It is cool, absolutely, and really neat tech, but it always looks cooler in the demo than in the games that are produced by it.

Should I not be impressed then? I thought this was cool.

This is a demo. You can easily see that it&#x27;s structured in a way that allows to easily mask loading of the new scenes and that there&#x27;s not a lot of interaction going on - pretty much the only interactive thing they shown was dynamic illumination (which is something they were promising since early UE4 demos, and I believe that&#x27;s what GP mostly meant) and particle system.You can be sure that demos like that (especially early ones) make tons of compromises that are neatly hidden on the video but that usually wouldn&#x27;t be viable in context of a regular video game - at least without severely limiting your game design choices.

I think the comment above was about the fact that U4 demos where also very realistic, and also real time. Still, how many U4 based games can you name that look nearly as good as those demos? I can name zero.

I&#x27;m not sure whether your comment was about a time delay before release of the engine, or whether you&#x27;re implying that computer hardware won&#x27;t be fast enough anytime soon.In the video they said it was running on a PlayStation 5. There was a section in the demo where they had interactive gamepad controls so it appears it might have actually been running real-time on a PS5?I never thought I would be saying this but storage might actually end up being a bigger issue than CPU&#x2F;GPU performance. The new MS Flight Simulator has to stream the world over the internet because the entire map is 10 petabytes. In the UE5 video they said the demo scene was 13 or 16 billion triangles... I imagine that will take up a huge amount of disk space.Modern AAA games are already 50-150 gigabytes each, and this is only going to grow as models and scenes become increasingly detailed.Edit: finding holes in their demo - this may be a video compression artifact, but the big open scene at the end appeared to be of much lower quality. This is something current AMD GPUs can do where if you move around it dynamically lowers the resolution to prevent FPS from decreasing. Perhaps they also dynamically lower resolution in the big open areas? IDK how much of a benefit that would make, but you can never trust these marketing videos...

I remember the first UE4 thing I saw was Fortnite, which didn&#x27;t seem that impressive...that might have just been the first UE4 game though, and not the first UE4 footage, I can&#x27;t remember.(Just a reminder, this was back when Fortnite was not a Battle Royale game, and nobody in the world knew about the it. That game was in development &#x2F; early access for ages before it became the biggest thing in the world.)

Games built on Unreal 4 in the last couple of years look way better than that 2012 UE4 demo. The first few years of games on UE5 might not look like the UE5 demo today, but in a few years they will catch up.

All I could find with a quick search is this Unreal 4 tech demo from 2012: [1]A lot of it actually looks subpar 2020 standards.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OZmRt8gCsC0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OZmRt8gCsC0</a>

Everyone should just keep in mind the first look at Unreal Engine 4 all those years ago before getting too too excited. Big step forward, absolutely, but it won&#x27;t be as seen here.

Yeah I would personally use this instead of Unity because I don’t want to pay royalties on a tiny indie video game that I’m barely making any money on. My games aren’t ever going to gross a million dollars. The licensing model at Unity is vague regarding whether tech workers need to pay for Unity Plus if it’s a side thing for them also (I recall there being a 100k cap).

This is a huge jump from the previous $3000 per quarter being royalty-free when they initially made UE4 free. It will be interesting to see if it helps them capture more of the indie studios from Unity.

And developers who launch on the Epic Store get much better placement than the average Steam listing, and free promotion by Epic&#x27;s social accounts. At least right now, even before the financial incentives, there&#x27;s a lot of perks for a new developer to become &quot;heard of&quot; from Epic.

I&#x27;m not following this comment. Is it because the intersectionality of players includes lower-income people, children, and those struggling with addiction?

Also
&gt; Epic Account and Game ServicesI think this has the potential to be a huge shift if enough developers build games targeting Fortnite players. There&#x27;s an ecosystem right there to be tapped into, and Epic just happens to be giving you the tools to do it.

You&#x27;re better off using Unity for such projects.

The only reason to use Unreal for a 2d game is if you want easy cross platform support and an asset pipeline, otherwise you would probably just make your own or use one of the existing 2d engines.

&quot;Low-fidelity&quot;, 2D does not mean no artist.Pretty much every game needs someone talented in art or design. It can be one of the programmers, of course.Unreal is not a good choice for a 2D game, anyway.

I&#x27;m not an expert in these things but my understanding is that Unity is much better for smaller games. I think Unreal is aimed at the AAA market.

Plenty of gamejam games are made in a weekend using Unreal, Unity is still holding strong due to ease of whipping something out in Adventure Creator.

To be honest 2D games are more art heavy than 3D games. At least in 3D games you can get a long way with shaders, textures, geometric shapes and store-bought meshes. In 2D games everything is custom art.

I’d be really curious to see what a talented programmer or two could do with the engine by themselves, without bringing an artist on board. Is the Unreal engine flexible enough to do low fidelity, 2D games or are you just better off coding up your own engine at that point?

buried lede, perhaps: retroactive to Jan. 1, &quot;Unreal Engine royalties waived on first $1 million in game revenue&quot;&gt; Unreal Engine End User License Agreement for Publishing: This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD.

Yes, it isn&#x27;t specific to PS5. I was only mentioning PS5 because it is not the most powerful machine of all and we are already capable of that.

It remains to be seen how the PS5 and the new XBox compare in terms of performance.The specs of the new XBox are slightly higher on paper, but the PS5 is doing some really interesting things in terms of optimization. Basically the XBox is going for high constant clock speeds, and the PS5 is shifting priority between the CPU and GPU components of the SOC so each gets boosted performance when it&#x27;s most relevant.Both consoles are doing very interesting things with asset streaming and decompression of assets directly from the SSD to video memory which are going to open up new opportunities not only in visual quality, but in terms of how flexibly game worlds can be designed.Probably we will have to wait and see how all of this plays out in terms of real-world performance.

&quot;As for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, Sweeney isn’t saying the new Xbox won’t be able to achieve something similar; both are using custom SSDs that promise blazing speeds. But he says Epic’s strong relationship with Sony means the company is working more closely with the PlayStation creator than it does with Microsoft on this specific area.&quot;

Well, I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that the Unreal Engine will also work on the next XBOX (and any PC) and that the PS5 was less powerfull than the next XBOX.

In this demo I thought it &quot;didn&#x27;t feel that way&quot; more due to the camera positioning and character than anything else, though. The environment seemed quite indistinguishable from pre-rendered CGI.

There are definitely diminishing returns at this point.  However, I think there&#x27;s a lot of room for impressive Physics demos.

Often there are choices made to support a larger range of devices that require comprises on graphic quality. It doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense to build a game only 5% of your customers can afford to run.Next-gen consoles will have to become more ubiquitous before the previous gen consoles are left out of game releases.

I think with every engine- or console generation people will go &quot;this is photorealistic!&quot;, but in practice &#x2F; real games it doesn&#x27;t look &#x2F; feel that way, or (maybe more likely) you get used to it until you run into the next best thing.That said, The Mandalorian has used the Unreal engine to render real-time backgrounds for scenes, so it&#x27;s good enough for that at least.And in films they don&#x27;t need to do real-time, they can take their time to render a scene.

