Unreal Engine 5.2- Next-Gen Graphics Tech Demo

rgMekanic said:
Is there even any games using UE5?
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Immortals of Aveum, console review by EuroGamer (Digital Foundry)

After five years of development, Immortals of Aveum has landed, with the distinction of being the first non-Epic game to ship on Unreal Engine 5 using all of its next generation features. There's Nanite micro-geometry and ray-traced Lumen lighting, along with virtual shadow maps.
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Game targets 60fps on all consoles.

Upscaling from 720p to 4K/1080p on series X & PS5
Upscaling from 768x436 on series S

Last word by EuroGamer:
That's the console situation and we'll be returning to Immortals of Aveum soon to discuss the situation on PC - but it's not exactly a spoiler to say that this one's going to be challenging on the hardware side too.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfo...ine-5-hard-and-image-quality-suffers#comments
 
Marees said:
Immortals of Aveum, console review by EuroGamer (Digital Foundry)



Game targets 60fps on all consoles.

Upscaling from 720p to 4K/1080p on series X & PS5
Upscaling from 768x436 on series S

Last word by EuroGamer:
That's the console situation and we'll be returning to Immortals of Aveum soon to discuss the situation on PC - but it's not exactly a spoiler to say that this one's going to be challenging on the hardware side too.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfo...ine-5-hard-and-image-quality-suffers#comments
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Seems pretty nice, but the messed up shadows is a Nanite or lighting issue not Lumen or FSR related one.
UE 5 defines shadows with shadow maps done in Nanite and are applied to the mesh. They also don’t do static lights only dynamic ones, so if they have a room or a hall being lit with “standard” static lights as you would have done traditionally then they won’t cast shadows. Standard lights use fewer resources than dynamic ones so if they were seeing it in Boss fights which I assume are visually impressive then they may have implemented static lights for the FPS boost, and forgot about the shadows.
 
Marees said:
Immortals of Aveum, console review by EuroGamer (Digital Foundry)



Game targets 60fps on all consoles.

Upscaling from 720p to 4K/1080p on series X & PS5
Upscaling from 768x436 on series S

Last word by EuroGamer:
That's the console situation and we'll be returning to Immortals of Aveum soon to discuss the situation on PC - but it's not exactly a spoiler to say that this one's going to be challenging on the hardware side too.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfo...ine-5-hard-and-image-quality-suffers#comments
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Unfortunately, the art style in that game leaves a lot to be desired.
 
Marees said:
Immortals of Aveum, console review by EuroGamer (Digital Foundry)



Game targets 60fps on all consoles.

Upscaling from 720p to 4K/1080p on series X & PS5
Upscaling from 768x436 on series S

Last word by EuroGamer:
That's the console situation and we'll be returning to Immortals of Aveum soon to discuss the situation on PC - but it's not exactly a spoiler to say that this one's going to be challenging on the hardware side too.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfo...ine-5-hard-and-image-quality-suffers#comments
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Game runs on UE 5.1
Not enough time to upgrade engine to 5.2 (that would have optimized shader compilation)

Extract below on comments on using Nanite in UE 5.1 by game developers:

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-immortals-of-aveum-tech-interview


It allowed us to build this game much faster with that small of a team.
we actually started building this game in Unreal 4, so a lot of our early kits were started along that traditional pipeline. When we switched over to Nanite and UE5, there was a lot of excitement because we could pack much more detail into the assets themselves... [Originally] there was a high poly [model] done in ZBrush, which was baked down into the classic texture and material to get the shape of it while maintaining a low poly count. But when we switched over to Nanite, suddenly we were able to just bump back to the high poly assets. Figuring out how to unwrap something of that density was definitely a big kind of rethinking of the workflow, because now you're dealing with so many more polygons, in the millions... Once it was in the engine, it was pretty incredible just to start adding millions and millions and millions of polys into the engine and not have it completely crash.

