Unreal Engine 5 vs. All other next gen engines

[jelly]

Don't know enough to say but comparing last gen and early this gen, I don't think developers are left behind, if anything they are doing great and we really don't know what their next step is yet so it could be just like before, there is nice UE4 games and nice whatever engine games. I think the more interesting part is 60fps, ease of creating content in the industry, the latter sounds like a real thorn for devs sometimes and don't know if Unreal also suffers that quality, like Destiny and Halo.

 

[Sotha_Sil]

Id Tech and many of Sony's engines will certainly be up there with Unreal.

 

[Manta_Breh]

Naughty Engine

Capcom's RE Engine

Rage

God of War Engine

Guerrila Games engine.

 

[Matty H]

Can't wait to see what Naughty Dog has cooking.

 

[Tyche-42]

AAA devs can implement their own AI solutions on top of UE5.. also the AI and physics have seen big improvements with UE5.

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True, but as a general purpose engine there is only so far you can push it no? Most proprietary engines are usually built with something specific in mind and are specialized towards that. Trying to do the same thing in UE5 might not work out of the box, and altering UE5 to make it work might not be all that feasible.

Kind of same reason people just dont all use UE now. Knowing your codebase and having full control/ownership over it is more valuable more often than not.

 

[Biggzy]

Echo what a lot of people have already said in that engines have their strengths and weaknesses, so there will be engines that do things better than UE5 - higher frame rates for one thing.

But I feel the main selling point for UE5 seems to be the relative ease of use to make games that appear to have a bigger budget than they actually have, which will benefit smaller developers a lot.

 

[Vash63]

No engine will have all that Unreal 5 has, because it has chaos physics for destruction, Nanite for geometry, Lumen for illumination, Niagara for visual effects, cascadia for particles... and moreover you can mix it with other support engines... it has a flexibility in that regard... it's very ambitious and supportive. Amazing.

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That's just a giant list of buzz words. Just because other engines don't have a fancy name for their lighting system doesn't mean for example Metro Exodus EE's lighting system isn't already comparable. UE5 may be furthest along right now (at least as publicly shipping demos... no game has shipped with these features so they might not end up first to market even), but their tech isn't magic and other developers can and will come up with similar solutions.

 

[Firmus_Anguis]

UE5 is quite obviously targeting 30 fps - so anyone looking for more performant solutions targeting 60, will want to go a their own path at the moment anyway. Even then, UE5 still has a long way to go for being performant when things get complex in the open world. Every time you move through a streaming zone in UE5 demo on XSX or PS5, the game throttles to like 20 fps. So there is a lot of work to do still. I do not think other engine makers should feel threatened - if anything, they should be inspired.

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How easy/hard do you reckon it is for other developers (obviously applies to those big enough to afford it) to tweak their engines to do similar stuff?

I imagine it would take years...

 

[EVIL]

Honestly, I don't see any other engines besides maybe Unity having a Virtual geometry, light and texture solution like nanite with lumen any time soon, mostly because the whole creation pipeline and art workflow is still so experimental right now. I feel it will take a few years at least before any other engine would attempt anything like it.

You need to have the luxury of not being in the middle of a current in development project and have enough capital to spend resources on a non game project to really invest in this technology.

 

[Charcoal]

I feel like Frostbite was in the running for a while, but not no mo.

 

[oriic]

Unity.


I would say CryEngine, but I seem to recall that there's a problem with it at the code level, which might make it problematic to use in larger multiplayer games. There was also a game where they replaced CE with Unreal Engine. But I don't know anything about it, I just thought I heard it somewhere. If I say something stupid, I'm sorry. :)

 

[Orioto]

Real question i guess is regarding nanite and lumen and the way they work, is this some magic from them or is this something that's in the air and was bound to happen this gen. if the latter, i guess most big studios will have equivalent techs ?

 

[Dr. Mario]

Real question i guess is regarding nanite and lumen and the way they work, is this some magic from them or is this something that's in the air and was bound to happen this gen. if the latter, i guess most big studios will have equivalent techs ?

