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pg2g

Member
Dec 18, 2018
4,812
So what does it mean when they say it scales "hard" with resolution? That it takes much more power to go up resolution?

I am curious what this type of engine means in the Lockhart scenario, where we have approximately one third of the rendering power of the XSX and are targeting a lower resolution.
 

ILikeFeet

DF Deet Master
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
61,987
So what does it mean when they say it scales "hard" with resolution? That it takes much more power to go up resolution?

I am curious what this type of engine means in the Lockhart scenario, where we have approximately one third of the rendering power of the XSX and are targeting a lower resolution.
As resolution increases, there are more triangles to shade. Compared to the traditional LoD system, where you have a finite triangle count no matter the image resolution.
 

Wollan

Mostly Positive
Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,816
Norway but living in France
But with the 1440p PS5 result being described as 'defying pixel-counting' (image looking like native 4K) by DF it seems like the hard-scaling challenge with Nanite is just a theoretical dilemma for the foreseeable future (though getting to 60 fps will still be a challenge I assume with these next-gen consoles).
 

Garrett 2U

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
5,511
1440p at 30fps, please no. Cool technology but hopefully devs can optimize it to get much better performance than that.
 

PLASTICA-MAN

Member
Oct 26, 2017
23,638
But with the 1440p PS5 result being described as 'defying pixel-counting' (image looking like native 4K) by DF it seems like the hard-scaling challenge with Nanite is just a theoretical dilemma for the foreseeable future (though getting to 60 fps will still be a challenge I assume with these next-gen consoles).

1440p at 30fps, please no. Cool technology but hopefully devs can optimize it to get much better performance than that.

bLlVJ1o.png


Don't worry, this 1440p is not that bad and not standard 1440p also this demo seems to be not optimised that well and don't forget the engine is still in its infancy and the full version isn't there right now and more optimisations will come down the line. remember how Elemental UE4 demo on PS4 back then ran like hell and was choppy but later we not only got better looking games overall with better performance but also even UE4 games looked better too.

Don't worry, you will get more 4K games next-gen than you ever imagine.
 

Wollan

Mostly Positive
Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,816
Norway but living in France
I will gladly take Nanite visuals 1080p @ 60fps if possible on console. Normal Blu-ray image quality still looks great and Nanite provides image stability equivalent to pre-rendered footage.
 

Governergrimm

Member
Jun 25, 2019
6,561
I don't think you're understanding just what was happening in that demo.
This is doing much more than you think and stressing the GPU and CPU in it's raw performance. AC will look nothing like this visually or technologically. Be cool and don't let the console war thing get to you. Things will run much better when tools are mature and optimized.
Sigh... Nevermind. I'm not bothered. Evidently it's wrong that I was hoping for higher frames.
 

Garrett 2U

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
5,511
At some point we're going to have to move beyond worrying about resolutions. Obviously we're not there yet.

I guess you missed the 30fps part. In fact most of this community (78%) wants 60fps.

www.resetera.com

Shots Fired! You can only choose two... (prioritizing resolution / frame rate / visual detail & effects)

So imagine that the big news this August from the Summer Game Fest is that Fisher Price jumps into the console race outta nowhere. They announce that they'll release the Omega Fun Machine (OFM) this fall for only $250. * The OFM comes with a free, exclusive solo action-adventure title called...
 

Governergrimm

Member
Jun 25, 2019
6,561
I guess you missed the 30fps part. In fact most of this community (78%) wants 60fps.

www.resetera.com

Shots Fired! You can only choose two... (prioritizing resolution / frame rate / visual detail & effects)

So imagine that the big news this August from the Summer Game Fest is that Fisher Price jumps into the console race outta nowhere. They announce that they'll release the Omega Fun Machine (OFM) this fall for only $250. * The OFM comes with a free, exclusive solo action-adventure title called...
I agree but I'm out. Good luck.
 