There were a few times on import when sometimes the Nanite flag would not stick, and we'd be re-importing a multi-million poly bookshelf, and we'd be wondering why the engine was stuttering when we looked in that direction. You could see Unreal not knowing how to handle that but as soon as you check that box, it's just handling everything. It's doing the sort of dynamic LODs and the clusters just to the point where our workflow was sped up so significantly, and it was pretty amazing to jump into the Nanite view and see the clusters be adjusted in real time and see how it's optimised.
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we've been able to build a huge Confluence [corporate wiki] page on how Nanite should be handled going forward.
When we first switched over to Unreal [5], we turned Nanite on everything we could. I think 5.0 wasn't [compatible with] foliage, that came a bit later, but as soon as we were able to have Nanite foliage we turned it on. Then we started to pull back from that and [asked] "does this really need to be Nanite?" We were encountering some assets that [were problematic due to] their construction and the way that the UV shells were set up, so we had to rework some of those assets to make it workable with Nanite or change it up entirely and go back to the traditional method. We couldn't use [Nanite] for things that would move, like flags. We really threw everything into the Nanite bucket, to learn from it.
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it works better on consoles
Nanite virtualised geometry is very stream-heavy, it is all about disk I/O. So UE5 is rewriting the I/O pipeline and the optimisations they made for NVMe SSDs. It's designed to work on consoles. On PC, I have no idea what anybody's I/O bandwidth is... The only downside on console is when you're using Nanite, you really need to use streaming virtual textures, you really need a very large virtual texture pool. Consoles have fixed memory, but [a single graphics card] can have more memory than the PS5. So optimising for both of these is really difficult.
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Nanite has just opened the world to making levels that much more beautiful, because now that we're no longer having to rely on normal maps and that sort of fakery that falls apart [at a certain viewing angle]. That [issue] doesn't exist anymore, because the geometry is actually there... you can get up really close to it and it will still have all of that curvature and detail to it.



the first 10 minutes of the game after the theatre cinematic, we do the pan of the Seren Underbridge - that's all real-time, in-game, fully lit Nanite geometry world partitioned area. That thing's huge - I think a lot of us forget just how breathtaking it is; every other game would have [made it] pre-rendered. Real-time lighting, windmills on these buildings spinning in real-time, animated meshes... every time I look at that, I pick up a new detail.
 
Marees said:
Game runs on UE 5.1
Not enough time to upgrade engine to 5.2 (that would have optimized shader compilation)

Extract below on comments on using Nanite in UE 5.1 by game developers:

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-immortals-of-aveum-tech-interview


It allowed us to build this game much faster with that small of a team.



we've been able to build a huge Confluence [corporate wiki] page on how Nanite should be handled going forward.



it works better on consoles




Nanite has just opened the world to making levels that much more beautiful, because now that we're no longer having to rely on normal maps and that sort of fakery that falls apart [at a certain viewing angle]. That [issue] doesn't exist anymore, because the geometry is actually there... you can get up really close to it and it will still have all of that curvature and detail to it.



the first 10 minutes of the game after the theatre cinematic, we do the pan of the Seren Underbridge - that's all real-time, in-game, fully lit Nanite geometry world partitioned area. That thing's huge - I think a lot of us forget just how breathtaking it is; every other game would have [made it] pre-rendered. Real-time lighting, windmills on these buildings spinning in real-time, animated meshes... every time I look at that, I pick up a new detail.
Click to expand...

