Unreal Engine 5 revealed - Epic Games engine for future generation

Im hoping next gen tomb raider game will look like this. It reminded me of that right away.

 

Looks really good. I'm not picky with graphics at all, but damn that's some smexy graphics right there. Question is - does that actually run on PS5.

 

That's it? Unimpressed.

 

From the IGN interview with Epic...

"So there you have it, while Epic did not create a whole new game for the PlayStation 5, they did build a working, playable demo running off a PlayStation 5 dev kit. Earlier in the interview, Libreri even told IGN, “I think a lot of people [will ask], ‘Oh is [the demo] real?’ But you know that demo was grabbed from the back of a PlayStation 5 development kit. An HDMI cable went into a disc recorder and played out real-time — no editing, no tricks, that’s what comes off the box.”

 

You must be fun at parties.

 

No, its a tech demo, showing tech of UE5 on PS5. This doesnt mean PS5 game will look like this, just what is possible with it.

Tim Sweeney and two other devs? did interview with Geoff Keighley at his Summer Game Fest. They confrimed its a tech demo and not a game.

 

I'm more cynical, i got the impression it was a scripted cutscene rendered to make it look like gameplay.

 

Well the moment she started flying and jumping of the cliffs it looked very scripted indeed.

 

Environment looks very good and sharp but that character did not impress me.

 

So how does Nanite work and what makes it able to display billions of triangles/poly's?

 

It doesn't display billions. It allows developers to import models with billions then it automagically culls/lods/simplifies the assets for the developers.

As already stated in this thread, it probably makes use of Turing/RDNA2's Mesh/Amplification shaders, which is essentially a fundamental change in the way geometry is processed.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dire...on-shaders-reinventing-the-geometry-pipeline/

Here's an Nvidia demo from Turing launch showcasing it:



As you can see the total triangle count is 3.5B but the mesh programs automatically reduce and blend the number drawn in real time depending on the scene - in this case it's some function of the asteroids proximity to the players camera. Closer asteroids will automatically scale up to a much higher triangle count, giving maximum detail when it's necessary while further ones get scaled down from the imported asset.

 

So it is using mesh shaders. I was confused whether it was using mesh LOD because of this scene:



Okay after looking closely to the "noise" the size doesn't seem to change from the distance, the colour was just throwing me off, thanks Denial.

 

It's not confirmed but it's likely. Nvidia's technique makes use of 10 LOD levels (IIRC I haven't watched that video in a long time) but it's possible Epic came up with some kind of new approach. The beauty of Mesh Shaders is the flexibility they bring to geometry processing which prior was really fixed.

I'm assuming they'll detail it more as UE5 approaches but I'd say there's a 90% chance it's utilizing Mesh Shader functionality.

 

I thought it looked ok except for the water part. That looked totally unrealistic to me. Plus the character model too not really impressed by the face, looks kinda cartoony or maybe that intended?

 

Not sure what all the fuss about the char models/water in every fifth post are all about since we're not even half way through 2020? I think it's a safe bet to assume that the FIRST demo of UE5 ins't showing everything, or quite candidly, all the tech slated for 2021?

Impressive as always.. Love the fact that it's API agnostic but then again, I always loved that about the Unreal Engine. Will I will agree with is that neither game-devs or myself (or even my GPU for that matter) have scratched the surface of UE4 yet....

 

As usual, the main questions for me when things like this happen:

1) How many developers will make their games look like that?
2) How many games will be just like that from start to finish, everywhere you look at without loss of quality?
3) Is it feasible to attain such levels of graphics fidelity everywhere in a big open world especially without loading of assets and far draw distances?
4) Will A.I. still be dumb? (Yes. Yes it will.)

There's many examples, indeed, of tech demos showing something is possible with new tech / hardware, only to finally end up pretty much never seeing it in practice.

Does anyone remember PhysX? Some of the tech demos at the time showed practically 95% destructible environments? Did we ever get a game like that? Just one? Nope. Never happened.

Heh, time will tell. I cannot possibly look at this tech demo and think "Damn, future games will be amazing!". Sorry, this is absolutely a 'been there done that' scenario. In this case, 'been there seen that' before. I started with 8-bit gaming, I've seen it all with gaming evolution and revolutions of hardware over more than two decades. Even if a full game ends up looking just like that we'll have to wait at the end of the life span of next gen before it happens, because the big games that push a current gen hardware usually take anywhere between 4 to 6 years to make, even with a big studio and hundreds of people working on it. Call this being pessimistic, but I am from experience. I demand to see to believe this (in a full game, from start to finish; wake me up when that one happens).

 

I wonder if this engine revision brings any new Multi-GPU compatibility improvements or features.

 

UE3 was around for 4 hojillion years. Every major game that's to be taken seriously uses UE4. Every time some cough *Japanese* cough company tried to stray from UE4 we ended up with an abomination that ran like ass and looked far worse than it should have a la FF15.

UE is always user friendly on PC to modify in every way. Every time I hear a game I want is coming out I always hope it's on UE knowing no matter what flaws it has, if it's on UE there's a good chance I can do something about it.

Speaking of messing with UE4 games, I just heard about this today from a Digital Foundry video - https://framedsc.github.io/GeneralGuides/universal_ue4_consoleunlocker.htm

 

Really nice looking demo , i'm impressed. I too worry about the huge chunk of GBs it will need from our storage with all the cinematic effects and what not. I like it if this is the future of what games will look like , i approve !