Dictator

Digital Foundry
Verified
Oct 26, 2017
4,932
Berlin, 'SCHLAND
For next gen we are going to look to get away from Pixel counting and perhaps turning to a new metric, as resultion... Does not give the whole picture.
Probably something like where we compare the console Image to the prisitibe native Image on PC to say how close it gets, or a number to describe that, or a number to describe how noisy or aliased an Image is, something like that.
 

nib95

Contains No Misinformation on Philly Cheesesteaks
Banned
Oct 28, 2017
18,498
For next gen we are going to look to get away from Pixel counting and perhaps turning to a new metric, as resultion... Does not give the whole picture.
Probably something like where we compare the console Image to the prisitibe native Image on PC to say how close it gets, or a number to describe that, or a number to describe how noisy or aliased an Image is, something like that.

Sounds pretty interesting. Although I do think the rating could be privy to some subjectivity so to speak. Much harder to ascertain a fixed objective metric for something like this, but one could certainly try to maintain consistency in ratings across games.

I guess you missed the 30fps part. In fact most of this community (78%) wants 60fps.

www.resetera.com

Shots Fired! You can only choose two... (prioritizing resolution / frame rate / visual detail & effects)

So imagine that the big news this August from the Summer Game Fest is that Fisher Price jumps into the console race outta nowhere. They announce that they'll release the Omega Fun Machine (OFM) this fall for only $250. * The OFM comes with a free, exclusive solo action-adventure title called...

I don't know how those percentages make sense, but 63% wanted better graphics and 20% wanted better resolution, so overall more were still inclined towards visuals over 60fps, just split between resolution and graphics. Honestly, I personally expected frame rate to command a bigger difference vs visuals here on Era.
 

Pottuvoi

Member
Oct 28, 2017
3,065
So Nanite seems to be using the idea behind geometry image. Meshes are stored as "picture" rather than traditional vertex or triagnles. The engine will use the idea of virtual texture to stream in mesh picture tiles based on feedback from current frame, and re-build the triangle mesh in realtime, which is done in software rasterizer, since hardware rasterizer suffers from efficiency issues under situation where there are millions of pixel/subpixel level triangles. So you now can achieve dynamic lod selection, GPU culling, adaptive tessellation and other features all in one framework. Extremely cool idea! Dictator
Yup.
Apparently there is couple of software renderers running on async compute.

I wonder if they use deferred virtual texturing, meaning using software rasterizer to write UV or barycentric coordinates and other information to g-buffer and other compute job does the actual texturing for whole scene in one pass.

I cannot wait to see the coming tech paper.
 

Nooblet

Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,637
xboxera.com

Phil Spencer: Ninja Theory are excited to bring the Unreal Engine 5 innovations to life on Xbox Series X

Today Epic has shown a demo of Unreal Engine 5 running on a PlayStation 5. There was no mention of the Xbox Series X at todays event. But, many of

Many games like Daylight and Ester One this gen released before the official release of UE4 and using beta version of UE4 that only devs got by that time.
Not beta ver but actually early access version of UE4, which is what they were using. There is no early access for UE5 available.
 

gofreak

Member
Oct 26, 2017
7,737
They use ssr in the Demo for any high frequecy reflection. To put it on the record, Epic said nanite works with hw RT.

Sorry, yeah, I forgot the SSR reflections. I guess world-space high frequency reflection could be very challenging here.


So it should technically scale down better?

I think it might depend on the costs of the data management and pre-raster-processing side of things, I presume for a given scene there is some fixed lower floor on what you need to get even the lowest fidelity stuff on screen. I think there's also a question of how far this scales down before it's maybe just not worth it vs a regular pipeline. We might get a better idea after the tech talk comes out.
 
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PLASTICA-MAN

Member
Oct 26, 2017
23,638
Not beta ver but actually early access version of UE4, which is what they were using. There is no early access for UE5 available.

Yeah but HB2 could start having an early access of UE5 if they ask directly Epic and work closely with them cus they are not like random indies and obviously HB2 isn't a 2021 game so by that time HB2 could start being a full UE5 game and that will make sense. Fortnite will already migrate to UE5 during the middle of next year anyway which is even befroe the official release of UE5 to the public so UE5 exists right now and by the end of this year more VIP companies will have a chance to get an early access with it.
 