5.1 = It's going to stutter

i-guarantee-it.gif
 
Marees said:
Game runs on UE 5.1
Not enough time to upgrade engine to 5.2 (that would have optimized shader compilation)

Extract below on comments on using Nanite in UE 5.1 by game developers:

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-immortals-of-aveum-tech-interview


It allowed us to build this game much faster with that small of a team.



we've been able to build a huge Confluence [corporate wiki] page on how Nanite should be handled going forward.



it works better on consoles




Nanite has just opened the world to making levels that much more beautiful, because now that we're no longer having to rely on normal maps and that sort of fakery that falls apart [at a certain viewing angle]. That [issue] doesn't exist anymore, because the geometry is actually there... you can get up really close to it and it will still have all of that curvature and detail to it.



the first 10 minutes of the game after the theatre cinematic, we do the pan of the Seren Underbridge - that's all real-time, in-game, fully lit Nanite geometry world partitioned area. That thing's huge - I think a lot of us forget just how breathtaking it is; every other game would have [made it] pre-rendered. Real-time lighting, windmills on these buildings spinning in real-time, animated meshes... every time I look at that, I pick up a new detail.
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Yeah Unreals open world generation tools for 5.2 especially are dope. Previously you would manually place assets overlap them and resize them and all that jazz but you would have to also remember to clean them up as you go, otherwise it will waste time realizing that there’s lots of stuff inside other things that don’t need rendering but still exist.
The new tools not only populate areas based on your input but more importantly deal with the cleanup. And a big part of optimizing anything is cleaning up clutter, makes for a more fluid outdoor experience with fewer frame rate surprises.

And for all the similarities that using x86 CPU’s brings to the console-pc porting process their storage architecture and memory configuration is so dramatically different that the similarities no longer matter. But PC still has a few years to go before SSD and Mechanical drives aren’t in the bulk of them.
 
socK said:
5.1 = It's going to stutter

View attachment 594346
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Nah, not on anything running NVME4 and ReBAR, or using any NVME3 that has a good controller.

Sadly too many drives out there cheap out on their interface controllers, they benchmark very similarly but the cheaper ones lack some API’s and functions that hinder them when you try to do some of the heavy things like texture streaming.

Microsoft has done a lot to combat that with DirectStorage especially in 1.2 but there’s only so many clever software tricks you can do to make up for lacking hardware.

Note:
One of the reasons AMD was so very excited about their partnerships around NVME4 is that it moves many API features that were optional into the required section of the spec. And outside some of the higher end Phoson controllers most ignored all the optional parts. But those optional parts are all included on the PS5 and Xbox.
 
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socK said:
Legit shocked since even Fortnite hitched until 5.2.
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My brother texted me for the first time in a long while to let me know that the new Fortnight is awesome and I should play with him and his guys. (Not all guys) not a computer person in the slightest, but he’s impressed with how much better it runs on his laptop which is probably something along the lines of a 1660s or a 2060 based on how long ago it was he last asked me for input on a new one.
 
Marees said:
Last word by EuroGamer:
That's the console situation and we'll be returning to Immortals of Aveum soon to discuss the situation on PC - but it's not exactly a spoiler to say that this one's going to be challenging on the hardware side too.
Click to expand...

PC review by EuroGamer / Digital Foundry

Lumen (dynamic lighting) has a significant performance cost that impacts the minimum hardware specs required & might make it appear as if the game has not been "optimized properly", despite years of optimization by the devs

Immortals of Aveum on PC: a demanding game with big hardware requirements​

Unreal Engine 5's new features look beautiful, but require serious kit.
The game is powered by Unreal Engine 5.1 and is the first triple-A title to simultaneously take advantage of several signature UE5 features in order to bring its world to life.
I broke out my old PC equipped with a GTX 1080 and a quad-core Intel i7 7700K. What I found was interesting - at 1080p with FSR 2 quality, high textures and everything else set to low, the game actually remained above 30fps in some pretty demanding areas, at least until I walked through some trees and the frame-rate tanked to the low 20s. So, the game is still playable on hardware well below the minimum spec, but you will be stuck with the lowest settings, and 30-40fps at best. Again, capping things at 30fps to maximise consistency could be the best option, though poor frame-pacing from the in-game's 30fps cap (with v-sync active) isn't great.
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https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfo...e-better-performance-and-visuals-than-console

Our first build to test had an Nvidia RTX 4080 and Intel Core i7 13700K, therefore lining up well with developer Ascendant's recommendations for 4K 60fps gameplay. This build was indeed able to stay around 60fps or above with maxed settings for much of gameplay, though DLSS quality mode wasn't sufficient for large areas with plenty of characters - and I eventually had to drop to DLSS performance mode to iron things out completely.

