Duderino

1 hour ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

X360 graphics were ahead of PCs in its day.  Xbox Live was arguably revolutionary compared to the multi-player PC options.

Recall any graphics specifics?  

My memory is a bit hazy but I remember the tech behind Doom 3 and idTech4 paving the way for that console generation before UE3, Gears, and the 360.  Gears was impressive, but Doom 3 was like seeing next-gen early.

39 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Xbox 360. 

Trying to remember, what was shown on the 360 that broke ground on consoles first?  It's been quite a while. On Sony's end the PS3's cell processor never had a breakthrough game demonstration on this level.

More of Tim setting the record straight:

There's not some secret deal. 100% of the stuff we've been working on with Sony over the past months is now publicly announced: The UE5 demo on PlayStation 5, Nanite, Lumen, and Epic Online Services for cross-platform play across all platforms.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) May 17, 2020

Not sure exactly what was said. The translated quote on 40 fps isn't a comparison between hardware capabilities. To hit a 100% solid 30 fps with vsync in the demo, per-frame times vary from 30 fps up to much higher.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) May 17, 2020

1 hour ago, legend said:

I'm sure they have run it on other systems, but that doesn't mean they can make a fair comparison if the other platforms need more optimization work. Optimization can take a long time, and if the PS5 is the best situated for this tech, then it may have been easier for them to get it to work there first.

It's kinda crazy that we're seeing some next-gen tech on a console first.  When was the last time that happened?  The psx/n64 era?

Epic stands to gain way more profits from gamers buying Unreal 5 tittles through the PC Epic Games store.  I could never see Epic agreeing to avoid talking about other platforms. Money hat joking aside, it doesn't add up.

Just now, Xbob42 said:

That doesn't clarify things. How did the rest of it run? Where can we find this demo? I WANT TO RUN THE DEMO.

It clears up the false claims, not how well we can expect this demo to run on other platforms.

We need more information and further demonstrations from Epic to get better understanding there.  No one outside of Epic has those answers yet.

17 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

Interesting, but why would it be at 40 FPS?

That is easily explained. The 40fps number comes from this statement in the China presentation that multiple people speaking the native language have confirmed:

Quote

The Epic guy is saying the first scene(Lumen) can run at 40fps on his notebook, not the whole demo.

People just ran with it, misrepresenting what was actually said (and shown).

Hopefully that clarifies things.

@Xbob42, that dsogaming article is misleading, as confirmed by Tim Sweeney:

They playing the video on the stream. Do you see the ".mp4" in the title bar?

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) May 17, 2020

Said it earlier, but there is plenty of misinformation being spread.

1 hour ago, SimpleG said:

Unless I am misunderstanding you , you just made @JPDunks4 point valid. 

Epic: New X destroys Y

Epic: Demos X

User: Can You Demo X vs Y ?

Epic: Its not ready for Y

User:So you mean X is better then an incomplete Y

Epic's primary goal here is to sell people (and developers) on what Unreal 5 will be capable of.  The PS5 happens to be the ideal platform to demo it.  Sony's priorities have aligned well with Epic's tech.

A comparison video now would probably drive PS5 sales and increase intent to purchase future NVMe drives, but work against Epic's pitch of their tech being a paradigm shift for the industry as a whole.

33 minutes ago, JPDunks4 said:

Epic could have pretty easily demonstrated something like this showing what the Demo would look like with the "God Tier" SSD vs what it'd look like on a regular NVMe SSD.  Just so we could see the actual real life application of the tech.  Reading numbers about I/O doesn't mean a whole lot to me since I'm not the most tech savy, but seeing a side by side comparison to demonstrate it would do wonders.

Given how new this tech is and how key the SSD and file I/O is to this process, I doubt Epic wants to show this running on anything less than the ideal hardware right now.  Why show something "pretty good" now when they can potentially improve on it in the coming months.

Informative article from PCgamer that clarifies a few things:

Quote

The Unreal Engine 5 tech demo looks pretty amazing, but it was supposedly run on a PlayStation 5, not a gaming PC. So what kind of PC do we need to get that kind of quality?

 

I couldn't get any exact specifications from Epic, but on a conference call earlier this week I asked how an RTX 2070 Super would handle the demo, and Epic Games chief technical officer Kim Libreri said that it should be able to get "pretty good" performance. But aside from a fancy GPU, you'll need some fast storage if you want to see the level of detail shown in the demo video.

 

Sony was heckled a bit for its focus on the PlayStation 5's storage speed, and if all you're imagining is loading screens disappearing more quickly, it does seem like an odd focus. But it's about moving beyond loading screens entirely, to the point where "you can bring in [the demo's] geometry and display it despite it not all fitting in memory," says Epic CEO Tim Sweeney. 

 

In other words, the storage needs to be fast enough to keep up with the player, allowing the game to seamlessly increase the complexity of distant objects as they get closer without 'popping in' more detailed models—something we've gotten used to seeing.

 

To that end, Unreal Engine 5 is being "optimized for next-generation storage." The PlayStation 5 storage tech is "god-tier," says Sweeney, while PCs have some catching up to do. That said, "on a high-end PC with an SSD," and especially with an NVMe SSD, we should get "awesome performance" from Unreal Engine 5 games. (With a good GPU and CPU too, of course.)