Dizastah

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,124
For next gen we are going to look to get away from Pixel counting and perhaps turning to a new metric, as resultion... Does not give the whole picture.
Probably something like where we compare the console Image to the prisitibe native Image on PC to say how close it gets, or a number to describe that, or a number to describe how noisy or aliased an Image is, something like that.
Very interesting!
 

nelsonroyale

Member
Oct 28, 2017
12,130
Yeah but HB2 could start having an early access of UE5 if they ask directly Epic and work closely with them cus they are not like random indies and obviously HB2 isn't a 2021 game so by that time HB2 could start being a full UE5 game and that will make sense. Fortnite will already migrate to UE5 during the middle of next year anyway which is even befroe the official release of UE5 to the public so UE5 exists right now and by the end of this year more VIP companies will have a chance to get an early access with it.

Sure, and that wouldn't be any different from any other dev with close links to Epic working on an unreal game. I doubt they would get special 'access' relative to say SE, etc.
 

Wollan

Mostly Positive
Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,816
Norway but living in France
Sounds pretty interesting. Although I do think the rating could be privy to some subjectivity so to speak. Much harder to ascertain a fixed objective metric for something like this, but one could certainly try to maintain consistency in ratings across games.
Maybe they will have a way to ensure that the same level segment is played out in the exact same fashion w/same conditions across the different versions of the game (PC & consoles). Then they can apply magnifying scope across various differences their eyes pick up on. There's a somewhat subjective element to it but with two or more people one should get a pretty clear take.
 

PLASTICA-MAN

Member
Oct 26, 2017
23,638
Sure, and that wouldn't be any different from any other dev with close links to Epic working on an unreal game. I doubt they would get special 'access' relative to say SE, etc.

Yeah companies like SE would get UE5 before otehrs too but I think they gonna give their Luminous Engine a chance to shine first and they will reveal what it can do soon during the PS5 reveal. Let's wait and see how different engines will behave next-gen.
 
Oct 26, 2017
7,981
The SDFs they use for mid range GI are not compatible with animated characters unless they've added something for that. Will probably usually suffice to use screen space GI for that though.
 

jett

Community Resettler
Member
Oct 25, 2017
44,663
Excellent video. Really interesting to see exactly what Epic's global illumination approach is like, and how it achieves RT-like lighting without ray tracing.

Nanite still seems basically magic. I only wish performance was better.

Makes me wonder if developers with a history of crafting bespoke engines like Naughty Dog will attempt to implement something similar, because it's such a game changer.
 

Pottuvoi

Member
Oct 28, 2017
3,065
Nanites sounds like Unlimited Detail Engine
UDE was voxel/octree based one if I remember correctly, so there should be quite bit of differences.
Excellent video. Really interesting to see exactly what Epic's global illumination approach is like, and how it achieves RT-like lighting without ray tracing.

Nanite still seems basically magic. I only wish performance was better.

Makes me wonder if developers with a history of crafting bespoke engines like Naughty Dog will attempt to implement something similar, because it's such a game changer.
There is ray tracing, but not against triangles.

Voxel tracing has advantage that voxels can be easily be prefiltered and mipmapped.
Same goes for distance fields.

Should be interesting to see how they combine them.. (which is doable as well.)
 
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Alexandros

Member
Oct 26, 2017
17,815
Well, I'm confused now. Can Lumen be accelerated with ray tracing hardware or is it something totally different? I think i saw Krejlooc posting something to that effect but reading this thread it sounds like Lumen is an alternative to ray tracing. Apologies if I misinterpreted anything.
 
Oct 26, 2017
7,981
I wonder if all the temporal accumulation is just stored as screen space data ? This would mean the 'infinite bounces' would be limited to the screen space tracing part and might explain the disocclusion examples. The SDF tests would still improve over time via accumulation too because the ray directions will be changed per frame.
 

sncvsrtoip

Banned
Apr 18, 2019
2,773
I'm really happy that devs are not into catchy 4k and rt but know that on nextgen hardware(even tough it's quite powerful) it's not necessary best way to achieve best graphics
 

Dictator

Digital Foundry
Verified
Oct 26, 2017
4,932
Berlin, 'SCHLAND
The SDFs they use for mid range GI are not compatible with animated characters unless they've added something for that. Will probably usually suffice to use screen space GI for that though.
Yeah it seems like animated things like Characters and such will all be screen space, and light leaking will be a thing. But I prefer that to Light maps every day of the week.

