The PS5 and Xbox 2 thread - it's happening

[Perkel]

Unity Engine HQ must be shitting bricks right now. Although I doubt actual games will look that good once fully populated and scripted.

Doubt it. UE4 also presented itself with amazing trailer and then went nowhere for few years and dropped its main feature. Meanwhile Unity stole their leader chair reserving UE only for big budget games and not that many to boot unlike UE3 and then they released U5 which made their engine look as good if not better than UE4.

Either way Unity doesn't even target same type of devs.

 

[tritosine2k]

The LOD rabbit hole goes much deeper than this, they sound like they have a solution to overdraw yet it cannot be a true solution because that's also transparency problem not just tri-s.
(A forest can break this )

 

[taxalot]

This was nine years ago and we just reached the point where games look like that.

Digital foundry gotta digital foundry though

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Either way Unity doesn't even target same type of devs.

Unity doesn't even target anything outside game industry, so Epic couldn't care less.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Feature breakdown.

 

[sullynathan]

This was nine years ago and we just reached the point where games look like that.

Digital foundry gotta digital foundry though

You know, Arkham Knight looks a lot like this game. That game still looks good all this years later.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

You know, Arkham Knight looks a lot like this game. That game still looks good all this years later.

More importantly, this looked circa 2011 more revolutionary than UE5 in 2020.

 

[vortex]

What kind of PC is required to run games like that in UE5 ?

 

[some funny shit]

Nanite enabled the artist to built a scene with geometric complexity that wouldn't have been possible before.

There are tens of billions of triangles in that scene and we simply couldn't have them all in memory at once. So what we end up needed to do is streaming in triangles as the camera is moving troughout the enviroment.

And the I/O capabilities of PS5 are one of the key hardware features that enabled us to achieve that level of realism.

So its streaming of geometry from SSD

 

[sullynathan]

Modern games just look too good already

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Modern games just loojk too good already

No they look like plastic. Dishonored 2 was the last AAA game I can remember that didn't look like shit.

 

[Perkel]

So its streaming of geometry from SSD

More like they are doing PR for Sony so consoletards have something to talk about.

New consoles will have at best 5-7GB/s and with decompression that gives you maybe 10-15GB/s in best scenario which is drop in a bucket when VRAM and assets require 400-500-600GB/s.

It is reasonable that they load dynamically stuff into VRAM especially since it is tech demo and they know exactly what is going to happen but it completely idiotic to assume that they can stream directly from hard-rive assets and RAW assets at that like they saying. RAW assets would be literally TERAbytes of data so good luck trying to shove that through 10-15GB/s neck.

Moreover they already are lying. In trailer it says "captured on Playstation 5" but in interview they said it was DEVkit not something you will be able to buy in store. Console devkits usually have double or triple amount of RAM/VRAM and they have better hardware. Moreover since PS4 devkits are just PCs with standard graphics cards but with custom drivers. For an example PS4 devkit just before release had HD7990 rather than downclocked 7850+ what was in PS4 at release.

 

[Perkel]

Imho the only amazing thing about their demo was proper GI that looked as realistic goal other than that i smell bullshit. Finally after nearly 15 years of promising and various ways of going about it usually with terrible performance seems like it will become a standard much like PBR with PS4/Xbox era.

With rise of GI you don't need anymore crappy AO.

 

[Shinji]

Too bad all that technology will be wasted in 4k cinematic walking simulators that promote wokeness.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

https://wccftech.com/unreal-engine-...uper-could-run-it-at-pretty-good-performance/

Unreal Engine 5 Demo Is Rendering at 1440P Most of the Time on PS5; RTX 2070 Super Could Run It at ‘Pretty Good Performance’
By Alessio Palumbo
1 hour ago
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The Unreal Engine 5 demo footage released this afternoon by Epic Games is going to be hoarding all the attention for quite some time. Not only is it a demonstration of truly impressive next-gen visuals and the first footage we've seen to be confirmed as running on Sony's PlayStation 5, but it also showcased some genuinely impressive new technologies.

Luckily, Epic didn't just drop the demo and ran off into hiding or something. Some of the key engineers, including founder Tim Sweeney, appeared in an interview with Eurogamer's Digital Foundry to discuss what was showcased in great detail.

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Let's begin with the question that will be on most of our readers' minds: what was the rendering solution of the Unreal Engine 5 demo on PS5? According to Vice President of Engineering Nick Penwarden, it was 1440P 'most of the time'.

Interestingly, it does work very well with our dynamic resolution technique as well. So, when GPU load gets high we can lower the screen resolution a bit, and then we can adapt to that. In the Unreal Engine 5 demo we actually did use dynamic resolution, although it ends up rendering at about 1440p most of the time.

