Unreal Engine 5.1 adds some cool new stuff

A big one they barely mentioned is foliage now using the nano stuff or whatever it's called. I saw some guy's video showing it off and the performance and detail is amazing. He did a massive forest.
 
sharknice said:
A big one they barely mentioned is foliage now using the nano stuff or whatever it's called. I saw some guy's video showing it off and the performance and detail is amazing. He did a massive forest.
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5.1 and the changes seem to have some huge improvements on open area content. It looks straight up awesome.
 
Witcher Remake will be using this, but probably release in 2028 or some time
 
honestly, seeing that "virtual production" in this was mind blowing - hadn't even considered that application of the engine!
 
sharknice said:
A big one they barely mentioned is foliage now using the nano stuff or whatever it's called. I saw some guy's video showing it off and the performance and detail is amazing. He did a massive forest.
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So finally realistic forests/jungles in games? Though the problem will still be NPCs.
 
I'm excited to see what Stormgate does with it. Hopefully they have some high end settings. There hasn't been a good RTS with bleeding edge graphics in a long time.
And with Unreal Engine they could do some really cool first person stuff along with the traditional isometric view. If they don't I bet there will be some awesome mods that do it.
 
Love the new visuals. Sounds like a lot of this leverages dedicated hardware for acceleration though.

Of course, the #1 reason why people stop playing UE games is cheaters. Reasons #2-100 are also cheaters. It might be cool if one of these decades, they tried building some cheat management directly into the engine rather than leaving it up to individual game developers to code their own bandaids on a broken engine.
 
Reason # 2,567,300 that raster is better than performance sucking ray tracing.
 
Lakados said:
5.1 and the changes seem to have some huge improvements on open area content. It looks straight up awesome.
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Wait but I'm still waiting on the 5.0 improvements. Meaning, where are the games?!
 
This hit Fortnite last night. It is GORGEOUS. Make your rig bleed though lol. They did a whole Chapter change just for the engine after only four seasons on Chapter 3/ UE 5.0

5.0 had pretty decent foliage, but the nanites are next level. Ray tracing seems to be very well implemented, it shows up in places I do not expect it at all.

I am going to need a 7900xtx or a 4080 though to run it higher than 1080 at max.
 
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7900xtx and ray tracing?

nope-no.gif
 
idiomatic said:
This hit Fortnite last night. It is GORGEOUS. Make your rig bleed though lol. They did a whole Chapter change just for the engine after only four seasons on Chapter 3/ UE 5.0

5.0 had pretty decent foliage, but the nanites are next level. Ray tracing seems to be very well implemented, it shows up in places I do not expect it at all.

I am going to need a 7900xtx or a 4080 though to run it higher than 1080 at max.
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Nice, I'll have to try it out with my 4090
 
DPI said:
Wait but I'm still waiting on the 5.0 improvements. Meaning, where are the games?!
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Always takes a few years. Lots of UE4 projects still being worked on and coming out. I'm sure most projects not in the beta phase will probably update to the newest version though.
 
I'm getting around 70fps average in Fortnite UE 5.1 with a 4090. Nantite, Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps all on and set to their highest with hardware ray tracing enabled and resolution at native 100%. Temporal Super Resolution on "quality" boosts performance significantly but is noticeably blurry so I left it at native.

The visual upgrade looks impressive, I have to say.

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looks like Fortnite Chapter 4 is the first game to use UE 5.1...looks pretty impressive
 
Flogger23m said:
So finally realistic forests/jungles in games? Though the problem will still be NPCs.
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Agreed, amazing forests and cover that obstructs your aim and NPCs that aren't affected at all just makes me want to turn it off/lowest settings to level the playing field a bit. Kind of like the one thing I hated about the Dark Souls games, NPC homing arrows.
 
Shader mesh is really cool, seems like a really solid implementation. I've read a few papers on it but some of that math is a little over my head, I'm not really into the computer graphics space but I've learned a bit. Good to see tool sets improving, I have to dive into unreal some time. I've been working in Unity for 5 years now and it's great but these are some really nice tools.
 
Captain Newmackwa said:
I'm getting around 70fps average in Fortnite UE 5.1 with a 4090. Nantite, Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps all on and set to their highest with hardware ray tracing enabled and resolution at native 100%. Temporal Super Resolution on "quality" boosts performance significantly but is noticeably blurry so I left it at native.

The visual upgrade looks impressive, I have to say.

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Lumen is extremely heavy on Epic, you should get a good boost turning it to high. It's intended for 30fps upscaled from 1080p on next gen consoles like PS5. High is targeting 60fps.

They absolutely expect you to be using some kind of upscaling - TSR is kinda meh compared to DLSS though.
 
LurkerLito said:
Agreed, amazing forests and cover that obstructs your aim and NPCs that aren't affected at all just makes me want to turn it off/lowest settings to level the playing field a bit. Kind of like the one thing I hated about the Dark Souls games, NPC homing arrows.
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This has always been such a huge problem in games. LoD was always something that needed to be accounted for. Anyone who played ArmA games knows how the grass at a distance turns into a flat block covering the ground and a prone soldier is 100% invisible in it. UE5 seems like it would take care of that aspect. The problem would still be ensuring NPCs are inhibited the same way human players are.

I think this is a great first step. Without 5-8 layers of varying foliage LoD, developers can program for one type of obstruction. However this will still be very difficult. I would like to see the UE devs work on this next. There is the visual aspect of this (greatly improved) and the gameplay aspect. Would be great if the gameplay aspect followed. It would actually fix a massive gameplay limitation that has plagued games forever.
 