The Mandalorian filmed a lot of scenes with UE4 doing real-time rendering onto large LED screens like in that demo. Looked pretty good! Probably more fun and easier for the actors too.

This is really cool, looks like HDR environments in real life. Makes me wonder if this could be used in conjunction with cameras and some clever image processing algorithms as a camouflage method.

This is really cool, I just wonder for this particular demo, would it be cheaper to film in a real world location! :)

Amazing, the future of this tech is just exciting

I wonder if this has anything to do with my wife&#x27;s complaint (and I agree with her on this) that modern productions are beginning to look more and more like computer games.She&#x27;s been watching the third season of westworld, and it&#x27;s kinda scary to me how almost every episode feels more like a game trailer than an actual story...

Unreal is now starting to be used in place of green screens in some movies. (there&#x27;s a lot more that goes into it, but essentially it seems like unreal is one of the core software pieces)Here is an example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4</a>

Did you watch the video? Because they also have improved the audio system, chaos engine and animations drastically.

Triangles that are just one pixel in the screen, dynamic lightning and overall rendering this close to photorealism, it&#x27;s the all the other aspects of the games that limit the experience.Physics engine, character movement, etc. could still be improved.

The video was hosted on Vimeo which is generally less aggressive with quality and banding but this is still a good point.

Keep in mind it&#x27;s contending with YouTube compression too. A lot of the artifacts you see around the character and other moving objects are likely compression artifacts.

Water, dust, cloth and hair physics are all still in the uncanny valley...not to take away from the tremendous progress with triangles and lighting!

I noticed this too. They briefly showed it because it&#x27;s probably still being worked on (guess). The flow didn&#x27;t look very natural at all.

From what I&#x27;ve seen the look of water is usually not provided by the engine itself. Water is really hard to make look good and a lot of it depends on the specific needs of a game.

It&#x27;s not so much that the water looked off (which it did compared to the rock), it&#x27;s that the character was completely unencumbered by the water. If you&#x27;re walking through ankle-deep water, your feet are going to slow down as they drag through the water and go faster through air, and the character&#x27;s stride didn&#x27;t account for the increased drag. It&#x27;d be the same as if you put that super-realistic character in a stylized game like Hollow Knight without adapting her animation to 15fps like the rest of the characters are.The animation was great, but the graphics were much better, and one can&#x27;t help but notice the quality difference even though both are awesome works of art.

The water actually seemed to be acting like a smaller amount of water would, as if the character were six inches tall and walking through a tiny puddle or something.

the water effects just after the four minute mark looked odd. while the fixed assets like the statues and such later on looked great. however I kept going back to the water and questioning some of the lighting effects too.don&#x27;t get me wrong, the fixed assets look amazing and I look forward to seeing more done with this system

I suspect it&#x27;s a way to avoid the uncanny valley, and serves to highlight the photo realistic quality of the environments even more.

It was done on purpose, similar to how Pixar movies have obviously cartoony and unrealistic characters in an otherwise photo-realistic environment.

It&#x27;s strange that the character wasn&#x27;t more photorealistic in this demo. If you Google Image search you can find more photorealistic characters from previous versions of the Unreal Engine. I wonder if there might be some trade-off being made between photorealistic character and lifelike character movement.

Your only commentary here is that it doesn&#x27;t live up to your expectations. You wanted more.And then you wonder why AAA studios focus on graphics?&gt; That being said I concede that I&#x27;m clearly in the minorityYou definitely aren&#x27;t in the minority. r&#x2F;gaming is full of people racing to be most unimpressed by a good looking game.All the HN comments pointing out flaws with &quot;don&#x27;t get me wrong, it looks decent!&quot; could be predicted the second I read the submission title.

I think raytracing has the potential to be a big leap forward. Real-time lighting and shadows are still incredibly limited, and most games are only able handle dynamic shadows from a hand-full of light-sources at a time. I think we don&#x27;t see the difference yet because baked lighting gets a really good result, but I think after we live for a while in a world where every flickering candle, and every emissive texture in a game is a fully-fleged, shadow-casting, dymamic light source, then we are going to look back at current gen games and see how static and artificial the lighting is.But I do agree with you in general that more advanced simulation is a huge, largely untouched opportunity in games.

That&#x27;s funny you bring up the PS3, because my first reaction to the parent commenter and the OP video was how I remember thinking things couldn&#x27;t get much better than the PS3 demos [0] – which now look comparatively primitive – but I&#x27;ve had that same feeling with PS4 and now PS5. But PS5 really does seem to be getting close to real-time interactive realism.But I agree with you that I expected games to be much &quot;better&quot; by 2020, back when I was a kid playing 7th Guest. I guess I couldn&#x27;t understand back then how much manual, hard-to-scale labor and budget would have to go into story, dialogue, art, acting (plus salaries of A-list movie stars), mo-cap, etc. I expected in-depth scripted NPC behavior, like in 1992&#x27;s Ultima VII [1], to be extremely commonplace and basic by now, but I obviously didn&#x27;t understand back then what actual AI and emergent simulation requires (versus manual scripting, and testing of that scripting)[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pzvOgTABwr0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pzvOgTABwr0</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filfre.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;ultima-vii&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filfre.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;ultima-vii&#x2F;</a>

I find that the best PS4 games look and play markedly better than the best PS3 games.

Not sure what you&#x27;re on about. While playing Horizon: Zero Dawn and God of War I was constantly admiring and enjoying the visuals.

I agree that Story telling and Game Play is still the top priorities. Look at Nintendo! I enjoy Zelda,( not exactly the best graphics looking game ) more so than most &quot;photorealistic&quot; game in recent years. ( I will also admit I am now a lot older and dont have time for serious gaming )But still, the graphics in UE5 is stunning. The last time I was stunned by 3D Graphics was Crysis, and that was I think over 10 years ago.

The UE5 demo show realtime GI. Current systems often rely on baking. So this feature really allows games to have more dynamic environments at the same visual quality as last gen. That&#x27;s surely a win for gameplay.

I think there&#x27;s just an obvious law of diminishing returns on certain things.If you double the number of triangles, it doesn&#x27;t take long to get to a clean looking circle - the next time you double it, it doesn&#x27;t look that much better unless you&#x27;re zooming way in on it.So there&#x27;s two things here, I think:* There are tons of other improvements, like dynamic lighting. This turns into more of an immersion&#x2F; realism thing, and less of a &quot;detail&quot; thing. It&#x27;s weird when your characters shadow doesn&#x27;t move the way you expect with the light sources, it&#x27;s weird when one part of the room is totally dark because a block is just slightly in the way of a light source, and the light isn&#x27;t bouncing around it.* With VR, this will all matter way more. You&#x27;re going to have people taking objects in the game and putting them right up to their face - suddenly the difference between X triangles and 2X triangles is really noticeable again, relative to a 3rd person view on a monitor that&#x27;s at least a foot or two away from you, where objects are always at a distance. Immersion is an extremely important factor for VR, so optimizing there makes a lot of sense.So while todays mediums may not demonstrate these wins, they open up possibilities for new mediums.