DLSS 3 frame generation is available for users of 40-series graphics cards, but it's practically unusable at present due to a ghosting effect applied to the game's HUD - something that persists even after the game's first patch. Thankfully, standard DLSS 2 is sufficient for most cases, and the only other issues I noticed were some distracting pop-in and a few stutters here and there - thankfully not of the shader compilation variety, instead being related to traversal or and normally relagated to non-combat moments.

Interestingly, Immortals also supports FSR 2, which is more detailed than either native or DLSS - suggesting it has a different LOD bias, a sharpening filter, or both, included. However, DLSS offers a more stable experience, with better handling of fast-moving objects (eg when swapping weapons). That's with both upscalers set to their quality modes; at performance mode DLSS is still fine but FSR 2 becomes so murky that it's hard to recommend.

Overall, the suggested specs for a 4K60 experience seem to be accurate - but fixing DLSS 3 would make a big difference.
 
Marees said:
PC review by EuroGamer / Digital Foundry

Lumen (dynamic lighting) has a significant performance cost that impacts the minimum hardware specs required & might make it appear as if the game has not been "optimized properly", despite years of optimization by the devs

Immortals of Aveum on PC: a demanding game with big hardware requirements​

Unreal Engine 5's new features look beautiful, but require serious kit.
The game is powered by Unreal Engine 5.1 and is the first triple-A title to simultaneously take advantage of several signature UE5 features in order to bring its world to life.


https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfo...e-better-performance-and-visuals-than-console

Our first build to test had an Nvidia RTX 4080 and Intel Core i7 13700K, therefore lining up well with developer Ascendant's recommendations for 4K 60fps gameplay. This build was indeed able to stay around 60fps or above with maxed settings for much of gameplay, though DLSS quality mode wasn't sufficient for large areas with plenty of characters - and I eventually had to drop to DLSS performance mode to iron things out completely.

DLSS 3 frame generation is available for users of 40-series graphics cards, but it's practically unusable at present due to a ghosting effect applied to the game's HUD - something that persists even after the game's first patch. Thankfully, standard DLSS 2 is sufficient for most cases, and the only other issues I noticed were some distracting pop-in and a few stutters here and there - thankfully not of the shader compilation variety, instead being related to traversal or and normally relagated to non-combat moments.

Interestingly, Immortals also supports FSR 2, which is more detailed than either native or DLSS - suggesting it has a different LOD bias, a sharpening filter, or both, included. However, DLSS offers a more stable experience, with better handling of fast-moving objects (eg when swapping weapons). That's with both upscalers set to their quality modes; at performance mode DLSS is still fine but FSR 2 becomes so murky that it's hard to recommend.

Overall, the suggested specs for a 4K60 experience seem to be accurate - but fixing DLSS 3 would make a big difference.
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I just read a comment on Steam saying people should wait for the 5090ti for Immortal of Aveum that was a review.
 
Unreal Engine 5.3 Feature Highlights

Epic shared a new video that highlights some of the improvements introduced in it, such as enhancements to core rendering, developer iteration, and virtual production toolsets, experimental new rendering, animation, and simulation features, such as cinematic-quality volumetric rendering, orthographic rendering, a Skeletal Editor, panel-based Chaos Cloth, and support for SMPTE ST 2110...


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4_msnAbJtk
 
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I've been playing with Nanite and Lumen - lumen in particular is pretty amazing how easy it is to get to an "amazing" starting point for lighting a scene. Have emissive materials that can actually cast light out into 3D worldspace is nuts.
 