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Nanite is some magic in the sense that it's made sense since the beginning of 3D game engine that you upload the highest quality 3D model, and the engine would automatically calculate the ideal number of polygons to draw based on the player's distance and viewport, in a way that it doesn't create ugly artifacts and clogs up your memory with the highest quality asset. That makes more sense than having multiple versions of the same model with different LODs that the engine tries to blend between discretely based on set distances. The fact that after thirty years engines have still defaulted to the second solution (that I'm aware of, I don't work for any of the big game companies), tells you that Epic really cracked something here. If it was bound to happen it would have happened sooner. It's something that other engine makes will want to incorporate, but as I said earlier, here I think it's a costly investment that developers of non-general-purpose engines may want to skip.

Lumen I don't think is very unique. Global Illumination was another thing that would have made sense from the beginning but was always too computationally costly. The new gen put it within reach, although full GI is still one or two gens out, so UE's implementation is likely an approximation that I expect other engines to also include their own version and likely already have. It's more that it's easier for smaller devs to include efficiently.

 

[Crossing Eden]

As always game engine and the versatility of them is not just down to how pretty the end result of tons of talented artists with a huge huge budget can produce.

 

[ThereAreFourNaan]

We know what direction UE5 is moving in because it's public facing, while we have zero information about most of the in house tech. It's therefore impossible to judge.

 

[Bardeh]

The difference is that Epic is in the business of licensing their engine, and so have a vested interest in showing off all their fancy tech to catch the eyes of devs. The various in-house engines out there don't need to do this, and so we likely won't see all the cool stuff those teams are working on until their games are closer to release.

 

[KORNdog]

I think it'll be like any other engine comparison. It'll do certain things really well. And certain things really badly.

Right now in its development UE5 performance is a serious issue. Will it be eliminated while retaining its quality and density of detail? Who knows. But it's the sticking point of the entire thing so far. It's not native 4k. And it's not 60fps. Its also not the cleanest image in the world with lots of grainy artifacting all over the place. But again. This might be eliminated in the final version...at what cost? who knows.

I honestly don't think any engine will be touching UE5 though in its environmental high poly mesh usage. It has been built around it entirely. I don't think even GTA6 is going to be achieving that level of detail in its assets since it will likely be an evolution of what they had an RDR2. But then GTA6 may end up being 4k 60 so...

 

[Deleted member 37928]

Guerilla and Rockstar impressed me the most last gen. I'm hoping they'll deliver this gen as well!

 

[PorcoLighto]

[...]
The fact that after thirty years engines have still defaulted to the second solution (that I'm aware of, I don't work for any of the big game companies), tells you that Epic really cracked something here.
[...]

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Yep. It is also no secret that Brian Karis, Nanite's author, spent years working on it and of course drew some inspirations from some previous works on the problem. He is just the first one to finally put together a complete solution, so to speak.

Now with this solution making way to the public once UE5 is released, other tech companies with their talent will also be able to draw inspiration from it and make something of their own. Or maybe some of them already have something similar, just not there yet.

The future is bright and exciting.

 

[eso76]

Right now there's no other engine capable of handling geometry the way Nanite does or rendering real time GI as accurate as Lumen.

Lumen might have some artifacts and might be a tad slower to update compared to other solutions, but so far nothing comes close in terms of accuracy.

The promise of theoretical "UNLIMITED POLYGONS!!1" seems kept when you see people fiddle with UE5 and copy/paste assets until there's literally trillions polygons with no impact on performances. Now though, on the other hand the Matrix demo running on our consoles uses models that aren't especially impressive in terms on geometry and doesn't really seem to have a huge number of smaller objects on the streets either (i'd say at ground level something like watch dogs legion might have more intricate detail and stuff scattered around).
Of course that might simply be because demo or a number of different reasons: it's too early to judge, but I can't help but wonder why Epic hasn't released that "PS5" demo to the public...
Still, i'd say that UE5 is currently ahead of other engines, yeah

 

[Raigor]

Right now there's no other engine capable of handling geometry the way Nanite does or rendering real time GI as accurate as Lumen.

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The price to pay for that geometry is 30fps and not even close to 4K.

Devs prioritizing higher res and 60fps are not going to care much about Nanite and real time GI in the first place.

Also, i don't see any dev pushing all this tech on Unreal Engine 5 at this stage...maybe The Coalition and NT if they are willing to sacrifice A LOT, from res to framerate.

 

[Mik2121]

I'm gonna tell you most engines listed here are not even close to UE5 (UE4), and it's understandable. None of those engines receive anywhere close to the support UE receives, and none of those engines have anywhere close to the same amount of developers working and giving feedback on a daily basis, and none of those engines are built with outside users in mind so even if they are powerful in some ways, they can be incredibly hard to use or be very specifically built for certain games.

