UE5 game performance breakdown

[Lakados]

Home with a sick kid stumbled across this.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxpSCr8wPbc

Gives a breakdown of how UE5 has been used in games so far and shows what is can do for existing titles with minor tweaks.
interesting watch one way or another.

Hopes for 5.4 with improved multi core support to split up the main worker threads.

Its been said in other threads but the state of multi core for PC gaming needs to be pulled up, Coders and Designers who can do good multi core code make way more money with drastically better job security in other fields and the game industry is starting to fall behind because of it.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

Thanks for this post.

Hopes for 5.4 with improved multi core support to split up the main worker threads.

++++

That and better vRAM usage. As in, actually using it if it's available. Talked about around 20:20 in the video.

 

[Lakados]

Thanks for this post.

++++

That and better vRAM usage. As in, actually using it if it's available. Talked about around 20:20 in the video.

Not sure if that is an engine thing or a coding thing, lots of the current titles available make some hard coded decisions based on the consoles and they didn’t remove them for the PC release.

 

[LukeTbk]

would be interesting to see if it make it relatively easy for already used title to use that performance upgrade, would be really good news, because has of now the performance of pretty much all Unreal 5 title have been soso cpu wise, I wonder if Fornite was different being a tech demo from the giant themselve in that regard, the CPU has quite less to do in some regard too.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

Not sure if that is an engine thing or a coding thing, lots of the current titles available make some hard coded decisions based on the consoles and they didn’t remove them for the PC release.

Seems like it’s an issue across the board. I’m not a coder, but it seems like it would/should be a relatively easy thing to fix regardless of if it’s at engine level or at game level for any given dev.

 

[LukeTbk]

Seems like it’s an issue across the board. I’m not a coder, but it seems like it would/should be a relatively easy thing to fix regardless of if it’s at engine level or at game level for any given dev.

It would be hard to thing about an harder issue to fix than high core count performance scaling for an video game (just looking at the Unreal thread map screenshot hurt the brain)

 

[OutOfPhase]

You had me at sick kid. And UE5. And performance.

Edit: more seriously, yeah, teasing out worker threads better. Also not clear, from my skimming (and lack of UE engine knowledge) what is the engine and what is the game code.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

It would be hard to thing about an harder issue to fix than high core count performance scaling for an video game (just looking at the Unreal thread map screenshot hurt the brain)

??????

 

[OutOfPhase]

??????

It's a horrendous problem to solve.
Minimum latency, maximum FPS, and you cannot easily design in the rules ahead of time. If you have a thread - where do you put it? We have multiple threads on a core, muliple cores, possibly with different cache structures per core/thread, and of course "E" cores for more fun.

Beyond that - how many cores can you actually expect to be present? Blerg.

 

[sharknice]

You had me at sick kid. And UE5. And performance.

Edit: more seriously, yeah, teasing out worker threads better. Also not clear, from my skimming (and lack of UE engine knowledge) what is the engine and what is the game code.

A lot of that stuff is dependent on each other.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

It's a horrendous problem to solve.
Minimum latency, maximum FPS, and you cannot easily design in the rules ahead of time. If you have a thread - where do you put it? We have multiple threads on a core, muliple cores, possibly with different cache structures per core/thread, and of course "E" cores for more fun.

Beyond that - how many cores can you actually expect to be present? Blerg.

I think you're talking about two different things. Lakados' response to me was in-regards to UE5's arbitrary vRAM cap. No one is contesting difficulties regarding parallel processing.

 

[OutOfPhase]

A lot of that stuff is dependent on each other.

Indeed it is. And this is without how the driver reacts to threading.

 

[socK]

Unreal has sucked in this regard for a while. This and the fucking stuttering that they finally seen to have at least somewhat under control. 5.4 is looking like a killer release.

You had me at sick kid. And UE5. And performance.

Edit: more seriously, yeah, teasing out worker threads better. Also not clear, from my skimming (and lack of UE engine knowledge) what is the engine and what is the game code.

The game logic runs on it's own thread. This is the actual gameplay simulation. I.e. entities running around, shooting, whatever.

It is allowed to run slightly ahead of the renderer for parallelism sake. So instead of immediately stalling, the next frame can already be simulating while the first is rendering. Bubbles where nothing is processing is bad.

would be interesting to see if it make it relatively easy for already used title to use that performance upgrade, would be really good news, because has of now the performance of pretty much all Unreal 5 title have been soso cpu wise, I wonder if Fornite was different being a tech demo from the giant themselve in that regard, the CPU has quite less to do in some regard too.

Fortnite is where they dog food everything, it's almost always the latest engine branch. I'm sure the have enormous amount of metrics, automated testing, and seeing what customers are running into when they support them.

Fortnite doesn't use a special engine branch that I'm aware of, but it usually has the updates very fast and very early.

 

[Thunderdolt]

Nice visuals, but not sure I really care. At this point, cheaters out number legitimate players 2:1 in most games. I'd rather see them do something about that before making prettier pictures. I know that's an entirely different set of software engineers, but it's the same dev budget.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

Nice visuals, but not sure I really care. At this point, cheaters out number legitimate players 2:1 in most games. I'd rather see them do something about that before making prettier pictures. I know that's an entirely different set of software engineers, but it's the same dev budget.

Not sure if you even watched it, but I don't think there was even one multi-player game covered in that DF breakdown video. Fortnite even was barely mentioned.
I personally don't care as I don't really play multi-player games. Though it does seem that Steam is doing at least a fairly decent job with CS2.