There are a couple false positives from the screen space filling in of GI in the Demo, the stalactites are too thin to have indirect shadows from the coarse GI and then the screen space GI fills that in, but in the wrong directions im screen space, so it create a shadow in a crevace behind the stalctite with non directionality.
 

T002 Tyrant

Member
Nov 8, 2018
8,996
Well, I'm confused now. Can Lumen be accelerated with ray tracing hardware or is it something totally different? I think i saw Krejlooc posting something to that effect but reading this thread it sounds like Lumen is an alternative to ray tracing. Apologies if I misinterpreted anything.

I think we're all a little confused but I believe it's definitely not ray tracing. Especially when this engine is stated that it will be compatible with current gen platforms too. But maybe this Lumen lighting is exclusive to more powerful machines, or it could be something cooked up by epic that can run in various forms in a scalable way?

Personally I'd have really liked to see Epic provide a demonstration on scalability such as seeing it run on an android device, perhaps a current gen console, a next gen console and a high end gaming PC. Just so we can see the differences.
 

19thCenturyFox

Prophet of Regret
Member
Oct 29, 2017
4,309
Well, I'm confused now. Can Lumen be accelerated with ray tracing hardware or is it something totally different? I think i saw Krejlooc posting something to that effect but reading this thread it sounds like Lumen is an alternative to ray tracing. Apologies if I misinterpreted anything.

I think you can use one or the other depending on the kind of hardware you're targeting since UE5 supports both GI approaches. Lumen doesn't appear to benefit from dedicated ray tracing hardware because it is an approximation instead of a full blown simulation.
 

Deleted member 20297

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 28, 2017
6,943
For next gen we are going to look to get away from Pixel counting and perhaps turning to a new metric, as resultion... Does not give the whole picture.
Probably something like where we compare the console Image to the prisitibe native Image on PC to say how close it gets, or a number to describe that, or a number to describe how noisy or aliased an Image is, something like that.
I think it depends. Many games will meet the detail of that demo, especially in the beginning. I also had different opinions in how the new tech from UE5 will make it easier or harder for people creating assets. I feel we will see many games targeting either this fidelity or targeting 4k60. There are still games that will want to have a different approach, like racing games or mp shooters. The versatility of the UE5 features are not yet known, I think.
Edit: I also think that we will see even more IQ "manipulation" techs than this gen :)
Edit2: But with that shift I hope devs don't use more GPU power just for resolution but for more fidelity. As you said, UE5 scales especially well on the GPU side so that should not be wasted in more resolution but squeeze out everything at max while still having a good IQ overall for the titles that use UE5 in the way the tech demo does.
 
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Dictator

Digital Foundry
Verified
Oct 26, 2017
4,932
Berlin, 'SCHLAND
I think we're all a little confused but I believe it's definitely not ray tracing. Especially when this engine is stated that it will be compatible with current gen platforms too. But maybe this Lumen lighting is exclusive to more powerful machines, or it could be something cooked up by epic that can run in various forms in a scalable way?

Personally I'd have really liked to see Epic provide a demonstration on scalability such as seeing it run on an android device, perhaps a current gen console, a next gen console and a high end gaming PC. Just so we can see the differences.
As started in the Video it is a type tracing that does not trace triangles, which is what Hardware raytracing accelerates. It is a simpler, less accurate but cheaper Form of tracing. Think like voxel tracing that cry engine has or UE4 had.