The only benefit those other engines have is that they are built with certain projects in mind so they are very good wt that one specific thing. But you could do that with UE4/5 with the right amount of messing around with the engine.

I have used and seen some of the in-house engines people list up here and yeah, no, nowhere close.

If UE5 looks too good to be true, it's because it's actually pretty damn good and the budget spent on it is many many times more than what most other engines receive.

 

[Butch]

I'd like to see what Decima Engine achieves this gen.

 

[boogerbrain51]

The decima engine is the best so far

 

[DC5remy]

RAGE will probably top it.

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I get it!

 

[eso76]

The price to pay for that geometry is 30fps and not even close to 4K.

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True, although I think it's mostly Lumen affecting framerate and Nanite limiting resolution (other than that, Nanite should always represent a more efficient and faster way to render geometry).
How the engine can scale to allow 60fps and/or native 4k remains to be seen.

 

[toy_brain]

..................
I have used and seen some of the in-house engines people list up here and yeah, no, nowhere close.

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The OP's question wasn't phrased in a way that specified 3rd party development and ease of use as a point of 'coming close' to UE5.
I think a lot of us just took it as "is anything else gonna look as pretty?"

I don't doubt for a second what you say about ease of use, feedback, support and documentation. Some of us are just coming at things from an 'only the end result matters' (in other words, ignorant) perspective, at which point some in-house engines can look really nice, and also appear more performant than the current Unreal Engine - even if it did mean untold numbers of hours fighting against terrible development tools with little documentation.

In terms of 3rd party support, to my layman's perspective, only Unity is in a vaguely similar-ish league to UE, and it looks to be waaaaay behind in terms of tech.
Agree? Disagree?

 

[chris 1515]

True, although I think it's mostly Lumen affecting framerate and Nanite limiting resolution (other than that, Nanite should always represent a more efficient and faster way to render geometry).
How the engine can scale to allow 60fps and/or native 4k remains to be seen.

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When we will have engine using realtime GI like avatar I doubt they will be 4k 60 fps on consoles. People need to understand we are into cross gen period and things will change when devs will use the new technology inside the console.

 

[Mik2121]

The OP's question wasn't phrased in a way that specified 3rd party development and ease of use as a point of 'coming close' to UE5.
I think a lot of us just took it as "is anything else gonna look as pretty?"

I don't doubt for a second what you say about ease of use, feedback, support and documentation. Some of us are just coming at things from an 'only the end result matters' (in other words, ignorant) perspective, at which point some in-house engines can look really nice, and also appear more performant than the current Unreal Engine - even if it did mean untold numbers of hours fighting against terrible development tools with little documentation.

In terms of 3rd party support, to my layman's perspective, only Unity is in a vaguely similar-ish league to UE, and it looks to be waaaaay behind in terms of tech.
Agree? Disagree?

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Oh yeah, I was not even getting into ease of use talks, just features. A lot of the engines out there have lighter versions of certain features because they have specific use cases, whereas something done for UE5 is done to catch a broader range of use cases.
When I talked about support and feedback, I don't mean it as ease of use either, but instead, you have more people testing your features, asking for extra stuff, etc. which means you end up with a much more robust engine that can do more things.

Think of UE4/5 as some sort of rover car that can work for almost any situation, it's not going to let you down but it's also perhaps not the most advanced at one specific thing.
Some engines out there might be crazy sports concept cars that are really good at this one thing, but then have significantly glaring issues in some other regards. That doesn't go for all other engines out there, obviously, but some are like that.

And when you have the amount of software engineers working on an engine like Epic does, it's gonna be tough to beat that.

 

[EVIL]

Real question i guess is regarding nanite and lumen and the way they work, is this some magic from them or is this something that's in the air and was bound to happen this gen. if the latter, i guess most big studios will have equivalent techs ?

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Its a bit of the right ingredients coming together and the right kind of thinking, but it took the industry by surprise for sure. nobody thought something like this was even on the radar. so I don't see any mature tech coming from any other player that is doing the same thing. especially since there are very few engines that have the constant financial investment like unreal engine, so yeah maybe unity is working on something similar, but don't expect it in more inhouse engines.