However I see the new features in this particular demo as a game changer in many practical ways other than just eyecandy:- Realtime dynamic GI makes baking lights unnecessary, increasing iteration time for environment artists.- Also using this dynamic GI it is possible to create new gameplay mechanics based on dynamic lighting (for example in the demo the roof of the cave falls down and the area becomes lit, making more things visible)- The new animation system makes developers able to create natural motions that automatically adjust to the environment, which would also save a lot of developer time.- The demo explanation video mentions that the statue model assets are imported directly from ZBrush without any postprocessing (with the original triangle count, without baking any normal maps&#x2F;LODs), which also saves time for artists importing their work to Unreal (although the file size costs might probably be a bit high to practically use this in every scenario)

&gt; They don&#x27;t really spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don&#x27;t look particularly good.Even CGI water looks typically very fake (except from afar), because we don&#x27;t really have very good models for water&#x2F;liquids. That&#x27;s certainly not the priority for games either.

I agree. Many projects seem to spend so much resources on graphics, which are getting quite impressive (not photoreal, though who cares), but game mechanics aren&#x27;t getting better. Netcode has improved, allowing for more variety in multiplayer experiences, but other than that I get a sense of a game-mechanics winter.

&gt; there are more polys, sure, there are higher res textures, sure, there are more complex and dynamic lightsWhat I&#x27;m noticing is there&#x27;s too much focus on fancy lights, over-the-top postprocessing effects with annoying crap like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections that hog a lot of performance for just reflecting your character in water puddles placed everywhere just to show the effect off, and so on.And not enough focus on good old textures and polygons. Approaching spherical objects closely still makes the polygons very very obvious. Staring directly at walls still shows how low res textures are.&gt; You could destroy everything, dig holes, build thingsYou might be looking for Minecraft! :D

At the risk of sounding a bit negative I personally find that graphics have plateaued since about the PS3. Sure, there are more polys, sure, there are higher res textures, sure, there are more complex and dynamic lights. But you don&#x27;t really have the kind of gap we used to have between, say, the PS1 and PS2 for instance. Diminishing returns and all that. The problem is that, in my experience, this eye candy only matters for about 10 minutes when you get into a game, then you stop really paying attention to how it looks and you focus on the gameplay and story etc...Meanwhile all the dynamic stuff is still fairly primitive IMO. At around 4 minute in the video they briefly mention the water effects. They don&#x27;t really spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don&#x27;t look particularly good.When I was a kid in the 90s I definitely expected future games to look a lot better, but I also expect gameplay and world interaction to progress massively. Fully interactive environments you can interact with like in the real world. You could destroy everything, dig holes, build things, have advanced physics, great AI for NPCs etc...It saddens me that the AAA video game industry is almost entirely focused on eye candy first and foremost. That being said I concede that I&#x27;m clearly in the minority, after all the Uncharted games are generally considered to be good games when I find them incredibly boring.I hope that now that we can reach near-photorealism in games they&#x27;ll have to come up with something new to keep pushing the envelope.

Depends on the game, and camera logic is usually up to developers rather than the game engine so sensitivity can be fairly flexible.

Maybe i just don&#x27;t play many games where a camera tracks a single player like the demo. But the camera tracking felt jerky. Is that normal?

I think it&#x27;s the global illumination that really makes the difference.  You can&#x27;t get to realism just by drawing more polygons, but if light acts in believable ways (especially when the scene changes or lights move around) it really starts to look like real life.

- no shadows on the scarabs- obvious SSAO when hand touched the rock wall- odd reflections on the bird sculptures- down-resing of textures and motion blur when she flew- obvious uncanny valley face (pancake makeup, no subsurface scattering) on face closeup- dust sprite cloudswere some of the things I noticed on my first watchbut it was still quite pretty. like what I&#x27;d expect uncharted 5 on the pc to look like

New games will be in a single room. But it will be a very detailed room.Covid-19 games.

The graphics are better, but camera and animations are a dead giveaway. It was fine when the camera was relatively static and far away, but shots with more movement became really noticeable. (Watch carefully, you can see the character&#x27;s hand go through the rock in some places, or not make full contact in others. Once you notice it&#x27;s hard to un-see.)I&#x27;m sure this is all fixable, but some part of me wonders how much larger game budgets will have to become (or correspondingly, how much less content will be offered) in order to achieve the new standard in production qualities.

the character is still quite unconvincing

In the past, I have always looked at Demos from Games and thought this is very good and getting close to movie quality. But that &quot;close to&quot; remained &quot;close to&quot; for quite some time. Even though It is improving every year but you can still tell it is gaming graphics. Even if some of the shots are not real time and pre rendered, they are still gaming like.That Unreal 5 Demo was the first time ever I thought this is Hollywood Movie quality GFX ..... ( Apart from the Character ). IT IS STUNNING! And this is done Real time on PS5!Edit: I am sorry for the tone and block capitals.... I am seriously geeking out.

I&#x27;ve got the default VR scene running on my Quest. It works pretty well - there&#x27;s just a slight bug with the teleport texture.The Unreal Editor was not as easy to use as I thought it might be, but it isn&#x27;t too bad. I wish it didn&#x27;t take an hour to recompile shaders all the time though.

It took a good deal of fiddling but I was able to get this starter project working with Valve Index: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unrealengine.com&#x2F;marketplace&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;product&#x2F;steamvr-input-for-unreal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unrealengine.com&#x2F;marketplace&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;product&#x2F;steam...</a>It included teleporting and picking up objects, full hand tracking and finger positioning.Overall, it seemed like a decent foundation but clearly needed a LOT of work to be ready for a full game. The skillset and toolset is very different than what web&#x2F;app devs and backend devs use.

That looks so good! I hope they add few VR related features.
I tried running the default VR scene with Unreal 4 and couldn&#x27;t get it to work.Unreal looks better than Unity but I found it difficult to get started.

Looks impressive, especially the reduced friction for artists. The demo hints at several shortcomings of the engine, though, especially the nanite componet. Stepping through the feature highlight (whatever the youtube compression lets through), during dense scenes geometry often gets washed out, looking less detailed then an authored model would probably look. Hard edges often appear fuzzy, and the fuzziness is not temporally stable.

You don&#x27;t have to use C++, you have Blueprints, which can control not only shaders, but also game logic and levels.

I looked at unity and unreal 4 before starting to learn an engine. Unreal is great, but the massive amount of tutorials and documentation is why I started with unity. I really hope unreal 5 can do something similar in the distant future. Before unreal 6 is released.

I&#x27;m normally skeptical of tech demos, but normally they don&#x27;t actually talk about the tech. Assuming the actual promises aren&#x27;t misleading, this is extremely impressive.&gt; Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.Unity still has a big edge on usability. Unreal is very much a AAA tool: you have to use C++, all the built-in systems have a much steeper learning curve, etc. Even as a professional dev who&#x27;s tried a few times to get into it for fun, it&#x27;s just too much headache for my level of project. Whereas I can whip something together in Unity really easily. All that said, this definitely widens the gap for actual studios. If you have the time and know-how to use Unreal, you have even less reason to consider Unity now.

And indie devs. A ton of indie games are on unity on the desktop.

And Hollywood, just like with Unreal, some studios are adopting Unity instead.

Unity pays lip service to AAA but its primary market segment mobile game development (which is nearly half of the entire gaming market).

