General Gaming Digital Foundry: "Brilliant visuals and growing pains: examining the first generation of Unreal Engine 5 games", update: console analysis posted

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Brilliant visuals and growing pains: examining the first generation of Unreal Engine 5 games

WWW.EUROGAMER.NET

---

Unreal Engine 5 games have a reputation for pushing graphical boundaries - with performance issues and other woes. Alex…

 

Quote

 

Unreal Engine 5 was announced more than three years ago and we're only now seeing the first wave of third-party UE5 games on PC and consoles. For the audience on PC, these launches are both exciting and terrifying - we're finally seeing all of the eye candy promised by Epic with Lumen, Nanite and Virtual Shadow Maps, but we've also had an array of UE4 titles that have exhibited poor CPU utilisation and instrusive stutters.

 

With these conflicting emotions in mind, I thought it would be interesting to round up the first generation of UE5 releases to identify the good, great and not-so-great aspects of these titles - an early barometer if you will of how developers are getting to grips with the engine on PC and what it means for the future of UE5 on the platform.

 

The goal here isn't to cover any one game in exhaustive detail, but rather to give a potpourri of impressions after testing a variety of games including demos of Jusant, Robocop: Rogue City and The Talos Principle 2, and the full releases of Remnant 2, Immortals of Aveum, Lords of the Fallen, Desordre, Fort Solis and Layers of Fear.

 

 

 

[eventide11]

I'll be honest I'm not impressed with the engine. At all. Maybe the potential for whatever it's capable of isn't being pulled out of it at the moment but I've never played a game this Gen that uses that with as many game breaking bugs as I've experienced

[Paperclyp]

2 hours ago, eventide11 said:

I'll be honest I'm not impressed with the engine. At all. Maybe the potential for whatever it's capable of isn't being pulled out of it at the moment but I've never played a game this Gen that uses that with as many game breaking bugs as I've experienced

 

What games do you speak of? 

[stepee]

22 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

 

What games do you speak of? 

 

Boti: Byteland Overclocked had issues with flashing water on the ROG Ally for about a month but it’s patched now. 

[Paperclyp]

54 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

Boti: Byteland Overclocked had issues with flashing water on the ROG Ally for about a month but it’s patched now. 

thank goodness 

[crispy4000]

Great video from DF as always.  I want to see a console equivalent video next with where it has and hasn't delivered compared to games running on other engines.

 

On that note, we haven't seen much in the way of open world UE5 games either.

[stepee]

Matrix demo is open world!

[Keyser_Soze]

ARK: Survival Ascended came out two days ago and it's UE5 and open world.

[eventide11]

18 hours ago, Paperclyp said:

 

What games do you speak of? 

Lords of the Fallen for one. It's a technical trash pile of turds. But yeah the other ones mentioned as well. Never been a fan of Unreal period 

[stepee]

Pretty positive video actually. If they really can get parallel processing sorted out and relieve the cpu enough to heavily mitigate traversal stutter, we will be in a good place this gen for UE games. Also saw path tracing listed for 5.4 as well, so good stuff.

 

The biggest takeaway for me though was that apparently Don’t Nod has an ICOish game coming out on UE5 with a cartoony art style that is out in two days????? Oy, another one.

[TwinIon]

Good vid from DF. I'm glad that there is at least some hope that CPU performance will be better. It's not much of a surprise that things like shader compilation studder will stay with us for the UE5 generation. I'm looking forward to playing UE5 games as they really do look amazing at their best.

[crispy4000]

Console versions check in:

 

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Written article:

 

A wealth of Unreal Engine 5 games are finally here - so how are the consoles coping?

WWW.EUROGAMER.NET

---

After years of waiting, Unreal Engine 5 games are here in force - but how does the engine's tech scale to console syste…

 

Quote

 

After years of waiting, Unreal Engine 5 is finally here with a decent roster of full games to look at, beyond the tech demos and samples we had in the past. The early results have been mixed, with some titles exhibiting UE5's merits convincingly while others have been bogged down by image quality or performance problems. Yet there's one question that hasn't been answered quite as well: how well do these technologies scale to console systems? Today we're looking at the current state of Unreal Engine 5 on PS5, Series X and Series S to evaluate how the technology fares in early game efforts.

 

The key takeaway from my experiences with Unreal Engine 5 so far is that the core feature set works. Lumen global illumination (GI) solves indirect lighting in real time to a high degree of fidelity, producing great-looking shading in most circumstances when set up correctly. Lumen reflections similarly help to light glossy and semi-gloss surfaces correctly, giving them good-looking reflective detail. Virtual shadowmaps overcome the limitations of cascaded shadowmap techniques to deliver super-fine shadow detail, with accurate variable penumbra in some cases. Meanwhile, Nanite delivers high-quality meshes with a continuous level of detail system that simplifies asset production and prevents LOD popping.

 

 

Quote

 

Ultimately, I think we are seeing some mostly positive indications from UE5 in console games. The core graphical tech clearly scales well to console hardware, delivering some really impressive visual results in problem areas for real-time rendering. A game like Robocop is delivering top-tier console visuals with the help of UE5, for instance. On the performance front, some games do struggle, though in some cases this seems to be more at the hands of the developer than the UE5 tools.

 

Performance in future games will prove more interesting. This early crop of titles mostly consists of lower-budget fare and we haven't seen a lot of big-budget AAA efforts to really stress the engine tech. Can a game that features super-detailed Nanite meshes and intricate character models hit a solid frame-rate on consoles, especially when aiming for 60fps? Will big-budget games sidestep or overcome the traversal stutter issues often associated with Unreal? And can they achieve good-looking visuals on Series S while retaining key UE5 tech? I don't think we have good answers to these questions, but they should be forthcoming over the next year or two.