General Gaming Unreal Engine 5 announced

[crispy4000]

 

[crispy4000]

Running real time on PS5. Was Keighly's special announcement as well.

[Firewithin]

this engine demo looks better than any real game shown for next gen so far 

[crispy4000]

 

[Mr.Vic20]

Fantastic! I am genuinely impressed! 

[Kal-El814]

Unreal Engine 5 announced today, Unreal Engine 5 textures loading tomorrow.

[AbsolutSurgen]

 

[Remarkableriots]

 

[Mr.Vic20]

The implications of dynamic geometry are, frankly, mind blowing! 

[crispy4000]

30fps @ 1440p... take note people.  

 

This is probably Epic trying to create the look of a 30fps benchmark next-gen title.

[chakoo]

Wow, now that is how you demo the next generation. The amount of geometry that demo was streaming was insane. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

Demo is 1440p/30fps. 
 

Some impressive effects - I wonder how long it will take them to be implemented in games (and how they will look running in an actual game). 
 

I think the existence of lumen is a good alternative to ray tracing for console hardware. 

[chakoo]

2 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

Some impressive effects - I wonder how long it will take them to be implemented in games (and how they will look running in an actual game). 

Considering one of the big points was artist being able to bring in raw zbrush assets to use in engine it's going to speed things up immensely. There is so much time lost/wasted in having to clean up art assets.

[Mr.Vic20]

6 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

30fps... take note people.  

 

This is probably Epic trying to create the look of a 30fps benchmark next-gen title.

Most definitely! But what I'm excited about is anything an engine can do to take some portion of workload off of developers. Some of these features will allow smaller devs to continue to compete with "b tier" games, which honestly, often turn out to be some of my favorite games in a given generation! 

[AbsolutSurgen]

8 minutes ago, chakoo said:

Considering one of the big points was artist being able to bring in raw zbrush assets to use in engine it's going to speed things up immensely. There is so much time lost/wasted in having to clean up art assets.

It should do great things to speed up the work of artists. 
I was trying to figure out if any big games in 2021 could take advantage of these features, or if we’re talking about 2022?

[crispy4000]

10 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Most definitely! But what I'm excited about is anything an engine can do to take some portion of workload off of developers. Some of these features will allow smaller devs to continue to compete with "b tier" games, which honestly, often turn out to be some of my favorite games in a given generation! 

 

There still might be some optimization problems though.  This demo was still only 1440p/30fps without raytracing.

 

I have to wonder if it could be a trap for some smaller devs.  Who's going to be the next ARK?  It's not out of the question.

[Mr.Vic20]

5 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

 

There still might be some optimization problems though.  This demo was still only 1440p/30fps without raytracing.

 

I have to wonder if there's traps for smaller devs with this tech.  Who's going to be the next ARK?  It's not out of the question.

I guessing that right out of the gate, there has to be a fairly higher "floor" on what GPUs will play well with this geometry schema. On the plus side though, it will take a year or two for most devs to switch to and develop on this new engine in any meaningful way. So by then the next console gen with has its cross gen phase out of the way and the general GPU level on the PC side should have risen. I'd say this approach is more developer friendly than consumer friendly, until you meet a certain hardware threshold. The results are impressive though, so let's hope we're there by 2022! 

 

Edit: for small devs, I think lumen is a reasonable alternative to RT.

[AbsolutSurgen]

I’m guessing 2021 will be optimistic. 
Unreal Engine Website

Quote

Unreal Engine 4 & 5 timeline

Unreal Engine 4.25 already supports next-generation console platforms from Sony and Microsoft, and Epic is working closely with console manufacturers and dozens of game developers and publishers using Unreal Engine 4 to build next-gen games.

Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and in full release late in 2021, supporting next-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.

We’re designing for forward compatibility, so you can get started with next-gen development now in UE4 and move your projects to UE5 when ready. 

We will release Fortnite, built with UE4, on next-gen consoles at launch and, in keeping with our commitment to prove out industry-leading features through internal production, migrate the game to UE5 in mid-2021.

 

[crispy4000]

15 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

I guessing that right out of the gate, there has to be a fairly higher "floor" on what GPUs will play well with this geometry schema. On the plus side though, it will take a year or two for most devs to switch to and develop on this new engine in any meaningful way. So by then the next console gen with has its cross gen phase out of the way and the general GPU level on the PC side should have risen. I'd say this approach is more developer friendly than consumer friendly, until you meet a certain hardware threshold. The results are impressive though, so let's hope we're there by 2022! 

 

Edit: for small devs, I think lumen is a reasonable alternative to RT.