Wow! Quixel looks amazing!I&#x27;ve been hobbyist in Unity for a long time. But I think I&#x27;ll switch to Unreal just for that.

I love the Unity&#x27;s efforts with ECS, but how many games would benefit from it?

I think it remains to be seen. Unity&#x27;s big upcoming feature seems to what they call the Data Oriented Technology Stack. Essentially, this supposedly allows you to put far more non-static objects onto the screen than is usually available in a game engine. I do agree though that what Epic&#x27;s doing here is a huge deal.

Quixel is free for use with Unreal.  The pricing structure for all other content tools is the same as it was before Epic bought Quixel.

As far as I know, Quixel still requires a subscription, and the assets can still be used in Unity. But the dynamic LOD optimization is definitely a killer feature.

&quot;virtual&quot; is the keyword. They do some magic to not calculate or store most of it, most of the time.

This would be awesome tech if everyone had gigabit fiber. You could just stream all the assets during loading time or if possible during gameplay. On second thought, 125MB per second probably wouldn&#x27;t be fast enough. A 30 second load time would only result in 3750mb of assets at best. 4k on a Google Stadia doesn&#x27;t sound bad if the latency is good.

Instancing is the key, for that part of this demo at least. One statue replicated 300 times only costs slightly more than one of those statues alone.

That&#x27;s assuming 6 bytes per vertex, 3 vertices per triangle? Most assets use triangle strips, which averages closer to 1 vertex per triangle. They also said the souce mesh is in billions of triangles, but their Nanite pairs that down to 10&#x27;s of millions. At ~1 vert&#x2F;tri * 6bytes * 100mil tri, that&#x27;s 600MB of meshes. Keep in mind this is just a demo, so they can pack what would normally be an entire level into one room. A whole game might end up be equivalent to a couple of demos after they manually optimize even more.

&gt;even if we assume just three bytes per triangle,that give&#x27;s you up to 16.7m (2^24) possible triangles. Your napkin math is way off,

In reality its the same rock mesh 1000s of times.

You can use delta compression, you can even use lossy compression. It doesn&#x27;t matter if a vertex is at x=1.001 or x=0.998 if it looks good enough.That said, yes, of course, assets are getting enormous - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - 175.2GB on PS4.There was a post about the new MS Flight Simulator and how it&#x27;ll stream high-def textures from the &quot;cloud&quot; during gameplay, because it has petabytes of textures.

Don&#x27;t you still need to do some of that just for file size and data transfer, if nothing else? In the demo they said it had hundreds of billions of triangles. Google tells me you can get down to 18 bytes or so per triangle, but even if we assume a lower bound of just three bytes per triangle (amortized storage of 1 vertex per triangle of an x,y,z point), we&#x27;re talking about on the order of terabytes to just store that scene, right?

Gears of War with updates is 250G, so yeah, looks like it.

Call of Duty: Warzone requires over 100Gb free on the PS4 disk just to download updates.

Maybe we&#x27;ll go back to the days of cartridges. Imagine getting a 1TB SSD that you push into your PS5

Presumably at some point the standard model for games will be streaming as you play.

Maybe, but some assets could have smaller sizes; instead of distributing a mesh with 500k vertex in LOD0 and various other LODs with less, you could distribute a single mesh with 50k vertex, then do some passes of catmull-clark subdivision on it during loading. Wouldn&#x27;t work the statues and rocks seen in the demo, but good for weapons, cars etc.

I&#x27;m mostly concerned about the storage and bandwidth issues associated with this level of detail.Are we going to download 500GB games on our Playstation 5s?

I am always skeptical of tech demos like this, but if Epic has truly created a way to show full quality assets at runtime without manual LOD &#x2F; optimization, then this is going to be a huge process improvement for game development. Same goes for this lighting. Baking lights is such a burden, if they can simply do all of this at runtime then making beautiful games just became that much easier.They also bought Quixel, which gives all of these photo realistic assets to any Unreal Engine developer (even if you&#x27;re some kid building a game for free). Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.

Yah, they said &quot;convolution reverb,&quot; so I think they expected audience to know what it was. Often it&#x27;s not about creating new technology, but making existing technology accessible to new audiences and new creators.

This has been done for ages in the audio production space, it&#x27;s called &quot;convolution reverb&quot;. It&#x27;s quite nice, but it doesn&#x27;t allow you to tune it very much, besides basic filtering and stretching&#x2F;cutting.

Modular micro LED panels will make this easier, when they’re not absurdly expensive.

As a high-end builder, I would love to integrate a wall like this into a project. The ability (as shown with the Mandelorian video) the screens have to produce light would be incredible in interior living spaces.

This is one area where hardware accelerated ray-tracing has me excited. I like the idea of walking sound sources to the observer. Unlike light, you need to account for the speed of sound through mediums, which adds an extra layer of cool imo. You also don&#x27;t need to update at the audio sample rate, since most objects will not be moving very fast (unless you want trans sonic simulations, which would be exotic and cool).Forget all of the little hacks. Sound processing is cheap. In 2020 it is unnecessary to select from a set of pre-baked filters and applying them to some predefined volume (ie this room is echoey, this room is absorbant, etc.)This is one area where software has regressed then stagnated [0]. It doesn&#x27;t make any sense, other than it wasn&#x27;t prioritized. I think it&#x27;s only a matter of time before engines go back and finally complete the audio simulation problem.0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cS_Fbueh7F4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cS_Fbueh7F4</a>

Ah, convolution reverb. We&#x27;ve had it for a long time in DSP. Basically what you do is pop a balloon (create an &quot;impulse&quot; -- you can also clap your hands or use an electric arc) and record the echo. This gives you what&#x27;s called the &quot;impulse response&quot; of the space.Reverb is really just thousands of echoes, and echoes are just the original sound delayed back to you. So what you can do is use the impulse response in a FIR filter, convolve it with the original signal, and you&#x27;ve recreated the same reverb with a different sound.This technique has been quite accessible to audio engineers (and mechanical engineers) for a few decades now. But you really only go out and sample impulse responses when you really need a very accurate model of the reverb. In most cases someone will just use a precanned impulse response.

It&#x27;s great to see that graphics continue to improve, but I think the pipelining of reproducing physical space characteristics is most interesting to me. One of the things they mention in the video is using tools to measure how real spaces echo and then reproducing those echo characteristics in virtual spaces. Techniques like that have enormous potential for allowing us to use virtual space and actual space collaboratively. We&#x27;ll always have games, but I&#x27;m excited to see how, in the next twenty or thirty years, technology that started in games starts to allow us to interact and socialize in new ways.

It&#x27;d be my default engine if it had language bindings other than C++.

It&#x27;s a total game changer.Time for everyone to learn Unreal, Houdini, and Mari.

I agree the water was weak point, which is why they didn&#x27;t spend much time looking at it!

Yeah, but I don&#x27;t see 100% sync between where she moves her hand and where the ball glows.

Watch the characters&#x27; hand. When she first reveals the ball, it glows in every direction. Then she moves her hand position to &quot;focus&quot; the light forward.

Holy forking shirtballs, that looks amazing.There&#x27;s still some weirdness - I found the water movement (around 4:10) a bit odd, and the lightball in the cave seemed to be directional even though it was a ball. But my god, that&#x27;s beautiful.The end scene with the flying reminded me of the (fully rendered) Avatar ride at Disney World. I stood in line for two hours for that.