 

[OutOfPhase]

I think you're talking about two different things. Lakados' response to me was in-regards to UE5's arbitrary vRAM cap. No one is contesting difficulties regarding parallel processing.

Sorry. Correct - two different issues. I conflated my interests with what was actually said.

 

[socK]

It's a horrendous problem to solve.
Minimum latency, maximum FPS, and you cannot easily design in the rules ahead of time. If you have a thread - where do you put it? We have multiple threads on a core, muliple cores, possibly with different cache structures per core/thread, and of course "E" cores for more fun.

Beyond that - how many cores can you actually expect to be present? Blerg.

This is why modern engines land on task parallelism.

Work is just chunked up into tasks/jobs and workers pick it up as they have availability. Ideally there's no idle cores because there's no preference where work winds up.

Doom Eternal is the extreme end of this and its entire engine loop is a task graph. It has no dedicated threads at all, so there's no thread dedicated to rendering or whatever. It's just arbitrary chunks of work that get processed by whatever thread has time to consume it.

It's always almost dead even even across a _lot_ of cores. It's really impressive, it just scales and scales.

 

[OutOfPhase]

This is why modern engines land on task parallelism.

Work is just chunked up into tasks/jobs and workers pick it up as they have availability. Ideally there's no idle cores because there's no preference where work winds up.

Doom Eternal is the extreme end of this and its entire engine loop is a task graph. It has no dedicated threads at all, so there's no thread dedicated to rendering or whatever. It's just arbitrary chunks of work that get processed by whatever thread has time to consume it.

It's always almost dead even even across a _lot_ of cores. It's really impressive, it just scales and scales.

I have found general task parallelization to be a box of chocolates, when it comes to threads per core and a division between efficiency and performance cores.

This is perhaps (deep breath) another thread. Let's keep talking about UE5 here. (I do appreciate the input).

Edit: came out as dismissing your point, I'm trying to dismiss mine. Arg!

 

[Thunderdolt]

Not sure if you even watched it, but I don't think there was even one multi-player game covered in that DF breakdown video. Fortnite even was barely mentioned.
I personally don't care as I don't really play multi-player games. Though it does seem that Steam is doing at least a fairly decent job with CS2.

Yeah, I guess I was responding more to the totality of press releases and media coverage rather than this specific video. Everything has been "oooo, look at the pretty pictures" and none of it has been "we've been working on addressing the #1 reason people stop playing games that use our engine."

I guess I'm just a grumpy old man. Water is wet, news at 11.

 

[sharknice]

Yeah, I guess I was responding more to the totality of press releases and media coverage rather than this specific video. Everything has been "oooo, look at the pretty pictures" and none of it has been "we've been working on addressing the #1 reason people stop playing games that use our engine."

I guess I'm just a grumpy old man. Water is wet, news at 11.

Fortnite has extremely good cheat protection, at least it did back when I played it. I'm not sure what they do other games don't but whatever it is works extremely well.

 

[Lakados]

I think you're talking about two different things. Lakados' response to me was in-regards to UE5's arbitrary vRAM cap. No one is contesting difficulties regarding parallel processing.

It’s a laborious problem to solve not a difficult one.

But man hours are the expensive part. So it’s one of the things that gets cut first.

 

[LukeTbk]

It’s a laborious problem to solve not a difficult one.

But man hours are the expensive part. So it’s one of the things that gets cut first.

Not so sure of the nuance, I doubt it is something easy to do for beginners you just need to have hours to do it, I feel to do better than the UE 4 approach would be quite difficult not just long and in term of software project, I imagine the amount of man hours that went into Unreal engine development since the first launch of V4 has been monstrous, internet seem to talk about moie than 200 employees.

What would be harder than that in game development software engineering ?

 

[Lakados]

Not so sure of the nuance, I doubt it is something easy to do for beginners you just need to have hours to do it, I feel to do better than the UE 4 approach would be quite difficult not just long and in term of software project, I imagine the amount of man hours that went into Unreal engine development since the first launch of V4 has been monstrous, internet seem to talk about moie than 200 employees.

What would be harder than that in game development software engineering ?

It’s more about having to prep the assets over and over for different compressions and verifying that things still look good on the way out.
So it’s paying an art team to do the same thing 3 or 4 times and it takes them about the same time each time.

Epic and UE5 have some tools that came out with 5.2?? That lets you do it all in one shot but I believe they have a separate license for that.

 

[LukeTbk]

It’s more about having to prep the assets over and over for different compressions and verifying that things still look good on the way out.
So it’s paying an art team to do the same thing 3 or 4 times and it takes them about the same time each time.

Epic and UE5 have some tools that came out with 5.2?? That lets you do it all in one shot but I believe they have a separate license for that.

A i thought you were still talking about multhi-thread (the parallel processing part of the answer), discard my comments.

With modern DX12-Vulkan type, the program has also a lot of manual control to decide what stay and what get removed from the vram and how to optimize that part.The way to predict if something is worth to keep to avoid reload balanced in keeping room and how much, and make all that scale well with vram available.... It is a place where machine learning could maybe help if you have enough fire power and agents able to play the game reasonably well (or beta run in the wild), build a predictive model for it.

 

[Lakados]

A i thought you were still talking about multhi-thread (the parallel processing part of the answer), discard my comments.

With modern DX12-Vulkan type, the program has also a lot of manual control to decide what stay and what get removed from the vram and how to optimize that part.

There’s that too.