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Flogger23m said:
This has always been such a huge problem in games. LoD was always something that needed to be accounted for. Anyone who played ArmA games knows how the grass at a distance turns into a flat block covering the ground and a prone soldier is 100% invisible in it. UE5 seems like it would take care of that aspect. The problem would still be ensuring NPCs are inhibited the same way human players are.

I think this is a great first step. Without 5-8 layers of varying foliage LoD, developers can program for one type of obstruction. However this will still be very difficult. I would like to see the UE devs work on this next. There is the visual aspect of this (greatly improved) and the gameplay aspect. Would be great if the gameplay aspect followed. It would actually fix a massive gameplay limitation that has plagued games forever.
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The biggest improvement with Shader Mesh will absolutely be from the artistry side. LODs are simple enough for developers to implement even in a custom engine, they take a ton of time for custom assets. Having 1 asset that dynamically makes it's own LODs is a godsend for small teams making high quality games. Tool sets like these open up the space more to AA developers to have fantastic looking games.
 
Decko87 said:
The biggest improvement with Shader Mesh will absolutely be from the artistry side. LODs are simple enough for developers to implement even in a custom engine, they take a ton of time for custom assets. Having 1 asset that dynamically makes it's own LODs is a godsend for small teams making high quality games. Tool sets like these open up the space more to AA developers to have fantastic looking games.
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I'm mainly talking about how NPCs react to LoD. ArmA is a perfect example of AI that doesn't react to LOD changes like the player as the LOD greatly changes vegetation shape/visuals.
 
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I am trying to tune for the my hardware and staying fluld with the game, I do play alittle and had also killed 2 other people alone as why my reboot card was setting there, the other team members was unless lol..

30fps will never cut it in this game.

 
sharknice said:
A big one they barely mentioned is foliage now using the nano stuff or whatever it's called. I saw some guy's video showing it off and the performance and detail is amazing. He did a massive forest.
Click to expand...
Called nanite. It's very impressive and really not only improves graphics but efficiency.
 
ZeroBarrier said:
Was there any doubt it would be otherwise?
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I think a part of the ray-tracing discussion has to be application. CP2077 and Control require brute forcing RT features. Whereas Unreal 5.1 is all about optimizing RT features down a specific pipe of what gives the biggest image impacts while minimizing performance issues. Considering all consoles run off of AMD, and now they all have RT features baked into Fortnite, it was a really good demonstration that even with not "best in class" hardware really nice RT features can be implemented.

As much as I hate Epic, their engine is incredible. And for the 99% of gamers, UE will be the performance expectation vs CP2077 which arguably is the new Crysis: pretty and unoptimized. High end RT is still in the hands of a scant few. Although hardware can't iterate fast enough, if software doesn't meet us where we are, then putting a bunch of features in games that no one can see/use is equally useless.
 
Could have been interesting if the latest GPU review would have try to include some Unreal 5.1 to give some idea.

For example, according to:
https://www.hwupgrade.it/articoli/s...sione-geforce-rtx-4080-accerchiata_index.html


fortnite.png


Would it be a sign that Unreal 5.1 RT ways are memory bandwith heavy and would give a big edge to the 3090 over the 4080 at 4k ? Maybe it will end up completely irrelevant has we are even under 60 fps.

Maybe the many UE 5 demo are not optimised enough to be used and Fortnite being an multiplayer only affair too hard to benchmark correctly
 
UnknownSouljer said:
CP2077 and Control require brute forcing RT features. Whereas Unreal 5.1 is all about optimizing RT features down a specific pipe of what gives the biggest image impacts while minimizing performance issues.
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Cyberpunk 1440p RT ultra on a 4090: 94 fps, Fortnite: 96 fps

Control 4k, RT: 68 fps, Fortnite: 69 fps
Control 1440p RT: 131 fps, Fortnite: 96 fps

Fornite has much simpler scene/asset created for ultra-fast speed to be able to run on a switch, I am not sure how much it demonstrate some performance edge versus previous Rt implementation. Maybe it look much better when you play it too.
 
LukeTbk said:
Cyberpunk 1440p RT ultra on a 4090: 94 fps, Fortnite: 96 fps

Control 4k, RT: 68 fps, Fortnite: 69 fps
Control 1440p RT: 131 fps, Fortnite: 96 fps

Fornite has much simpler scene/asset created for ultra-fast speed to be able to run on a switch, I am not sure how much it demonstrate some performance edge versus previous Rt implementation. Maybe it look much better when you play it too.
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I haven't looked into all of the 5.1 + Fortnite + RT benches yet, but I did watch that entire video reviewing Fortnite on various consoles vs PC (and not comparison directly to other PC titles). And it's clear to me a few things:
1.) No console has performance equivalent equal to a 4090. This point is obvious and irrefutable.
2.) Both the PS5 and XB are capable of running Fortnite with RT features on at 60 fps in 4k.
3.) Both the PS5 and XB are obviously using resolution up-scaling reconstruction techniques as well as other optimization to run Fortnite with these features and to reach 4k/60 frame locked.
4.) Cyberpunk doesn't run nearly as well on consoles and is incapable of consistent frame rates with any form of RT features on on PS5 or XB.

Is Unreal 5.1 as optimized on desktop as on consoles? Is there some other factor I'm missing other than resolution upscaling techniques? I don't know. But at least on consoles there is a very obvious uplift in both visual quality and performance vs other titles that are also utilizing RT. And it's hard to compare titles head to head on PC without at least discussing what settings give the most visual benefit with the least amount of performance hit (or just give the greatest visual benefit in general) as well as what settings and what upscaling techniques. When you throw a bunch of fps averages at me, they lack context. I'm not saying your numbers are wrong, but without context, know what precisely we're getting in relationship to one another is difficult.
 
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