You aren&#x27;t wrong about features, but the fact it&#x27;s now free until $1 million USD in sales means by the time you own Epic a cent you&#x27;ve made a LOT of money, in Indie terms. Depending on how tight you think your budget will be that could be important.

For a while we pretty much only had UDK (Unreal 3). Unity sort of invented the idea of an omni-platform game engine that&#x27;s affordable and accessible for indies. Then Unreal slightly shifted its strategy to compete with that rising market, and Crytek... jumped in too.I think Unity is too valuable to low-medium end indies to go anywhere (you really don&#x27;t need most of these new features if you aren&#x27;t going for a photorealistic look anyway), but we could see a partitioning of the market as Unity takes over the low-mid and Unreal takes over the high-end. Unity actually no longer has the (partially) realtime global illumination they were so proud of just a couple years ago, because of licensing woes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.unity3d.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;enlighten-will-be-replaced-with-a-robust-solution-for-baked-and-real-time-giobal-illumination&#x2F;?utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_campaign=engine_global_generalpromo_2019-07-03_enlighten&amp;utm_content=blog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.unity3d.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;enlighten-will-be-repla...</a>

It would be a shame if they didn&#x27;t. Alyx is a pretty good showcase.

There&#x27;s a possibility Valve might release Source 2

Not licensed to third party studios. The last one that was open sourced was id tech 4 (Doom 3).

And Frostbite, although it&#x27;s specific to EA.

Crytek is living a second life as Amazon&#x27;s Lumberyard (though they say they have revamped the vast majority of the code)

Blender Game Engine has been removed from the 2.8 release.

Not really: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_game_engines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_game_engines</a>Plenty of proprietary engines are in use today. And you&#x27;ve got FOSS options like Godot and Blender. UE&#x27;s definitely the biggest, but other options aren&#x27;t going away any time soon.

Amazon is getting in the engine game as well, with Lumberyard.
And there is always the possibility of other studios making their proprietary engine available if there is a profit opportunity. RAGE and Anvil come to mind.

For a while there they really tried to overlap. Unity&#x27;s been making a huge graphics push over the last five years - it actually had realtime GI before Unreal did, and wasted no time telling the whole world about it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dk8gpz0o5TU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dk8gpz0o5TU</a>More recently it&#x27;s been making a lot of noise about its new scriptable render pipeline and shader graph. Of course these are still playing catch-up with Unreal, but they&#x27;re doing an admirable job.Meanwhile Unreal totally changed its pricing model ~5 years ago to be much more similar to Unity&#x27;s and affordable for indies&#x2F;individuals, as well as adding native support for mobile platforms, etc.For some customers there may be a clear choice, but for now at least there&#x27;s also a ton of overlap between their markets. We&#x27;ll see where things go in the future.

Unity doesn&#x27;t really overlap with Unreal.  Unreal is big and cutting edge for AAA titles. Unity is much more simplified. The path of least resistance is usually pretty clear for someone starting a project.

No, Unity only has the C# part on GitHub, but it also has a huge proprietary C++ code base.

Both Unity and Unreal Engine offer their source code on Github...Both engines have bugs, and one of the biggest complaints about Unreal Engine is that any feature not used by Fortnite is half-baked until Fortnite uses it. With Unity, the biggest complaints are about the relatively transitory lifetimes of some of their biggest-marketed features, like rendering pipelines or networking code.

All engines have bugs.Unity source code is partially available on github, and full available on commercial license, which is fair.Then there are plenty of other engines out there, for example Cocos2d-x is number one in Asia for 2D mobile games.

You forgot to mention the greatest editor there is, UnrealEd. Unity has a good one, Crytek has a horrible one.

Wow, we&#x27;ll soon be down to only one game engine.Crytek has financial worries. Plus it&#x27;s the most difficult to use, because it&#x27;s almost all C++.Unity is very accessible thanks to C# scripting, but has bug issues (and no source code).Unreal Engine looks amazing, is cheap or free for indie studios, and has source code included.If they can make UE slightly easier to develop for, they&#x27;ll dominate the market.

I&#x27;m pretty sure that most high-end iOS and Android devices are significantly more powerful than the switch—I mean, they generally cost hundreds of dollars more.

I&#x27;d sure hope so if iOS and Android are on the list.

Too bad. I&#x27;m always curious about gains in cross-platform target productivity. The dream being that you build a high fidelity game and just need to drag a slider down to create a build that runs at 30fps+ on the, for example, Switch.Of course what we normally see is a lot of work to port down games. A good example being all the work that went into getting Witcher 3 to run on the Switch: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;gtc&#x2F;2020&#x2F;video&#x2F;s22697" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;gtc&#x2F;2020&#x2F;video&#x2F;s22697</a>

&gt; 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.I wonder if they consider the Switch a current-generation console.

Somewhat tangential - I was hoping I could download and run a demo to see how things look on my hardware. What are your favorite downloadable graphics demos?

Even with all the amazing lighting and polygon counts, they still have screenshake from a 2001 game, only now even more uncanny. &quot;Is this a video game or real li.... never mind&quot;

Unreal engine 4 does, so I suspect yes.You&#x27;ll probably have to compile it yourself, but it isn&#x27;t hard. (I did it).<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.unrealengine.com&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;Platforms&#x2F;Linux&#x2F;BeginnerLinuxDeveloper&#x2F;SettingUpAnUnrealWorkflow&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.unrealengine.com&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;Platforms&#x2F;Linux&#x2F;Beginner...</a>

I just saw the tech demo on the ps5, really really impressive, the dynamic light, the zbrush import, the huge amount of polygons... I&#x27;m saying this with some experience as a 3d artist (zbrush) and a programmer.

Yes the character stuck out as much less realistic than the environment.  I thought it was an engine limitation but I suppose it could be improved with additional effort.

I&#x27;d just assumed it was a &quot;hey, wouldn&#x27;t this be great if Lara Croft was standing here instead&quot; place-holder.

The environment demo is very impressive - wonder why they didn&#x27;t put a bit more effort in to the character, it would have been insanely impressive if the character detail was next-gen.

that water simulation was pretty bad and blurred out, I went over it a few times. I don&#x27;t think this is a limitation of the engine because I have seen plenty of games use Unreal Engine 4 and do it differently.

The only things I can possibly criticize is the global illumination lagging behind environment changes (presumably because it&#x27;s iterative) and the water simulation not being movie-quality.Otherwise it&#x27;s simply astonishing.

Still playing UT99.  The original Unreal Tournament is just something done right.

Came here to say the same thing.  Hopefully, we&#x27;ll at least get UT5 as a tech demo like UT4 was.

Unreal Tournament 2021 exists, it is Fortnite.Dont&#x27;t see it? The Unreal Tournament is the team which released the Battle Royale version of Fortnite. Hence why Fortnite has bouncy, fast, area-ish gameplay.Sure it is different, but if you do not want any changes from the old Tournament games, just go play those.

I really, really, really want an Unreal Tournament 2021. It&#x27;s a shame they haven&#x27;t pushed that series as a showcase for the engine anymore.