Its advantage is speed in the trade off for acuraacy, for some game objects like a big wall with low Detail, there is not much of a difference in quality.
 
dev notes

ILikeFeet

DF Deet Master
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
61,987
Well, I'm confused now. Can Lumen be accelerated with ray tracing hardware or is it something totally different? I think i saw Krejlooc posting something to that effect but reading this thread it sounds like Lumen is an alternative to ray tracing. Apologies if I misinterpreted anything.
It's and alternative to ray traced GI. Other rt effects can still be used in conjunction. In fact, I wonder if RT shadows would help with the issue of screen space shadow errors that were shown in the video

Also, Brian Karis commented on the article (3 tweets)


 
Oct 26, 2017
7,981
Dictator your point at 17:45 seems to get explained in this paragraph

"The vast majority of triangles are software rasterised using hyper-optimised compute shaders specifically designed for the advantages we can exploit," explains Brian Karis. "As a result, we've been able to leave hardware rasterisers in the dust at this specific task. Software rasterisation is a core component of Nanite that allows it to achieve what it does. We can't beat hardware rasterisers in all cases though so we'll use hardware when we've determined it's the faster path. On PlayStation 5 we use primitive shaders for that path which is considerably faster than using the old pipeline we had before with vertex shaders."
 

icecold1983

Banned
Nov 3, 2017
4,243
Still disappointed in the 1440p/30fps. I get that it's computationally more expensive and probably can't run those computations on existing consoles. I had hoped that we could at least see 60 fps at 1440p. It's kind of surprising that Ass Creed is catching heat for 30FPS but this isn't. Have we seen any next gen footage running at 60 fps?
AC Valhalla is nothing more than a ps4/xbone game of course its going to get flak running at 30 fps on a next gen console.
 

sncvsrtoip

Banned
Apr 18, 2019
2,773
Still disappointed in the 1440p/30fps. I get that it's computationally more expensive and probably can't run those computations on existing consoles. I had hoped that we could at least see 60 fps at 1440p. It's kind of surprising that Ass Creed is catching heat for 30FPS but this isn't. Have we seen any next gen footage running at 60 fps?
assasins v is only crossgen without mindblowing presentation, probably that's the reason
 

Eeyore

User requested ban
Banned
Dec 13, 2019
9,029
I guess you missed the 30fps part. In fact most of this community (78%) wants 60fps.

www.resetera.com

Shots Fired! You can only choose two... (prioritizing resolution / frame rate / visual detail & effects)

So imagine that the big news this August from the Summer Game Fest is that Fisher Price jumps into the console race outta nowhere. They announce that they'll release the Omega Fun Machine (OFM) this fall for only $250. * The OFM comes with a free, exclusive solo action-adventure title called...

I didn't miss it. This community is a niche. For better and for worse. Obviously more responsive games are better, very few people will say otherwise, I think concentrating on JUST these aspects to be myopic.
 

SeanMN

Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,187
As started in the Video it is a type tracing that does not trace triangles, which is what Hardware raytracing accelerates. It is a simpler, less accurate but cheaper Form of tracing. Think like voxel tracing that cry engine has or UE4 had.

Its advantage is speed in the trade off for acuraacy, for some game objects like a big wall with low Detail, there is not much of a difference in quality.
As impressive as this demo is, my concern is highlighted in your post. "Lumen is less accurate, but cheaper" "It's advantage is speed in the trade off for accuracy" - if this is the case (which I believe that what you say is true) should we be lowering our expectations for games featuring RT GI and shadows or for higher framerates? Because for a technique built to be lighter weight than RT, it seems pretty heavy as it is being that it's only 30 fps in this demo.

I think the image quality looks great, and have not problems with dynamic reconstructed 1440p, I just hope as devs get to grips with this (and other) engines on the new hardware, they'll able to make optimizations so this level of quality can be achieved at high framerates.
 

Uhtred

Alt Account
Banned
May 4, 2020
1,340
As started in the Video it is a type tracing that does not trace triangles, which is what Hardware raytracing accelerates. It is a simpler, less accurate but cheaper Form of tracing. Think like voxel tracing that cry engine has or UE4 had.

Its advantage is speed in the trade off for acuraacy, for some game objects like a big wall with low Detail, there is not much of a difference in quality.

Could this algorithm be hardware accelerated by tensor cores? I'm guess we don't have enough information to say yet, right?
 

MrKlaw

Member
Oct 25, 2017
33,076
it's interesting to see software solutions being valid options once the raw performance of the computeunits gets high enough.

How much space is taken up by the rasterisers - if you had a GPU that was designed around 'software' rendering and was just CUs, how much more could you squeeze in?