 

[Prine]

Id Tech and Forza engine stand out to me. Forza engine in particular as it's being built from the ground up for next gen and beyond. Playground Games are going to do unnatural things with their game on the new engine.

 

[imapioneer]

UE5 is quite obviously targeting 30 fps - so anyone looking for more performant solutions targeting 60, will want to go a their own path at the moment anyway. Even then, UE5 still has a long way to go for being performant when things get complex in the open world. Every time you move through a streaming zone in UE5 demo on XSX or PS5, the game throttles to like 20 fps. So there is a lot of work to do still. I do not think other engine makers should feel threatened - if anything, they should be inspired.

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Isn't that because they threw everything including the kitchen sink in that demo? Reduce the crowds and traffic to 25 percent and most of those issues go away while still having plenty of density above what current gen games offer.

 

[Scrillz]

The price to pay for that geometry is 30fps and not even close to 4K.

Devs prioritizing higher res and 60fps are not going to care much about Nanite and real time GI in the first place.

Also, i don't see any dev pushing all this tech on Unreal Engine 5 at this stage...maybe The Coalition and NT if they are willing to sacrifice A LOT, from res to framerate.

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I'm not sure this is true. Per Epic, the Nanite render budget for the earlier PS5 demo was well within the 60fps budget. Also, there were over 20 million rendered triangles per frame. Under this new paradigm, why on earth would developers be chasing native 4k when a 4k display is averaging over 2.5 triangles per pixel? Difficult to compare the most recent Matrix demo since much more complexities such as hardware raytracing was included, but the initial Ps5 demo was running at native 1440p. IQ was pristine. No reasonable person was complaining about IQ because of the high quality assets with dense geometry. Shouldn't the focus be shifted to asset quality and install size optimization?

 

[Grue]

But then GTA6 may end up being 4k 60 so...

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If that happens (in its initial release, not some later remaster) then I will by an NFT hat and eat it.

(And enjoy doing so, because it's obviously better than 30 fps).

 

[eso76]

When we will have engine using realtime GI like avatar I doubt they will be 4k 60 fps on consoles. People need to understand we are into cross gen period and things will change when devs will use the new technology inside the console.

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For sure, I don't think we can have UE5 lumen at 60fps on consoles this gen, but devs could still use a limited set of features of the engine to achieve 4k60 if they want.
What advantages UE5 offers over other engines in a similar scenario remains to be seen.
Actually, basically everything remains to be seen; we only have a tech demo.

 

[Ales34]

I can see UE5 being unmatched for linear 30fps cinematic games. Open world games with complex systems is another matter.

 

[elenarie]

Not really sure what the core of the question / comparison here is.

There is no reason to advertise in house tech as it is not really available for anyone externally. Thus the only reason to showcase in house tech is to either attract potential employees or present an upcoming game. Epic and Unity have a very relevant interest in this case, as they are pitching their products as production-ready pipelines for next gen games. You don't really need to do that with in house tech.

It will take a few more years for non public tech to start firing with higher "next-gen" potential since most companies are still making cross gen games for now.

Eventually all tech worth investing into will be "on par" with publicly available tech stack. Those not worth supporting would eventually be abandoned and you won't really care much about whether they are on par or not anymore.

 

[Dr Guildo]

I think the game is over, UE5 will probably take the crown for the most complete and powerful engine when it comes to polycount (illimited), and texel size (one pixel, the max we could dream of). The other engines can do something in lighting area, and physics. For me, even internal studios won't do anything that could beat what Epic has achieved here with their UE5. It is even used to make movies, it tells all...

 

[jett]

Without both global illumination and virtualized geometry those other engines don't matter.

 

[Digital Savior]

I don't think we've seen enough of anything to make judgement calls yet. Tons of games over a variety of engines in the next 10 years will blow current games away.

 

[FuturaBold]

I feel like Frostbite was in the running for a while, but not no mo.

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I disagree, take a look at the remastered Portal maps like Caspain Border, they look incredible. Ripple Effect knows how to use the latest Frostbite.

 

[KodiakGTS]

Id Tech and Forza engine stand out to me. Forza engine in particular as it's being built from the ground up for next gen and beyond. Playground Games are going to do unnatural things with their game on the new engine.

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I'm surprised it took this long in the thread to get to ForzaTech. FH5 is probably the best looking game released at the moment (that or Rift Apart I'd say).