Who knows, maybe they will finally fix freezes in Escape from Tarkov (confirmed by devs as engine problem) after 4 years of promises.

Looks impressive. Lets see what Unity has upcoming.

This is insane. The next decade of gaming is going to be amazing.

I&#x27;ve always been excited to see these demos over the years, from childhood until now. Although they may not be what is actually implemented in a real game, Unreal, id, Nvidia, etc. have always managed to spark that feeling of giddy euphoria, a glimpse into the future, with these demos.

You can take a shot with small aperture and have it all in focus.The problem here is probably some sharpening filter.

There&#x27;s no distance blur and the entire shot is &quot;in focus&quot;. These shots would be impossible to take with a camera. In addition, if you game a bunch, you&#x27;d expect LOD to drop with distance, but here it doesn&#x27;t.

it&#x27;s too sharp for me. I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s much antialiasing going on.

There&#x27;s limited places for your eyes to rest. The end scene with heavily detailed architecture surrounded by smooth desert, does it feel more comfortable than the earlier footage?

There are all sorts of weird (temporal?) artifacts in the demo, I think especially visible in the climbing scene. Look at this cropped capture for example:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ibb.co&#x2F;PrYT6pq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ibb.co&#x2F;PrYT6pq</a>The region below her arm is much sharper&#x2F;detailed (missing dof&#x2F;motion blur?) than surrounding area. It seems to be somehow related how stuff is revealed, as her arm was moving up in this bit, so the overly sharp region was covered in previous frames.Also the shadow (e.g. her fingers) has very sharp pixelated edges which can contribute to the feeling of oversharpness. There are some other lesser artifacts also abound, so yeah, its obvious that the engine cuts corners. But of course that is to be expected, realtime graphics is all about compromises.

Can someone help me articulate my issue with this? Looking at a lot objects, they seem unnaturally detailed. Like the bugs, or the statue at around 6 minutes. Something about it makes me really uncomfortable feeling physically.Is this like a weird infinite depth of field kind of thing?

You kids are spoiled nowadays with all your fancy graphics that substitute flash for performance, I played Warcraft Orcs and Humans for weeks, in all of it&#x27;s beautiful pixelated, 8 bit glory. Now get off my lawn, zug zug.mild \s

Graphical quality can be a way of conveying &quot;real&quot; data. Here&#x27;s a video where they cover the importance of graphics in fighting games, such as allowing characters to have larger move sets because the better graphics allows moves to be visually distinct to players.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dSxk7THBnxY&amp;t=2s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dSxk7THBnxY&amp;t=2s</a>

So I don&#x27;t care much for graphics quality, I started moving towards the terminal and CLI for most everything in my life about ten years ago, ultimately I feel that graphics falls under unnecessary fluff and eyecandy that distracts from &quot;real&quot; data, gameplay, etc.But that flight scene at the end of the demo, how realistic it was, how it was seamless, how detailed it produced a physical reaction in me, a feeling of like &quot;WOW&quot; throughout my entire body as I watched it. That was amazing.

Epic Online Services; this is the big take away for UE5, graphics will always improve, but user experience is key to long term success.We can now all sit back and watch Epic eat Valve’s and Microsoft’s Lunch right in front of them, like some kind of sordid picnic.I look forward to seeing the pricing details and revenue options based on player base and time.

why do you want that, out of curiosity. The description seems to mimic human eye and reduce load on rendering processor, but it seems like less information for the player at once

My #1 desire for the future of game graphics is universal support for foveated rendering.

there have been a couple games over the decades that do this well, I too am surprised how this isn&#x27;t built right into the engines for everyone to independently opt for doing that

It&#x27;s not a technical limitation, but more like a game design limitation.If you can punch holes in any wall, then the designers suddenly have an infinite cases to handle. It could still cause problems with open world games.I&#x27;m with you btw, 100% destructible world is my childhood dream for games.

Better physics.  It&#x27;s 2020 and still doors, walls, and even windows can be struck by a rocket without anything other than a scorch decal left behind.

Physics and character animation haven&#x27;t kept up with the improvements in graphics. Especially for VR we need big advancements in both.

I don&#x27;t actually hate motion blur, I really like the cinematic feel of in-engine graphics.I went through a phase where I wanted things sharper and sharper to showcase technical ability (mostly in consumer grade video and photography), but then once THAT was ubiquitous I found myself focusing on deteriorating the quality for its uniqueness and allure. Forcing the viewer to find focal points themselves and increasing interest.I feel like gamers don&#x27;t really have an opinion one way or the other, but have been told not to like blur? I&#x27;m not really sure I just haven&#x27;t seen the arguments and have gone full circle on the meme myself. At the end of the day I enjoy it.

Removal of motion blur as the default. It&#x27;s even present in the demo!

yeah, all the economy stuff in games is because you are the only one amassing wealth, stealing and looting from everyone and everything. it is pretty ridiculous.even that skyrim patch that lets you invest and makes shop owners have more money was still only influenced by you and you alone

Do you have any ideas for approaches to this not including the dominant behavior tree paradigm used in Unreal Engine? If this type of true AI behavior has to be built on a case by case basis per game per behavior (pathfinding, animation, mechanics): it&#x27;s gonna be a few decades to get there.

Active worlds.I&#x27;ve played open world games like the Witcher 3, or Assassin&#x27;s Creed Odissey; and damn they&#x27;re impressive games.
Assassin&#x27;s creed in particular was really amazing, you could wander through ancient Greece and just enjoy the sights, visit the cities.With the kind of things demoed here it will be even more amazing.But the games feel somehow lifeless, as if you&#x27;re the only one really living in there. 
Sure there are some NPCs, but they are all reactive, not active. You can roam the countryside for a while and come back to civilization, nothing will have changed, except maybe the town will be governed by blue instead of red.There&#x27;s some premises, on Odissey, you have some patrols for both sides moving around, and if they encounter each other they start fighting. 
But that&#x27;s small scale, and partly scripted at that, there will always be the same patrols going through the same 
paths.What&#x27;s missing is that you cannot walk on a battle in progress unless it is in the story. You won&#x27;t see a city patching up its walls after a siege, merchants running a real economy, people going on with their lives in general. But meaningfully, not just walking around the town and going back to their house at night.I assume it&#x27;s really difficult though. 
First technically, it&#x27;s a lot of CPU power. And a lot of work to create AI that meaningfully impact the world.Then it&#x27;s how to design a game in a world you cannot really predict. It could be purely open box, a la mount and blade, but I think it could be more, with an underlying story line that would adapt to the changing world.Of course you don&#x27;t need to do everything at once. In this case, simply having the 2 armies stateful (e.g. a set number of troops with some replenishments, but not always the same soldiers in the places), with troops moving across the countryside, and 2 AIs vying for power across the land would be fantastic

so PC gamers, with 8K textures and UE5, what would you like to see aside from pushed framerates?

I wonder if the background in the flight scene is pre-rendered. If not, then PlayStation 5 (which the demo is running on) is going to be a beast of a console.

I have to wonder how much of this requires ray tracing hardware. I&#x27;ve noticed for many, many years that the quality of models and textures has been &#x27;good enough&#x27;, but lighting, for the most part, still sucked. Ray tracing seems to solve a lot of lighting problems.

