked LoDs.
In any virtualised system you're effectively trading memory footprint against bandwidth. For a given set of data, the overall net data size doesn't get smaller just because you're virtualising it. The amount in RAM can be smaller, and that's a function of how quickly you can get data in an out of RAM. So there is a relationship there with storage speed.
For this system vs 'before' or the PS4/XB1 gen? The net data size will be vastly bigger I think. Yes, you don't need a normal map to compensate for missing mesh geometry anymore. But the vertex data is much larger, they're using multiple high resolution texture layers per model, and you can have many more assets per scene now that they have a renderer to handle it.
How that translates to necessary RAM? We know the amount of data needed across that demo exceeds what can be stored at once in RAM, at least if you believe it when they say they need to stream data (and some notable amount more vs 'before'). What we don't know is how much data needs to be accessed at what rate - or, how much RAM you would need for the same result with different levels of storage performance. It's possible it all, always, fits neatly into less-than-PS5 levels of memory and storage performance. It's possible it doesn't, or not at every point in that demo. We might have an idea, for this demo, when the tech talk hits.
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Excellent and very informative video showcasing not only how the tech works what is new and what isn't but also comparing it to current gen games making the tech even more and less impressive at the same time somehow.
Really excited now for next gen and Sony's games especially since it seems this kind of technology is basically what the PS5 seem to be build around with that massive IO speed.
Really excited now for next gen and Sony's games especially since it seems this kind of technology is basically what the PS5 seem to be build around with that massive IO speed.
Great video, looking forward the SSD and I/O vid.
Also think it will be a bigger leap this next generation compared to PS3 -> PS4.
Also think it will be a bigger leap this next generation compared to PS3 -> PS4.
I really hope they're able to capture the feeling of being surrounded by huge buildings. We'll be looking at the world from Spidermans size instead of the current camera.
Haha yeah, it really looked like shit compared to that. Sorry ND devs!
According to Epic it was meant to be playable at GDC but Sony said no because they did not want people to accidentally (or purposely try) to break the demo and it also meant less time having to design more than needed but it was playable.
That flying scene is impressive, but come on...... We already have games with incredible set pieces, like spider man and uncharted 4, working fine on 100MB/s HDD. I don't see how SSD that is 80 times faster and no less can be a minimum requirement for a scene like that, since the assets themself won't be that much bigger, compared to this gen.
That flying part is not being controller obviously but the point is to showcase what is possible with SSD and I/O.
Or at least as much. I found the transition to this gen pretty big, since we had a lot better fidelity and asset quality in open world games than we had in linear cinematic games last gen. Next gen though, it seems we may approach CG levels of asset density. That is probably an even bigger leap. Super exciting!
I could feel that pretty strongly watching the Ghost of Tsukuhima state of play yesterday. The game deems to do absolutely everything that shows the limitations of a PS4. It's crying for a PS5 version.
So i have a question about that nanite thing. I was thinking, when people where all saying "ho my my pc is going to run that at 4k" that i's not that easy cause the scaling tech uses pixel density so 4x the pixels means.. 4x the polys. WHich he seems to confirm.
But then i was thinking, couldn't you set the engine so it doesn't use 1 pixel for one triangle, but let's say, 4 pixel for 1 triangle ? So that the geometry is the same on screen at a bigger rez ?
He literally starts his video explaining that this is how he thinks it works and not that it's a fact but he is knowledgeable and been doing this for several years so it's not like he is a random commentator on this forum.
That's the point - the data is much bigger.
This system came about because the developers asked themselves what would happen if you had a renderer that could render so much data per pixel that you'd be pushing up on the point of diminishing returns (on geometric complexity, for a given res), and if you had the data access to feed that renderer and operate at 'game scale'.
What the demo proves is that being able to do that at scale is an impressive step forward visually. Or, at least, I think most people seem to agree it's impressive. And on the asset side that's all down to big(ger) data and the ability to process it.
I think this system will be scalable enough that you could scale down to 8GB of RAM with a 100MB/s storage, for some scenes at least, but I think at some point along the way you lose the fidelity that makes it look like a big step up.
Yeah, he's speculating. We don't know the data needs of the demo.
I don't see this as a positive necessarily, because developers usually understand what they are doing better than someone doing video analysis.
I thought his comment about PC catching up and needing 30-40GB of VRAM to get that level of image quality and object density was a bit silly, unless I understood him wrong.