 

DF did say that the new geometry tech will be heavily mpacted heavily by resolution.  So I don't see it as an issue that will go away after cross-gen.  If that wasn't an issue, we would have seen this at 4k60 today.

 

I want to see how this scales too.  Like, if it tried to push 1440p60 or even 1080p60, what visual sacrifices would need to be made?  And how much would the SSD factor into that relative to the GPU/CPU?

[Mr.Vic20]

Just now, crispy4000 said:

 

DF did say that the new geometry tech will be heavily mpacted heavily by resolution.  So I don't see it as an issue that will go away after cross-gen.  If it wasn't an issue, we would have seen this at 4k60 today after rall.

 

I want to see how this scales too.  Like, if it tried to push 1440p60, what visual sacrifices would need to be made?  And how much would the SSD play into that vs the GPU?

Oh to be clear, I don't think this kind of tech will work "native" at 4K for anything other than a high end PC or a mid generation console refresh. I think they will use reconstruction to achieve a native 4K look. I be at 4K that demo would have been a stutter fest!  That said, what we saw was quite lovely and I think difficult to distinguish from 4K, for most people. 

 

 Again, to me, the benefit of this approach is rapid game development, even for smaller developers, once a certain hardware bar is met.  What I don't expect to see out of this is 4K/60 on consoles. Though for some games/gamers, that might not matter in the least. Personally, it does matter to me and that's why I build a new PC every year. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

I wonder if we will see dynamic-geometry in the future?  Where the engine starts dropping geometry complexity in demanding scenes.

 

[Reputator]

Un-freakin-believable. Now THAT'S a leap.

[Firewithin]

ever since the OG splinter cell days one of my favorite things in games that gets better and better is the lighting and use of light

[Rick2101]

That looked amazing! I wish the engine would come sooner. So if it’s late 2021... does that mean we won’t see games running on this engine until 2023?

[TwinIon]

Wow. That was impressive.

 

Not having a geometry budget is incredible. I really love the idea that you could take a photogrammetry or cinema quality model and throw it into a game straight away.

 

Also, if they can really provide 100% dynamic lighting at a fraction of the cost of ray tracing, that would be great. I've long thought that perhaps the biggest benefit of ray tracing is the potential to ease the dev process while also providing better lighting. If Lumen can achieve that, it would be a huge deal.

 

Just for comparison, here are the first UE4 demos, from way back in 2012:

 

I'm too lazy to figure it out, but anyone have a rough guess for when it was that games matched that quality? Not that history will necessary repeat 1:1, but maybe that would give us a timeline for when we could expect real UE5 games to match this.

 

 

 

Seeing this gets me hyped for the next gen for the first time, but it also makes me understand why MS wanted first impressions of Series X games to come before this. We're going to start seeing PS5 games and they're going to be much closer to what we saw MS show off the other day than they are to this demo.

 

[legend]

Well done, Epic.

 

 

 

What makes you all say that Lumen isn't a ray-tracing-based method? Clearly they're not doing full-scene ray tracing, but I thought it was clear that "ray tracing" tech like RTX etc. generally wouldn't be used for full scene ray tracing anyway, but for subsystems like GI.

 

EDIT: DF seems to be suggested they said it's separate from ray-traced GI, but if they said that in the video, I missed it. So I guess my question is, if that's true, what kind of non-ray tracing based technique are they using for GI with bounces?

 

EDIT2: I see some other places concluding "no raytracing" because the demo used no hardware-accelerated raytracing in the demo, but not being hardware accelerated doesn't mean it's not using ray tracing-based techniques for it.

[Dre801]

That demo was more interesting than Inside Xbox.

[Mr.Vic20]

17 hours ago, legend said:

Well done, Epic.

 

 

 

What makes you all say that Lumen isn't a ray-tracing-based method? Clearly they're not doing full-scene ray tracing, but I thought it was clear that "ray tracing" tech like RTX etc. generally wouldn't be used for full scene ray tracing anyway, but for subsystems like GI.

 

EDIT: DF seems to be suggested they said it's separate from ray-traced GI, but if they said that in the video, I missed it. So I guess my question is, if that's true, what kind of non-ray tracing based technique are they using for GI with bounces?

 

EDIT2: I see some other places concluding "no raytracing" because the demo used no hardware-accelerated raytracing in the demo, but not being hardware accelerated doesn't mean it's not using ray tracing-based techniques for it.