I&#x27;m almost certain they are.  HW raytracing is of the big selling points of the new console generations, and if they achieved these kinds of results without it, then I would have to reconsider my skepticism of the occult.

Shadows are too sharp, so I don&#x27;t think they use raytracing.

Feels to me like: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gdcvault.com&#x2F;play&#x2F;1026182&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gdcvault.com&#x2F;play&#x2F;1026182&#x2F;</a> (which Nvidia has wrapped up in their RTXGI library: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;rtxgi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;rtxgi</a>). The idea is to supplement basic irradiance probes with moment shadow maps, so you can efficiently calculate how much each pixel should be affected by each probe. This greatly reduces the light bleeding problem, which is the biggest downfall of irradiance probes. Nvidia uses raytracing to update some percentage of the probes each frame, and I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if UE5 does, too (despite the Euro Gamer article). That said, their geometry solution is likely more amenable to random access than traditional rasterization, so that may make raytracing for probes and probe shadow maps unnecessary. Also, judging by when the player character puts her hand on the door, it looks like there&#x27;s a bit of screen space GI going on, as well.

I tried to figure out whether the new GI used raytracing, and it doesn&#x27;t seem like it is? If it is using raytracing hardware it isn&#x27;t nearly as impressive. If it isn&#x27;t, then it&#x27;s sheer magic.

Real-time ray tracing is not impressive in the current generation of games because they’re optimized to maximize the quality of traditional lighting solutions. Most games use mostly static assets and lighting, because baked lighting can get a nearly photorealistic result as long as nothing moves.Highly dynamic environments are where the technology shines, because it can achieve results which traditional solutions simply can’t. I think ray-traced Minecraft is the best current example of the potential of this technology.

This is a very ignorant comment.For some tasks, ray tracing already outperforms traditional rasterization.All &quot;photorealistic&quot; 3D renderers are trying to produce output on par with a true ray tracing renderer, and because the computation required is so high, tons of bodges and hacks are employed to approach that level of quality. The resulting complexity of a traditional rasterizer is astronomical compared to the complexity of a ray traced renderer.Ray traced graphics has been the goal the entire time computer graphics have been a thing; for the past 40 years, at least. That&#x27;s always been the goal. I can&#x27;t remember a time when it wasn&#x27;t.It&#x27;s only now that hardware fabrication technology has put us in a place where we&#x27;re able to slightly open the door to the rendering techniques we&#x27;ve desired for so long. It&#x27;s an exciting time.It is not a scam. It may not perform well in most situations currently, but I can promise you, that will change significantly as time goes on.Just like how early CPU hardware was slow and expensive, early ray tracing hardware is slow and expensive. Over time, CPU hardware has gotten cheaper and faster, and the same will happen with ray tracing hardware.

IMO, ray tracing is a scam as currently presented by Nvidia, et. al. GPUs are not the correct way to approach this problem. RTX is an approximation at best and a complete joke at worst. That said, I do believe ray tracing is the future and can become the standard way in which we engage with all 3D graphics concerns.Contrast the GPU with the newest generation of x86 CPUs. They have more cores than you can typically use, provide ridiculous amounts of pipelined throughput, and have specialized vector instructions which can dramatically accelerate common 3D graphics tasks (i.e. matrix multiplication).Most practical ray tracing algorithms are trivially parallelized (e.g. just throw each scanline at a thread) and also exhibit properties which can leverage the deep stack depths and OoO execution enabled by modern CPUs. Ray tracing is inherently a recursive activity with a profound number of potential branching opportunities. x86 has absolutely no problem dealing with this kind of scenario. This is exactly what it was built for. GPUs on the other hand require yet more specialized hardware that has its limitations baked-in at the transistor level. x86 does not have these same kind of limitations.Consider the hypothetical benefits of having your entire graphics pipeline implemented within 1 cache-coherent memory domain and on top of a single instruction set. Imagine no Direct3D&#x2F;OpenGL&#x2F;Vulkan&#x2F;drivers&#x2F;etc are involved to ruin your day. What if you could fit all of your required scene, texture and model data into L3 cache? How many times can you fill L3 from RAM per second on a 3950x with reasonable memory configuration? How many times per frame at 60fps? I feel we need to take some time to look at the emerging opportunities with the new hardware that is coming to market.I worry that the developer community is so out of touch with the hardware aspect (e.g. 22ms hello world) that we are basically saying &quot;lol no just use GPU magic graphics rectangle&quot; and calling it a day. I feel like specialization of ASICs is fundamentally taking us in the wrong direction now that we are able to put so many general purpose cores onto a single package&#x2F;die in a very cost-effective manner. Maybe this is why AMD is taking so long to bring a proper Nvidia killer to market. At some point there has to be a certain # of cores where someone raises their hand and asks &quot;why do we still need a separate GPU?&quot;.

It seems to me that this game doesn&#x27;t actually take in account all the seemingly existing light sources when computing the shadows: see for instance at around 7:45, there is an obvious light source in the bottom right region (actually a bunch of synchronized pulsating lights on some sort of cylinders) which clearly should affect the surfaces close to it, but it doesn&#x27;t in either mode! In the next comparison, there&#x27;s a fire burning close to a wall, and likewise the fire doesn&#x27;t seem to emit any light on the wall. Actually, the commentators do mention that there isn&#x27;t that much dynamic lights handled in the game, limiting the effect of RTX.I don&#x27;t know how that RTX tech is working, but from what I&#x27;ve seen of the port of Quake2, it looked much more convincing - did you see it before making that judgement?

Ray tracing is a scam to push more hardware we dont need.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RNRp9Y33xWE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RNRp9Y33xWE</a> Can you spot the difference worth &gt;2-3x performance drop?

The real-time GI is amazing. Ray tracing is going to be a game changer, not only in terms of visual quality, but also because it&#x27;s one of those rare times in computer graphics where the more advanced solution is actually making it easier on graphics programmers by replacing a bag of dirty tricks with a unified, physically based solution.One interesting note: they say the GI is &quot;instant&quot; but you can actually see that they are using temporal stabilization to achieve this effect, and there&#x27;s a slight lag between when the light changes and when the GI finds its resting point. I suspect removing this lag will be one of the things which makes graphics feel &quot;next gen&quot; when GPUs can handle enough rays per pixel to handle GI in one or two frames instead of a few dozen.

Any chance we can get a scalable network backend to go along with the render enhancements? Fan-out workers on actors and a KCP implementation would great!

I got the uncanny valley sense from the footage and had to watch it a few times to understand why. As you say, there are still subsystems whose fidelity don&#x27;t meet the quality bar that the texture and lighting set.Little things like the player model&#x27;s hands interacting with an invisible flat surface above the incredibly intricate rock textures.Yes, nits. With the player model acting as a locus for these uncanny interactions, I wonder if there will be a wave of first person games that can take full advantage of the photorealism.

The more accurate the rendering is, the more accuracy you expect of everything else.A game with cartoonish or simplified rendering can get away with one attack animation, one &quot;working&quot; animation etc; but once the rendering becomes realistic, you need better animations and physics, etc.