So it sounds like with some concessions and careful planning it was possible to get this demo running without the PS5 SSD's level of bandwidth.

Given this was only a tech demo, I would expect actual games to have more overhead to contend with.  What that means, who knows yet.  Looking forward to seeing what the actual games can do and how this applies to each platform.

The proper translation of the Epic China presentation:

Quote

-The Epic guy is saying the first scene(Lumen) can run at 40fps on his notebook, not the whole demo.

-If its a 1080P screen, 2 triangle per pixel, make some compression on vertex, than you still can run this demo, no need very high bandwidth and IO like PS5.

-UE4.25 implemented asynchronous/overlapped loading (Because bottleneck was the CPU). They overhauled their shaders to work well with the event-driven loader. This gave them >50% loading speed improvement.

-In the final UE5 scene, compression and careful disk layout avoided the need for high speed SSD. The workload wasn't that high.

-Guy mentioned they can run the demo in the editor at 40fps, not 40+ but did not specify resolution.

-Currently Nanite has some limitations such as only works on static meshes, doesn't support deformation for animation, doesn't support skinned character model, supports opaque material but no mask.

-Lumen costs quite a bit more than Nanite.UE5 could eventually be a hybrid renderer using both Lumen and Raytracing in the future.

That colteastwood guy loves to fudge numbers and stretch the truth.  I've had the misfortune of stumbling on his YouTube videos from time to time.

1 minute ago, SimpleG said:

See my above post, I was fucking around

Ok.

15 minutes ago, SimpleG said:

Took care of that for ya  

 

Gamers are so tribal

The idea of the PS5's I/O stack being a notable step forward is not all that far-fetched.  Question away though.

2 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

 

Some people like sun-levels of degrees.

Yup, there are some truly awful hot takes happening right now across the web.  Lots of people that obviously don't want these PS5 statements to hold water.

2 minutes ago, SimpleG said:

When it comes to video games and things like tweets,interviews,promos and press releases , I treat it as 5% truthful and 95% hyped bullshit.The general scumbagery of the industry is too high to not be skeptical of everything they say.

As I said, a healthy amount of skepticism is warranted.  It's not every generation that a console launches with notable market leading tech.

Tim Sweeney is not saying anything outlandish here, unless of course you were not taking Mark Cerney at his word during the PS5 presentation.

Seems like there was and still is a lot of selective listening happening.  Not that a degree of skepticism isn't warranted. Sony is challenging the status quo here.

Beyond the SSD, CPU, and GPU, there's also the general architecture advancements to consider if you're looking to build a PC that will match and/or surpass the PS5 here.

Sweeny also speaks to this:

Those PC numbers are theoretical, and are from drive into kernel memory. From there, it's a slow and circuitous journey through software decompression to GPU driver swizzling into video memory where you can eventually use it. The PS5 path for this is several times more efficient.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) May 14, 2020

It may be a while before you can build a PC with similar improvements.  Imagine that will (hopefully) come with the next wave of PC hardware.  Either way I could see there being a period where people need even higher-end components (such as top end NVMe drives) to reach PS5 parity.

I take all this to mean the PS5's specific architecture did play an important role in this demo, but the software side tech behind it can scale to other platforms.

One takeaway here is the PS5 is particularly well suited for this massive increase in asset detail.  May even be a differentiating factor for next gen.

If I were in the market for a new PC build and not a PS5 I would probably take a wait and see approach.  Conventional wisdom about how to best balence your system may change a bit in the future.

The Unreal Engine 5 demo on PlayStation 5 was the culmination of years of discussions between Sony and Epic on future graphics and storage architectures.

The Nanite and Lumen tech powering it will be fully supported on both PS5 and Xbox Series X and will be awesome on both.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) May 15, 2020

* And high end PCs

* And with features for scaling the content down to run on current generation platforms using traditional rendering and lighting techniques

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) May 15, 2020

why PS5 and not a PC? Was it due to SSD perf?

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) May 15, 2020

Systems integration and whole-system performance. Bringing in data from high-bandwidth storage into video memory in its native format with hardware decompression is very efficient.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) May 15, 2020

13 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

3 honestly plays better, but 1 and 2 had more memorable level layouts.

 

The thps games are some of the best examples of early 3D console games that aged well.

The level layout in 1 & 2 stood out partially because there was no revert to chain everything.

6 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

But knowing they were going to do a bunch of these, I really had no issue with what they showed.

 

I mean I'll eat my words if it happens but the notion of something looking "next gen" isn't really a thing these days. Games are looking good with diminishing returns on visuals. I thought the most next gen thing about it is all the high framerate stuff, I'll take that over purdy.

I do suspect many more games will target 60 FPS this gen, but this showcase was not exactly the best demonstration of the Series X's performance capabilities either.

One other reason live gameplay demos on the actual hardware would have been much appreciated.

Think this article sums up the disappointment quite well:

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/xbox-series-xs-inside-xbox-event-didnt-deliver-on-/1100-6476997/

The event just felt more like an extended games sizzle reel than a next-gen showcase.

What was the last first party Xbox game to show a live on-stage gameplay demo at E3?  I honestly can’t remember.

On 4/22/2020 at 12:45 PM, crispy4000 said:

People would freak if a new Chrono game got announced.  It’s been decades now.

Maybe it's time to resurrect: