Unreal Engine 5 First Generation Games: Brilliant Visuals & Growing Pains
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- First revealed back in 2020, Unreal Engine 5 promised next generation detail and lighting quality - and since then, the technology has only got better and better. Three years on, we're finally getting to play actual games using cutting-edge tech like Lumen, Nanite and virtual shadowmaps, so just how well is the engine shaping up in actual shipping titles? Alex Battaglia checks out the first wave of UE5 games including Immortals of Aveum, Jusant, RoboCop: Rogue City, Remnant 2, Fort Solis and Desordre to discover where UE5 excels, where it needs improvements and how developers can better utilise the features it has for PC gamers.
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We’re working in Unreal Engine 5 for the next Subnautica… trying to be mindful as we work. UE5 really does let you do amazing visuals. Can’t wait to show people when we’re ready! Thanks for the video, always great to see what other Devs do with the same tools.
will it perform as fantastically as most 2023/UE5 titles did? just asking for entertainment value. ;)
Next Subnautica!!! Link please!
Love Subnautica!
Industry news in yt comments
The first subnautica is still broken tho
My guess as to the reason for flat lighting in Lords of the Fallen: you can set a minimum lighting level (and it looks like they set it too high). This is usually to avoid the fizzling you point out in really dark areas lacking in samples. Fortnite uses the same trick but chooses a more appropriate value so you don’t really notice it.
I don't think that's it, if you look there is actually no "real" light source at all, it seems they went with the lazy option of just using hidden lumen emissive shapes, because the environment was designed without considering real light sources lighting it, but to be fair torches are usually too dark for environments like this, so it would require creating a lot of new art work if you want convincing light sources, thats why a lot of games with underground sections just opt to use weird plants that emit light everywhere.
@@lolroflmaoizationinteresting observation for the last part. Never thought about that. Souls games use that technique in abundance and I never just thought about it but makes sense 🤔
All Bethesda games use that trick too. @@jose131991
Lords of the Gurbage.
A lot of ue5 demos I've seen have really blown out highlights and flat lighting with little shaowing, in an unrealistic way. I think most devs don't know about setting this correctly.
The RoboCop shader stutter situation gives me a little hope for UE5 games, that demo had the classic shader compilation stutter on day 1, but the devs saw the complaints about it and got a patch out within a few days that basically cleared it up. My hope is that if devs can tackle 95% of stuttering that quickly through UE5 tools, it'll just stop being a thing for future games, but that's probably hopium.
Which makes me think as to why they didn't see that as an issue in the first place.
@@chexmixkittyprobably distracted by all the other work.
Small dev team or they were so used to testing it before their later optimization passes that theh sidnt motice it anymore because they are so close to the project and dont notice it anymore.
At least they fixed it before launch
i think you’re right. as devs get more familiar with ue5 some of these issues will be a thing of the past
@@CeezGeezUnreal engine has had these stutter since forever. Only a handfull of games runs without any stutter and they are often not open world. Probably around 70% of all pc games that has been realeses since 1998 has had mild to severe stutter. I dont think so many unreal engine 5 games will run flawless.
Its funny, like the devs need to see us all crying on basic issues that are present once you launch the game first time, like if they never launched that game before we did to tell them its bad, whats going on here :)
Hearing that UE5 is going to parallelize more of the work is the biggest thing i needed to hear.
🥴
Wait so it will actually use my CPU?
Will 8 cores 16 threads finally be used????
Doubt lol
Tim Epic Engine 5 the home of “omgbbq teh next generation of graphics” but also not properly using CPU architecture that’s been around for almost 20 years and is crucial for maximizing performance on consoles
@@bryanedds8922 you're cringe
Something worth noting: For good multithreading to come to more game engines and more games, the industry itself has to change. Writing MT code is hard. Writing good MT code takes experience and expertise that isn’t found in the games industry frequently, as the programmers good enough to do it will leave to go make more money elsewhere and not risk getting laid off every 12-18 months. Turnover, compensation, and retention actively stand in the way of progress in this regard.
yeah we seemed to have more programmers good at MT code back in the PS3 and PS4 era, and that was important due to how weak each individual core was. Now a lot of grunt programming work is outsourced or handled by relatively new hires. Might also explain how Nintendo gets so much out of the Switch CPU - they have great employee retention
Epic / Unreal is working on their "Mass" systems which will be rolling out and helping with memory management and multithreading.
Whilst of course plenty of excellent engineers leave the industry for better working conditions, it's also worth noting that those with passion for optimization are more welcomed in this industry to apply their skills than in most others.
Most "business software development" simply does not require much performance work, and that's the largest segment of the dev market.
The problem isn't that multithreading when designing a system for it, is that much more difficult. It's that porting systems that were designed as single threaded (such as Unreal's UObject systems, on which all worlds in the games are built) to multiple threads, without breaking all code written on top of it, is nearly impossible.
In more isolated problem domains, such as the rendering, animation, simulations, and particles, Unreal does leverage the many cores, but the core which orchestrates it all wasn't designed around it. So they need to develop (and are doing so), new systems that allow more code to leverage it, without breaking all projects.
Well said.
@@Aidiakapi It will be impossible to fully multithread game engines. There are just too many systems that rely on each other to work in a certain order, that means there will always be the main thread waiting on another even if it certain threads finished first. Obviously you can optimize those other systems to use more, which unreal is doing with its Mass system
I honestly hope we see more games with their own art style and not just realistic graphics in the future...
Honestly, same. I still think they look the best still. Having every game look photorealistic gets boring after a while. Fornite and Jusant look great on UE5.
THIS. Its why the new spider man looks meh. Zero personality.
NO this is the right step forward , since Crysis graphics barely developed and the ultimate goal should be to imitate reality to a scary amount of detail. You can always downscale but my immersion skyrockets when it looks like real life.
Photorealism can be fun sometimes, but yeah two of my favorite games this year were Hi-Fi Rush and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. I'd like some variety of thought put into art direction, not just assuming photorealism when it doesn't make sense.
@@QuentinBrutus this has to be a joke lol
Thank you for featuring my game Desordre! ❤
Loved the artstyle of the game ! Such a great vibe
never heard of it before this video, it looks cool!
Looks great
@@UNMERILLY Thank you 🥰
@@desertfish74 Thanks ☺
Read up on Amdahl's law. Games are simulations, simulations are serial, and so games will always ultimately be bound up on a single thread. The fact that games are even able to fully load two threads concurrently is actually rather impressive. Expecting games to make full use of even eight cores is a rather preposterous ask.
By the way, disabling the E-cores improves performance as it causes your ring bus clock to go up -- quite significantly on 12th-gen, somewhat less so on 13th/14th. Disabling HT also helps performance because it removes thread contention for a core's assets, and reduces the stress on ring bus ports.
I have a 7800x3d and Cyberpunk uses every single thread.
@@Lightsaglowllc Yeah, sure. I have a 5800X3D and same. What Alex is talking about in that part is "full" utilization, though, which is also what I said.
@@azazelleblack the issue is unreal 5 barely uses more than a few cores. Cyberpunk does a good job of saturating multiple cores whereas unreal 5 just can’t do it.
@@LightsaglowllcSure? I'm not saying Unreal 5 can't be improved, but Cyberpunk doesn't "fully" utilize all 8 cores, which was my original point to begin with.
@@azazelleblack got you.
This channel has become "Ray Tracing Foundry"
Lords of the fallen has so much noise without any upscaling added and it’s crazy. Everything looks so over-sharpened
Nanite with concrete structures looks absolutely mesmerizing in Lords of the Fallen. The hub area really pushes above anything I’ve seen prior to this technology. Lumen is also amazing, but we have seen already brilliant RT GI implementations before, specifically with Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition.
Is Alex right on ''only software Lumen in LotF?'' IIRC the Ultra GI preset ships with hardware Lumen, but the High preset switches to software and there is a clear visual difference and perfomance cost between the two presets.
Yeah I thought devs said there is hw lumen. The lack of shadows and ambient occlusion is still there though, which is a shame. At least put SSAO, in some scenes it looks like an xbox360 game because it's so flat. They need to add a separate toggle for hw lumen, for virtual shadowmaps and better shadows/ao settings or options. That would make the game look perfect. I don't think they will, but an upgrade to UE5.4 when it drops would be nice and boost the cpu performance which is...meh
I'd imagine destructible items in Lords of the Fallen with lumen enabled is causing a lot of crashes. The devs have been patching the game almost every second day since release and rolling back some UE5 features to make it more stable. In a recent patch they disabled lumen on destructible book cabinets because it was always causing a crash.
What kind of features did they rollback?
We should have just stayed on Unreal engine 3 for a while and just funneled more modern techniques down its pipeline.
Game Engines today are expensive, and the visual fidelity just doesn't justify what I'm seeing on screen. There's no balance between performance, visual fidelity and resolution anymore, and it's pretty apparent that optimization has been lacking by developers on many games this generation.
Yeah because that works perfectly as we can see with creation engine from bugthesda🤡
Interesting about the traversal stutter issue, as the devs of Satisfactory stated that one of their main motivations to port the EA version to UE5 was to rebuild the world chunks in such a way as to minimise the issue.
I really hope the traversal stutter issue in UE games gets solved soon because it really hampers the gaming experience for me. I was so looking forward to the Dead Space remake, but had to stop playing due to the constant traversal stutter.
I remember there was contrast and color in games
Some of the issues are not easily fixed, take virtual texturing popping for example. Increasing the size of VRAM usage will not do much for the popping, there are multiple reasons but one of the main ones is that you have to indirectly check what parts of the textures you need and only then load them, while you are traversing you don't know what you'll encounter in the future so there's no way of precaching to occur, same with cutscenes, unless they are completely deterministic you don't know in advance what you will need so you always load only when needed which by that time you are already rendering that surface, then it's a matter of how fast can you load it but it will still be visible.
Virtual shadow maps are also very hard to use, in theory it's great because it scales detail as necessary but if you shadows are dynamically changing then they become expensive because the whole point of them is to cache results, if the results change all the time it means you need to recalculate everything all the time. So virtual shadow maps are great is the lighting is static or rarely changing but horribly for anything a little bit more dynamic, so you may only see it in games where everything is a bit more static.
If there is any RAM left, the brute force approach would be to load just any texture from the area into it. Increases the chance of it being found in the RAM when needed. But especially for cutscenes there is no excuse, as it can be checked once before, which textures are needed.
@@tristanwegner it doesn't work like that, no one sane will load onto memory possibility hundreds of megabytes of data for something that might not happen. While cutscenes are in theory fixed when they start it's not because it depends on the player. The best you could possibly do is create some sort of corridor or area to the cutscene so when you enter it you start loading it before it even starts with the caveat that the player might not ever start it in which case you just wasted memory.
Same for the world, the whole point of using virtual textures is to save memory and your solution is to area load them so they don't pop in, you basically destroyed the whole purpose of using them in the first place.
UE5 have a “prestream” for VT (for any streaming managers actually, even for nanite), but it helps only for cutscenes or other stable points of view. For forward movement you can use increased feedback factor, but it doesn’t work for angular movement
We have striped out VT from our game
Theoretically you can achieve more performance with VSM, even with aggressive cache invalidations. With VSM ue5 recalculates only invalidated pages. And you can do it across multiple frames (with engine modification). CSM caching is ineffective too, especially with fast movement (eg racing games). With CSM you will be recalculate all near cascades and far cascades. With VSM far pages will be recalculating rarely.
@@ИльяМаксимович-ч1о all that you said is true, it all depends on your context, what you need and what is the game about, like you said, prestreaming only works in deterministic events, maybe in some games that's perfectly fine, but not for all of them, not using VTs is also a possible choice
invalidating VSMs everywhere is fairly easy, as soon as you want to change the lighting of your whole scene gets invalidated, even the far pages, for example, try to make a day night cycle. Yes you can spread our the updates throughout different frames but then you run the risk visible artifacts, maybe it's fine in your context but not every case is the same.
that's why I'm saying people shouldn't expect these technologies to magically improve over time, most of the times it's a trade off and it's up to the developer to check if it's worth it for their case. Specially for the case of VTs this is not a new technology invented by Epic and they still suffer from the same issues as the original did, simply because they were designed this way.
Nanite/mesh shaders/virtual textures have a upfront performance cost vs traditional materials. Its lite on vram usage because the albedo/basecolor is used and higher resolution roughness maps/normal maps that accompany a modern material are not needed. So you can have a great looking asset that is higher in disc space (due to the higher poly count) and lighter on Vram.
But you need to fully take advantage of Nanite by using a lot of virtualized assets to justify the upfront cost of virtualization. Once you hit that point, you can have scene complexity that far exceeds whats capable with traditional rendering methods.
The speed and number of shader cores on the GPU also matter. The GTX 1060/1660ti for example are DX12 capable cards, but they have trouble hitting high FPS with Nanite. You will need to use TSR/FSR to hit 1080p medium 60 FPS on those cards if you are going to have an open world scene with a high view distance. So some will dislike it but its the only way to support older hardware with new DX12 features.
Ram speed is also can be an issue; more then half of consumer PCs are still running 16 gigs DDR4. If your asset complexity hits a point where the CPU has to wait for the larger asset to be streamed in from the slower RAM it can cause microstuttering and jittering as the CPU is prepping the draw call for the GPU. DDR5 is much faster for this type of rendering. Its also possible for your game to be using a pagefile since most consumers will be running tertiary apps like Discord, Spotify, OBS, Chrome etc along side your game so there might be only 4-7 gigs of system ram available from the start.
I'm almost sure that Remnant 2 didn't use Lumen for the same reason Immortals should've done it - Epic themselves didn't recommend using it in shipping games until UE 5.2 (and it got even better in 5.3).
Also turning off nanite is not recommended by Epic themselves, as the culling and streaming of objects (among other things) gets far less optimal with it off.
I kinda hope that some of the early UE5 releases are allowed to (and have an ability to, because this might not be always painless) update to 5.4+ with a patch later on
Nanite is also supposed to perform better than traditional geometry when using lumen and vsm.
I think is good to point that in Unreal Engine Roadmap website they focus on performance improvements for HWRT Lumen, with the goal of achieving 4ms per frame in typical scenes, which would match the budget for Lumen SWRT running at 60fps. I hope they can do it for UE 5.4
The Unreal Engine 5 games I have played, I got the impression of them relying heavily on cheap tricks and STILL looking bad. And STILL the same hideous texture pop-in that has been there since Gears of War
Love your coverage Alex, you just nailed every time. My only request, is to also give some converage to AMD GPUs, i know nvidia is dominant and has a much bigger market share but would be great to see comparisons with 7900xtx and other midrange cards. Thanks for the amazing work !
I feel like a lot of those games would benefit from baked GI instead of Lumen. I think they wouldn't look any worse for many, many times more GPUs being able to handle them at their best visuals. Talos Principle 2 is a perfect example imo
This is very likely why the UE devs allowed Lumen Reflections as a stand alone option that works without Lumen GI. The GI is great but the surface cache and SDF meshes are far too low quality by default for it to shine, and raising the quality of those by either amount tanks frame rates pretty bad; hopefully more games give that new Lightmass GI thing a try, it helps performance a lot
One thing I'm really curious about in the games that have the most severe traversal stutter is which of Unreal's streaming systems are they using? The way that Lords of the Fallen has that one consistent stutter in that one location makes me think they're using level streaming volumes. I worked on a project where one of the senior engineers was absolutely convinced that it was impossible to eliminate level streaming stutter in Unreal and wanted to implement some really bizarre solutions to try to stop it. But ultimately, while we weren't able to eliminate it entirely, we were able to make it almost entirely imperceptible by massaging streaming priorities and breaking up some of the levels to be a little more granular. And this was a VR project, where framerate dips are much more noticeable to lay-persons.
World Partition doesn't have quite the same level of control as sub level volume streaming, though I think it's definitely possible to use different runtime streaming grids to more finely tune how much is trying to get streamed during traversal.
Shader comp stutter is the bane of Unreal games, once they work that out it's going to be great. They should just have a pre comp when you start the game up for EVERY Unreal game. Not to mention traversal stuttering.
Thats what i think too but pc gamera cry because they have to wait 10 minutes for pre shader compilation
@@deluxo2901 I'm a PC gamer and I want the initial shader comp to be there for all Unreal games 4 and 5. The stutter is one of the most annoying things having high end hardware and having a stutter lowers the overall experience of the game.
@@TheBorgey Honestly, why COULDN'T they work this out from the conception of Unreal Engine 5? This was and currently is a very known issue for Unreal Engine 4 and yet they didn't priotize fixing it from the the conceptualization phase of Unreal 5.
Fort Solis is such a good looking game. I loved it when it first came out, loved the setting and atmosphere. More of a walking sim but an immersive one.
I was thinking while playing The Talos Principle 2 demo (my first UE5 experience) how unimpressed I was with Lumen, between the huge amount of pixel swimming in some areas and the low quality hybrid reflections. It only being the software version (though I've run into people insisting that it uses the hardware version on ultra) perfectly explains this, and I'll have to try out the UE5 unlocker to boost quality.
On another note that demo had a LOT more shader compilation stutter before they pushed an update. I haven't played it since but it apparently did improve the situation significantly.
I’m going to be hearing the phrase “shader compilation stutters” on repeat in my head long after the video ends.
I advise anyone to look into The Finals, game uses UE5, forced RTGI and somehow still runs beautifully even on my RTX3070+Ryzen 7 5800h laptop
Well the dev team is made up a good chunk of ex-DICE people that brought the amazingly optimized pre-BF 2042 Battlefields.
@@acoolrocket Pre BFV to be precise, but still it is impressive how much they managed to achieve with this game
@@KingfishWatch I mean BFV runs better than BF 2042 whilst having more complex/mesh density maps.
@@acoolrocket For me BFV and 2042 run similar enough in 64 players mathes tbh but 2042 does look way worse while doing it, really shows there is no longer OG DICE engineers left in a company who knows how Frostbite works
No way you used the Unreal Tournament soundtrack, man that makes me sad I fucking love that game
Great to hear three wheels turning. Miss UT games - UT99 had an amazing soundtrack and creativity and gameplay in spades
Jusant's design aesthetic is so good I legit didn't clock that there were "no textures."
wow can't wait for unreal tournament 5 to come out using this engine! it's going to be so exciting! i'm so pumped!
I'm so glad Epic is FINALLY working on the shader compilation and traversal stutter issues with their engines.
Was excited when unreal engine 5 was announced , but not anymore
Now we just have to hope they make all these improvements that are needed. We know the visuals will be great, but we don’t want to go backwards on smooth gameplay. Great video!
Lies of P on PC still stands as a rarity in flawless performing UE4 games. Add to that some of the best visuals in any UE4 game and you have a real banger! Round8 are next level engine wizards. More devs should take notes from Round8
Dead Island 2 also ran flawlessly day 1.
It started to stutter at the beach after a while, for me. But it is one of best looking and best performing games out there.
I've been using UE5 on and off for nearly a year now for fun. It's only in recent releases the performance was increased, and when you are developing a game you are usually sticking to the same release to not to break anything. So I expect that games that started development now in ue5.3 will have more of UE features and with better performance. However, not sure about latest UE version, but previous versions stutter also when loading map chunks too.
Another issue that still persist in UE is hardware lumen/raytracing glitching out when using landscape mesh. That's why many games don't have that option. Those that do aren't using landscape mesh for their terrain. Apparently it is supposed to be fixed in UE5.4.
For all the praise and hype UE5 has received, it sure has a bunch of problems older engines (especially custom ones like the 4A Engine) did not have
No graphics improvement but with 4x the hardware requirement, literally UNREAL.
Cope
The 2nd part of the demo from Talos is actually amazing looking
Great video Alex. I really appreciate Johns and your Content.
Bist halt einfach der einzig wahre Dachsjäger ❤
Great video Alex. Hoping to see a video on AC Mirage. Looks pretty good and is very well optimized IMO, deserves some praise. Also looking forward to your Alan Wake II vid ofc. I know you have your hands full.
@@JonathanLukeAveryI agree, Mirage looks very dated and it’s especially egregious when you consider that Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla are all on the same engine as Mirage and yet each of those games look significantly better especially Odyssey.
I have to say I always have better performance with RT shadows on than with Virtual Shadows. VS are still very glitchy, dont' work well with "low poly" smooth surfaces, like faces and the amount of softness is not enough. In the other hand, for very specific use cases, using field meshes shadows for the lights, for environment objects, looks much better.
Since many games will use UE5, devs should consider hiring someone with an understanding of light and shadow, like a director of photography would in the world of cinema. They would know exactly how to paint a scene with light with the new lumen tech.
Another educational and level headed video from Alex. Great content to combat the plethora of "bro" tech arguments accross the internet.
Using UT music = chef's kiss
Fingers crossed for a UT in UE5 🤞
to Alex or any UE5 experts, is it possible for a game build on a 5.1 or 5.2 version to later improve utilize newer builds as soon as Epic unveils them that address major graphical concerns of the past builds? Or does that mean a full re-engineering that would need a "remaster" new release version from the developer or a modded "enhanced" version from the modding community?
You can upgrade a project to a newer version of the engine, but either the dev can't afford to update and it takes time and testing so it doesn't degrade the game with new bugs
You can always upgrade, and there's typically no need to fully re-engineer anything, and if there are performance improvements to existing features, you'll typically get them for free. However, if you have to rewrite your code to take advantage of new features that bring a faster way of doing things, then sure, it's going to take time and money, and the more point releases you wait between updating your code, the greater the chances of changes in the engine (intentional or not) breaking your game.
It's a balancing act. Typically, if you're early on in your development, you'll move with the engine, but once you get closer to your release date, you better have an extremely good reason for upgrading the engine because you will be putting that release date at risk.
@@EnglishMike I guess it's (unless you're CD Project Red) games that uses a proprietary game engine don't seem to improve on their botch launches beyond upgrading their engine codebase. They seem to be patched to:
1. met the previously decided original design goal
2. Degradation for the sake of performance improvements
So when I see videos like this where a point release of UE5 is highlighting so many improvements, you never see them across of the existing games that had been released since the debut of the engine to reap some of (the engine's) new benefits
hearing Alex's "Well guess what?" is such a positive context this time around is a lovely turnaround.
Don't forget about Satisfactory. On the early access branch, it is on UE 5.2, uses software Lumen and Nanite. It's not a full 1.0 release yet, but it IS a UE 5.2 game you can play right now. With DLSS, FSR and XESS too.
Yeah, I think they said that Lumen is more of an "unofficial" feature and not fully supported, but would be interesting to see
Cant believe we still are single core limited. Unreal 5.4 can't come fast enough.
Fort Solis uses hardware lumen. It just has some annoying screen space fallbacks that you can’t disable for indirect lighting
I also have question. How they disable it in video, where i can find a mod?
i remember when frostbite and cryengine were the pinnacle of game engines about 10 years ago
Frostbite, like UE5 has never been the pinnacle of anything. Maybe the best one size fits many solution. But bespoke engines, built to push the state of the art forward, have always been the 'pinnacle'
cryengine is still way better. frostbite was great for fps games but it seems the devs who made the engine and know its ins and out left a long time ago (around after bf1 release). same thing happened to redengine (devs who know it left long time ago hence the switch to generic garbage like UE).
And few of these games are actually fun to play.
Hellblade 2 and next gears will be true showcases for this engine.
Hopefully they don't have the stutter the UE4 based Gears 5 had at launch.
I noticed and appreciated the pun at 1:24
Thank you for cooperation with Ukrainian translators. It's really great to have oportunity to listen your videos in my native language to better undestant some minor things which I didn't understand in English. You're the best! Much love!
Alex, you've quickly become my My favorite person to listen, talk about games and their technologies. Keep up the great work man. DF is just doing better and better work all the time and I think you're leading the group with great content. Thank you!
I'm so tired of stutter and bad frame-times. I would gladly roll graphical fidelity back ten years if it meant consistent frame-times and it eliminated stutter.
It is one reason I like stylized graphics. Hi-Fi Rush on UE4 runs like a dream.
The texture streaming artifacts when changing cameras during cutscenes is the weirdest "unrealism" to me, it should have been easy to implement a system where you can give the texture streaming thread hints in advance and tell it to prepare the highest quality version of certain textures so they are ready for closeup cuts of faces and so on. Maybe it exists but devs don't always use it? With such a system you could probably profile a cutscene in advance to generate the hints automatically too. It seems silly that the texture streamer has to react to what's on screen instead of predicting what's coming down the pipe.
There is a way to prestream textures (unless they broke it in UE5, like a lot of things), but you have to specifically choose the textures you want to preload. Pretty janky and definitely not something you want to set up in every single cutscene.
Another game that I am pretty sure uses Lumen is En Garde!
Beautiful art direction and gameplay too.
Ark survival ascended is missing. It uses unreal 5.2(I think) with lumen and nanite and looks amazing
I'm a game developer in UE4 and I find it amusing how we're finally seeing CPU fixes coming in 5.4. UE5 was rushed out the door as a tech demo, it still has showstopper bugs that prevent some teams from moving to it and the tech team is not really interested in fixing them despite bug reports being filed. There are compelling reasons to move to 5.3 but there was very little good reason to move to even 5.2. I think we've got one more Gen left before this third party engine monopoly starts crumbling from poor maintenance.
You mean UE is finally getting too big/complex to be maintained by new generations of engine devs? Are there indications for that? What are those showstopper bugs?
Nanite and Lumen haven't lived up to the performance claims which is disappointing. It was advertised as a way to have studio quality assets in videogames with "no performance loss". All that was lies. None of these games have even close to studio quality models and assets and performance is still shotty.
Lumen wasnt advertised as that it was supposed to be lighter than hardware rt while retaining similar quality it was always supposed to be intensive nanite on the other was supposed to be a performance saver for high end assets seeing at remnant 2 seems not to be true currently
The unstable lighting reminds me of the PS1 area, without rounding errors (no floating point) leading to pixel shifts and warping textures. Artifact movement, where there isn't supposed to be one.
I find these videos very interesting, I love to understand issues and features behind the technologies that power videogames. Nice job!
A shame this much love for UE5 isn't given to the Cryengine 5
Ubisoft $3.61B, Epic $32B.
@@Safetytrousers CryEngine V is made by Crytek, a studio that has no connection to Ubisoft at all. Crytek made the first Far Cry. All other FC afterwards were made by Ubisoft with their own engines and not CryEngine.
to be fair disorder is kind of a lighting showcase without any texture detail, character models foliage etc. Its a lot easier in that environment.
Remnant 2 is such a solid game, looks and plays great
Man, that unreal tournament track is so good .
It's so dumb that devs don't enable high end Lumen features in their games, but I can imagine why. People will cry to high heavens if they can't put everything on "ultra" and play at 200 fps. Really glad Alan Wake 2 is going all tout.
i really hope unreal engine gets less popular in the future.
25 years of experience with this engine has made me almost compleatly bald.
Alex, in your opinion do you think we've seen a true "Next Gen" game yet? I tend to think we haven't, when I compare last gen releases like Assassin's Creed Unity, The Witcher 3, or Red Dead Redemption 2, it seems like we haven't had a real leap in fidelity that those games represented over the their previous gen counter parts, and as you've pointed out these recent UE5 releases aren't really using the available features, the best example of a Next Gen experience I can think of is still the The Matrix Awakens demo.
I was thinking about the same when it comes to true next gen leap...Matrix Awakens all the way. There is something about it that stands out from the crowd.
Matrix was next next generation. Tech demo what's going come many years later. This Gen in terms of portable game devices and consoles aren't ready for anything big in jump...
Thus generation wasn't suppose to be a leap in new technology but the leap to play catch up. Consoles were being jack of all trades but the master of none route. .
Mobile wanted to eventually play at the level of old Gen consoles...
Really the leap will happen next generation.
He said alan wake 2 is a true next gen game but it's not built on unreal engine.
You forgot to mention The Order: 1886. That was like Crysis-levels of next-gen visuals for the PS4 generation.
There was a lot of trickery with that game though, it's aspect ration, resolution, framerate, etc, it looked good, but the cost was too high.@@Shieftain
That texture pop in reminds me of Unreal Engine 3 or iD Tech 4 if I remember right, the one with megatexture support.
😏 I'm still waiting for next generation games 💯
How could you forget about the "masterpiece" that is Stray Souls lmao
one aspect is surely, that if you go and make the next generation engine, you dont create it with the intent for it to run for old hardware, but for future. Still, there are certainly some improvements needed
Right. Studios will already be well into the planning stage for the first set of titles to be released on the PS6 and next gen Xbox consoles in 2028.
One Love!
Always forward, never ever backward!!
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Classic UT music in the background...... :D
How would you say lumen compares to path tracing in terms of visual correctness, quality and performance?
No comparison at all, its like fiat to ferrari with same fuel consumption(aka fps drops)
@@SidorovichJr I asked this question because I've seen many many comparisons on YT between the two, and they are very similar. People compare them, so I wanted to know DF's take on it.
So you are one of the 57 players, that actually play Immortals on Steam.
i hope final fantasy 16 will use mesh shaders, dedicated pre comp shaders+async compute, many graphics options and all upscaled options, path tracing + rt, above consoles scalability and well optimized, and good mouse and keyboard support, and i hope ff engine will utilize big.little intel architechture with all cores and threads utilization
Great graphics but these developers need to remember the first principle of making a video game: it needs to be FUN.
This is not the job of developpers, this is the job of writers, quests managers, designers, etc...
FUN? no... first it needs to RUN... then FUN after.
What? lol. Those are all devs@@lio220
@@lio220 wrong
Yeah no shit. That's like telling an audio mix engineer "yeah sounding good is nice, but the SONG needs to be GOOD!" like bruh it's not their department.
All games will be running on this shit and looking more or less the same. Welcome to the future of gaming industry...
The beginning area of Lords of the Fallen had me looking through HDR and tv settings for a while just to discover later that it's just how the game looks 😅
I have to say I'm slightly underwhelmed. It's a shame Projekt Red will move to Unreal 5.
Having a heavy hitter like Projekt Red onboard should only help Epic focus on the things game developers most badly need. There's typically a lot of cross-pollination between the developers and the users in this line of work.
Exactly. And considering the fact that the Red Engine is miles more optimize than Unreal Engine 5 makes me soo mad of that dumb decision.
'ARK: Ascended' is now on PC in glorious UE5 too.
No way are fort solis or robocop rogue city UE5 games. They both look last gen, especially robocop. Fort Solis can be interesting at times, but still looks quite odd to be an UE5 game
UE’s notorious traversal stutter/asset streaming hitches on PC need to be comprehensively addressed moving forward. It’s been a problem going legitimately all the way back to UE3 games. The advancements in visuals are nice but consistent smooth stutter free performance is the most important thing. It does not matter how good your game looks if it stutters so EPIC and devs need to figure this one out.
Lumen's software RT looks like a slightly more temporally stable version of Reshade's RTGI plugin.
The biggest thing about UE5 was the unlimited geomitry with nanite when they showed the first demo. But I have the feeling nanite isn't used that often for now or am I'm wrong?
Thanks for that Pro-tip of a quick optimization on UE5 games!
More and more AAA game devs need and should use their own In-house engine. Which they know from inside out and is highly optimized for their requirement.
if the money and time lets you do that, croteam, the creators of talos 2 didnt have a big budget of overhauling their own engine so thats why they switched to unreal. To be honest they had serious sam classics open sourced i am sure, but they stopped making it open source, could open up many more new possibilities.
"As you can ser here" Zooms in to highlight a small thing that you would never notice otherwise. I love how Digital Foundry makes of a non-problem, a huge deal.
Lol I never knew how much devs disrespected me by having blurry reflections.
It's a huge deal when you are pursuing photorealism. Even stylized animated movies from Pixar have accurate lighting.
Hey Alex, please let us know how to mod Fort Solis with Hardware Lumen. Geht das über diesen Frans Bouma unlocker?
Why is Robocop in the thumbnail when the game isn’t even mentioned in the video?
Thanks for the video, Alex.
It's helpful.
I have zero doubt that, by the time that Unreal Engine 5 is sunsetting, we're going to be seeing some truly incredible games that are both beautiful and not marred by some of the technical hiccups that it has caught a reputation for.
how can you tell if turning down global illumination from ultra to high keeps Lumen on, but turning down to medium turns it off? Eg in your example of Talos principle 2