For sure, the physics once she starts rock climbing are horrific and super uncanny.Forearms need to be parallel to the gravity vector almost all the time. Arms need to be kept straight almost all the time. The only exceptions for these are the actual top of a motion to move up to the next hold.All stuff you would never notice if the graphics weren&#x27;t amazing.I think I&#x27;m so used to seeing unrealistic pony tails and clothes I don&#x27;t even notice.Other than Uncharted I don&#x27;t recall playing games with climbing.. I&#x27;ve spent enough real world climbing time since then it&#x27;s noticeable now.

Hair is nowhere near realism, yet.This is masked by using hairstyles which are either not intended to move or which are intended to display limited movement.Her hair isn&#x27;t in a true ponytail, anyway. Even with more restricted movement of the hairstyle she has, it still doesn&#x27;t look right at all.

Extremely impressive.That said, I am struck by how the inaccuracies in physics modeling start sticking out like a sore thumb the closer the visuals get to realism. After gawking at the ground and falling rocks in the first scene, I kept getting stuck on the weird movement of her ponytail. Also the landing of the first jump across the chasm.Picking nits for sure; incredible work here.

That my reaction to this recent UE4 demo. The whole world is monochromatic, and this seems to be an adaptation to the limits of the technology.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zKu1Y-LlfNQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zKu1Y-LlfNQ</a>

For all the advancements the demo is still essentially monochromatic.As I recall this is done to avoid the difficulties of rendering how two adjacent differently colored objects bleed their colors onto each other. No color - no bleeding.I&#x27;d prefer color over pixel accuracy.

I think it is interesting that the first thing they talk about is LOD. UE4 is famous for its bad LOD implementation. Look at FFVII Remake [0]. It&#x27;s an insanely high budget game made in UE4 with top-of-the-line assets, yet some textures never load in to their high resolution versions. UE4 has earned this stain. Since they&#x27;re talking LOD first and foremost, maybe Epic actually fixed their UE LOD issues this time around.0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qyGl5C3Uwak&amp;t=10m40s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qyGl5C3Uwak&amp;t=10m40s</a>

Just a bit of background first. I bought in heavily to the ue4 ecosystem as soon as UE4 was released, back when it was $20&#x2F;mo. After about 3 years I had enough and moved to godot and blender and being away from that ecosystems it&#x27;s deficiencies grow ever more glaring.It started with promises that the editor would treat linux as a first class client. Those were lies, as not only did a community fork do more work than epic for years because they refused PRs, but the launcher still hasn&#x27;t been made available for linux, requiring people to use Windows just to get marketplace assets. Now I get it, linux is a small subset of the community and it&#x27;s their choice, etc, so I moved on with only a few hundred in marketplace assets lost, my personal choice and not a huge deal...Then there was paragon (at least I got a refund). Then they completely changed fortnite. Then it was just one thing after another. For example, epic was bad enough with exclusives, but they actually even pulled Metro Exodus from steam even after it was taking pre-orders! They promised they wouldn&#x27;t do it again, and then did it again with Anno 1800. Then they started buying studios to remove old games from steam. They even started &quot;bribing&quot; crowdfunded games that magically moved away from steam despite originally promising steam release. (Shenmue 3, Outer Wilds, Pheonix Point)Their security was breached multiple times, with one single breach being over 9mil accounts. Multiple people with credit card issues who chargedback&#x27;ed immediately got a refund and then had their accounts suspended. (epic getting around chargeback fees).Epic is ~%40 owned by Tencent and has been found to do questionable things on systems. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;PhoenixPoint&#x2F;comments&#x2F;b0rxdq&#x2F;epic_game_store_spyware_tracking_and_you&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;PhoenixPoint&#x2F;comments&#x2F;b0rxdq&#x2F;epic_g...</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcgamer.com&#x2F;epic-steam-data-reddit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcgamer.com&#x2F;epic-steam-data-reddit&#x2F;</a>They bought easy anti cheat (EAC) and then completely stopped all efforts to support linux (Valve had been in talks with them and discussing the linux issue). (a pretty big deal for the linux community as it affects many games present and future)They started paying off mods at the fortnitebr reddit sub which caused a mod exodus and a lot of hubub.Tim Sweeney on linux: &quot;Installing Linux is sort of the equivalent of moving to Canada when one doesn’t like US political trends. Nope, we’ve got to fight for the freedoms we have today, where we have them today.&quot;Tim Sweeney doesn&#x27;t understand the difference between first and third party: &quot;Steam’s the largest PC store and already has PC exclusives such as DOTA2, Counterstrike, and Portal. Valve has every right to make deals with developers and publishers to secure more exclusives, just as Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Epic Games do!&quot;They bought &quot;views&quot; on youtube at least a few times (see Shenmue 3 trailer)There is no gifting in the epic game store, and if you use the same payment on other accounts (like family) they will lock that payment method.They killed Rocket League on linux and macos.The epic games store barely functions, with no user reviews and plans for the devs to &quot;opt in&quot; reviews so they can select only the reviews they like. They did enable OpenCritic reviews though. Broken or no cloud saves, achievements, mod support, forums, or wishlists.This is only a partial list!It wasn&#x27;t until 2019 that the Fortnight dev crunch thing came up, and honestly just calling it a &quot;crunch&quot; doesn&#x27;t seem to do the issue justice when contractors were under a culture of fear to work 70-100 hr work weeks!When someone has a repeated pattern of abuse and lies and gaslighting, you can be sure thats what they will continue to do in the future, and that is what both Epic and Tim Sweeney have and are going to continue to do. Anybody who buys into the UE4 or UE5 ecosystem is probably going to regret it... unless Epic pays them off like they have plenty of times before.

Many fiascos? Are you talking about how epic didn&#x27;t pay dancers for their dances in fortnite? Or the crunch they pushed on their workers to ship fortnite content?I&#x27;m trying to think of others, maybe you could expand a bit?

After the many fiascos of UE4 and the shit Sweeney and Epic have pulled I dont really care, I&#x27;m sticking with blender and godot.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;00gAbgBu8R4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;00gAbgBu8R4</a> - did Epic manage to pull off what Euclideon Holographics could not?

What makes this stuff possible now though? New global illumination algorithms? Better scanning techniques? Or mostly better hardware?I don&#x27;t know how it compares to other games to be honest. If it&#x27;s a big jump though, I&#x27;d be interested to know what&#x27;s being done different and why it&#x27;s being done now.

The graphics look good because of two things: Quixel and global illumination. Quixel is Swedish company that Epic acquired in 2019. Quixel does high-resolution scans of actual physical objects(photogrammetry) and makes them available as textures in Unreal Engine. The sheer rock faces that you see in the demo are Quixel megascans of actual rocks.The other thing that makes the graphics look impressive is global illumination, which provides real time dynamic lighting of the environment, instead of baked in (pre-rendered) lighting. The demo seems to only have a single light source - sunlight in the cave, light from the crystal looking thing in her hand while inside the room. I am not sure how well it look like in actual games when there are multiple light sources.The rest of the stuff doesn&#x27;t look too different from current gen games.

What&#x27;s going on behind the scenes to explain the jump in graphics quality? Hardware? Algorithmic?Does this involve some breakthrough somewhere or is this incremental?

A first look at Unreal Engine 5