We know that Fable and FM7 will also use this engine, so it seems they will be investing in it for quite a while.

 

[blastprocessor]

Activision, EA have divulged their GI solution via Siggraph presentations. I'm sure more engines will join the party if not already to compete with Lumen.

Nanite though is what gives Unreal Engine an edge but appears to be limited to static geometry. So no destruction, animation I'm sure there's other limitations such as foliage. It's going to be interesting to see what other devs do to sort out LOD popping.

You have the might of Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft (name any big dev i've missed) that will no doubt update their engines to compete. Early days yet.

 

[gothmog]

I'm surprised it took this long in the thread to get to ForzaTech. FH5 is probably the best looking game released at the moment (that or Rift Apart I'd say).

We know that Fable and FM7 will also use this engine, so it seems they will be investing in it for quite a while.

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People always ignore racing engines, but I'm sure if Fable looks good people will start paying attention.

 

[trashbandit]

The only other engine with those kinds of out-of-the-box solutions we'll likely see is Unity. I don't think UE5 will be exceptionally better than other engines though, at the end of the day it still has to be one size fits all, with all the compromise and issues that come with that approach.

 

[CheapJi]

the emotion engine

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"That game looks like a PS2 game!"

 

[Multiverse Moo]

As far as visuals go, there is some incredible stuff being done right now for varying projects including stuff that uses UE4/5 as a basis, but doesn't rely specifically on nanite or lumen. A bunch of the largest middleware companies have also been preparing their offerings along similar lines to integrate into the new baseline of PS5 / Series S with respect to mesh shading, micropolygons, subdivision techniques, indirect lighting, animation blending, and entity management (mass AI, crowd systems, traffic, creature ecosystems, etc.)

Its a bit of the right ingredients coming together and the right kind of thinking, but it took the industry by surprise for sure. nobody thought something like this was even on the radar. so I don't see any mature tech coming from any other player that is doing the same thing. especially since there are very few engines that have the constant financial investment like unreal engine, so yeah maybe unity is working on something similar, but don't expect it in more inhouse engines.

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While these features coming wholesale to anyone who plays with UE5 is unprecedented, I've seen comparable stuff in development for years at several studios. It was absolutely on the radar, even if most of the studios I'm talking about don't have an engine to sell (at least not public-facing).

GDC for the next few years should be pretty illuminating for many, as there are technologies that have been developed during the last 6 years or so that are culminating in a lot of what UE5 has been trying to do en masse.

 

[PLASTICA-MAN]

I always chuckle when I read comments like GTA6 or Rage engine will look like this or beat it, XD :



But since those seem to love the games, I won't deprive them from enjoying many years of illussions...ahem. hope. :p

 

[MysteryM]

It's hard to say, there are some great engines, Id tech, forza tech, decima etc. Other engines will be as good, it just takes time.

 

[nelsonroyale]

Not really sure what the core of the question / comparison here is.

There is no reason to advertise in house tech as it is not really available for anyone externally. Thus the only reason to showcase in house tech is to either attract potential employees or present an upcoming game. Epic and Unity have a very relevant interest in this case, as they are pitching their products as production-ready pipelines for next gen games. You don't really need to do that with in house tech.

It will take a few more years for non public tech to start firing with higher "next-gen" potential since most companies are still making cross gen games for now.

Eventually all tech worth investing into will be "on par" with publicly available tech stack. Those not worth supporting would eventually be abandoned and you won't really care much about whether they are on par or not anymore.

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This.

When more devs are going all out on next gen, we will see stuff that matches or on occassions exceeds the top stuff coming out of UE5...

Like of the studios not on UE that produced the best looking games last gen, which of them revealed next gen only games?

Insomniac, sure, and Ratchet and Clank is a very early next gen game that runs very well and looks stunning.

Who else? Housemarque and Bluepoint.

ND haven't. Capcom haven't. Rockstar haven't. Guerrila are a ways off. ID haven't. Suckerpunch haven't. Dice haven't. By far most of the devs who made the best looking games last gen, are years away from releasing next gen only games. This just seems to retreading the same issue people had with low expectations of visual output this gen. First, it was this gen won't be that big of an upgrade relative to last gen. Now it is only Unreal 5 will be able to produce a big step up from last gen. I never either was likely, and I still don't.