I don't think anyone has details so far, but here is the blurb that indicates its an alternative to RT:

 

https://www.gsmarena.com/unreal_engine_5_announced_with_new_geometry_and_lighting_features_coming_in_2021-news-43182.php

 

^{The other new aspect of this engine is Lumen, a new real-time dynamic lighting system with multi-bounce global illumination. With this system, developers won't have to bake in lighting into their game world nor have to look at computationally expensive techniques such as ray tracing to simulate bounce-light for GI, as the game engine dynamically does this things for them at a reduced cost compared to RT.}

^{You can see these technologies in action in the tech demo that Epic released today, which also happens to be running on a PlayStation 5. The demo features incredibly high fidelity geometry with lifelike materials thanks to the use of Quixel Megascans being imported into Unreal Engine 5. It also showcases the moving bounce lighting with the new Lumen global illumination system. The demo also showcases techniques such as Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering that are found in the current version of the Unreal Engine.}

[AbsolutSurgen]

 

[AbsolutSurgen]

18 hours ago, legend said:

Well done, Epic.

 

 

 

What makes you all say that Lumen isn't a ray-tracing-based method? Clearly they're not doing full-scene ray tracing, but I thought it was clear that "ray tracing" tech like RTX etc. generally wouldn't be used for full scene ray tracing anyway, but for subsystems like GI.

 

EDIT: DF seems to be suggested they said it's separate from ray-traced GI, but if they said that in the video, I missed it. So I guess my question is, if that's true, what kind of non-ray tracing based technique are they using for GI with bounces?

 

EDIT2: I see some other places concluding "no raytracing" because the demo used no hardware-accelerated raytracing in the demo, but not being hardware accelerated doesn't mean it's not using ray tracing-based techniques for it.

I think Alex does a good job of explaining what he thinks they are doing, and some of the shortcomings of lumen vs. ray tracing in this morning’s digital foundry video. 

[legend]

1 hour ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

I don't think anyone has details so far, but here is the blurb that indicates its an alternative to RT:

 

https://www.gsmarena.com/unreal_engine_5_announced_with_new_geometry_and_lighting_features_coming_in_2021-news-43182.php

 

^{The other new aspect of this engine is Lumen, a new real-time dynamic lighting system with multi-bounce global illumination. With this system, developers won't have to bake in lighting into their game world nor have to look at computationally expensive techniques such as ray tracing to simulate bounce-light for GI, as the game engine dynamically does this things for them at a reduced cost compared to RT.}

^{You can see these technologies in action in the tech demo that Epic released today, which also happens to be running on a PlayStation 5. The demo features incredibly high fidelity geometry with lifelike materials thanks to the use of Quixel Megascans being imported into Unreal Engine 5. It also showcases the moving bounce lighting with the new Lumen global illumination system. The demo also showcases techniques such as Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering that are found in the current version of the Unreal Engine.}

 

Thanks. They certainly seem to be under the impression that it's not an RT technique. I'd like to know what it is they're doing in that case. It seems hard to get away from using some form--even simplified--of ray tracing if you're computing light bounces and doing it dynamically with light sources. Of course, I'm not a graphics person, so it's entirely plausible I'm missing something!

[legend]

Just now, AbsolutSurgen said:

I think Alex does a good job of explaining what he thinks they are doing, and some of the shortcomings of lumen vs. ray tracing in this morning’s video. 

Cool, I'll check it out later today then. Thanks!

[legend]

8 hours ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

 

 

Finally got around to watching this. Fantastic video. Makes a lot of sense.

[number305]

On 5/13/2020 at 2:24 PM, TwinIon said:

Wow. That was impressive.

 

Not having a geometry budget is incredible. I really love the idea that you could take a photogrammetry or cinema quality model and throw it into a game straight away.

 

Also, if they can really provide 100% dynamic lighting at a fraction of the cost of ray tracing, that would be great. I've long thought that perhaps the biggest benefit of ray tracing is the potential to ease the dev process while also providing better lighting. If Lumen can achieve that, it would be a huge deal.

 

Just for comparison, here are the first UE4 demos, from way back in 2012:

 

I'm too lazy to figure it out, but anyone have a rough guess for when it was that games matched that quality? Not that history will necessary repeat 1:1, but maybe that would give us a timeline for when we could expect real UE5 games to match this.

 

 

 

Seeing this gets me hyped for the next gen for the first time, but it also makes me understand why MS wanted first impressions of Series X games to come before this. We're going to start seeing PS5 games and they're going to be much closer to what we saw MS show off the other day than they are to this demo.

 

I think both systems will have games that look really good at launch. I don't follow ps as close, but hellblade and Halo I expect will look jaw dropping. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

On 5/13/2020 at 12:46 PM, Rick2101 said:

That looked amazing! I wish the engine would come sooner. So if it’s late 2021... does that mean we won’t see games running on this engine until 2023?

Starting in 2023 maybe. But not all devs jump on the newest UE. Many will keep using UE4. We see it all the time. New UE is out but some devs still license the old version, and not always because they started development before the new UE came out.