What about PC?
Where does that leave the PC platform, especially after Tim Sweeney's claims of PS5's storage architecture being 'so far ahead of anything on PCs'?

Well, PC Gamer received word from Epic's Chief Technical Officer that even an RTX 2070 Super could run the Unreal Engine 5 demo at 'pretty good performance'. Technically, NVIDIA's graphics card even sports an inferior nominal TFLOPS value compared to the PS5 (9 vs 10.28), so that's great news.

Tim Sweeney expanded on that in the following statement to Digital Foundry, pointing to PC SSDs being able to deliver 'awesome' performance, too (while HDDs are probably going the way of the dodo rather quickly).

A number of different components are required to render this level of detail, right? One is the GPU performance and GPU architecture to draw an incredible amount of geometry that you're talking about - a very large number of teraflops being required for this. The other is the ability to load and stream it efficiently. One of the big efforts that's been done and is ongoing in Unreal Engine 5 now is optimising for next generation storage to make loading faster by multiples of current performance. Not just a little bit faster but a lot faster, so that you can bring in this geometry and display it, despite it not all fitting and memory, you know, taking advantage of next generation SSD architectures and everything else... Sony is pioneering here with the PlayStation 5 architecture. It's got a God-tier storage system which is pretty far ahead of PCs. On a high-end PC with an SSD and especially with NVMe, you get awesome performance too.

In fact, Sweeney confirmed the key features will be available across all next-generation platforms. These are micro polygon geometry powered by the Nanite technology and real-time GI powered by Lumen.

 

[deuxhero]

Don't SSDs wear out if the constantly have read/write applied?

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Don't SSDs wear out if the constantly have read/write applied?

You'd likely see the controller give up before the NAND cells give up. And if not.... JUST BUY A NEW PS5!!

 

[The Decline]

Don't SSDs wear out if the constantly have read/write applied?

Reading no, writing yes.

 

[taxalot]

Release the executable.

 

[DalekFlay]

This was nine years ago and we just reached the point where games look like that.

Digital foundry gotta digital foundry though

They've had "engine demos" like that which took forever to be achieved, but this is supposedly running on a PS5 and more like a console performance demo. Still, since it's scripted and not actually a game it likely looks much better than a game could (and is only 1440p and 30fps, which again makes me laugh out loud at the people who every generation insist "this is the one where console prioritize 60fps!" Yeah okay, sure Jan). Also maybe I'm crazy but while it looks really nice I don't think it looks unbelievable amazingly nice? Looks like a believable step up from stuff made in the last few years IMO, with seeming lack of any detail loss in the distance being the most impressive thing to me.

I watched that demo and then watched DF cum all over it and my response after both was "meh." Shadow of the Tomb Raider with slightly better visuals, okay. Diminishing returns indeed.

 

[sullynathan]

It does look nice. If you look at past tech demos, they look less impressive now than whenever they released while this one looks impressive and achievable.

 

[tritosine2k]

The tech looks like it was made for Disney's realtime stuff and they could trade overdraw problem for overhead https://youtu.be/gUnxzVOs3rk?t=150

 

[sullynathan]

 

[sullynathan]

 

[Lutte]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23169059

Some actual truth in marketing about the unreal engine because we see those impressive demos that never pan out all the time.

Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass window, projecting beautiful patterns. Soon after a deal was signed to use the engine throughout the entire studio. In retrospect that was a good decision and I have a lot of respect for Unreal Engine and Epic in general.
Edit: found the video of the demo levels that shipped with very early UE3


However UE3-generation games that finally shipped had none of the visual effects from the early demos. The multicolored shadows could only be rendered with multiple passes, at least one per light, which proved to be too expensive for larger dynamic game scenes. It took years of work from the demo to shipped games, and an army of unnamed engineers to wrestle the technology into a product.

UE4 had a great early demo of dynamic global illumination using something like voxel cone tracing if I remember correctly. To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped.

Epic is famous for their demos, and I love them for it... at least now that I no longer work professionally in that field. If anything it charts a long term technical direction for interactive entertainment.

This UE3 demo still looks better than a ton of UE4 games :


You look at any modern games and you can find some that are prettier on a static screenshot, like RE2remake. But they all look extremely static compared to the dynamics of light, shadows and overall effects of the UE3 demo.

And we're now reaching 'UE5'. Whatever. I was more impressed when this UE3 demo released, or when Doom 3 ( a shitty game, an impressive tech demo ) was released. I was more impressed seeing the chaos of firefights and all the shit flowing into the air in F.e.a.r. Modern games make for pretty screenshots but are very unimpressive in motion. I won't even click the videos of demos of UE5, whatever nice features is in there is going to go unused in profit of making more static games to push 18k worth of pixels at 30 fps.

If you're not numb to game engine marketing by this point you're the perfect consumer.