Blakestr said:
I've been playing with Nanite and Lumen - lumen in particular is pretty amazing how easy it is to get to an "amazing" starting point for lighting a scene. Have emissive materials that can actually cast light out into 3D worldspace is nuts.
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Yeah, UE5 has a lot of very significant time-saving features. Any projects that aren't too deep into other engines to make the change should seriously consider it.
 
Blakestr said:
I've been playing with Nanite and Lumen - lumen in particular is pretty amazing how easy it is to get to an "amazing" starting point for lighting a scene. Have emissive materials that can actually cast light out into 3D worldspace is nuts.
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Man, I remember lighting Quake 3 maps. Static lights, faking dynamic lights with shaders, and other trickery (only to have people play it using r_fullbright 1 or whatever that option was). Such a chore waiting for it to bake. Even with a modern CPU, it's still time consuming. Now in UE5 we can do it, in engine, in real time, at acceptable performance, while in developer mode, not even a final compiled product. That is insanely awesome.
 
LodeRunner said:
Man, I remember lighting Quake 3 maps. Static lights, faking dynamic lights with shaders, and other trickery (only to have people play it using r_fullbright 1 or whatever that option was). Such a chore waiting for it to bake. Even with a modern CPU, it's still time consuming. Now in UE5 we can do it, in engine, in real time, at acceptable performance, while in developer mode, not even a final compiled product. That is insanely awesome.
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And I haven't even touched Chaos yet - I had my project in UE4 since 2017. Just upgraded to 5.2, spent the last two months fixing shit that broke/needed to be updated.

I remember spending a few days using Blender to make cell fracturing to make rubble and other effects. That was 3 years ago, and I was impressed back then even though it was baked. Real-time is sorcery.
 
socK said:
Is that a YouTube video of someone watching a YouTube video on Twitch
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I mean, It's like watching the original with someone else. Generally the people who watch his video aren't going to watch the original, and its like getting two streams of info at once, the video, and his interpretation of it.
 
5.3 Really is a game changer though, the tools it brings to the table for open world generation and population are a really big deal.
Paired with a number of AI tools for dynamic content generation and it is something that saves Months or Years in man hours for world building and debugging.
 
Lakados said:
5.3 Really is a game changer though, the tools it brings to the table for open world generation and population are a really big deal.
Paired with a number of AI tools for dynamic content generation and it is something that saves Months or Years in man hours for world building and debugging.
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All for the wonderful prospect of running games at 720p upscaled to 4k at 30FPS 😍
 
KazeoHin said:
All for the wonderful prospect of running games at 720p upscaled to 4k at 30FPS 😍
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I should have sprung for a similarly priced 1080p screen instead of the 1440p one I do have. Would have made keeping frames up an easier job I think. But oh wells hindsight and all that.
 
UE 5 games run equivalent or better than series S version on steam deck OLED at 720p

However if there is no series S version (PS5 exclusive) then there could be trouble

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-is-unreal-engine-5-too-big-for-steam-deck

So is Unreal Engine 5 "too big for Steam Deck"? I don't think so - but you need to accept some brutal compromises in resolution. Even so, they work and these early titles are a good indication that UE5 titles can scale well to the Steam Deck. Granted, these are somewhat less complex games than we're likely to see in the coming years, but they manage to run decently well on Steam Deck hardware, with the exception of Fort Solis. Key parts of the UE5 feature set, like Lumen, can function on the Deck and even excel, depending on the game. And performance is firmly in playable territory, with broadly 30fps and above frame-rates.

We aren't getting the full high-end PC or console experience here, but considering the hardware, the results are quite good. Given the way other high-end titles can run on the Deck, I really wasn't expecting these UE5 titles to run as well as they do. And the Steam Deck OLED's display is a great way to show off the kind of dynamic lighting detail UE5 is capable of.

Unreal Engine 5, despite all my expectations, proves a decent match for the Steam Deck. Titles like Hellblade 2 or STALKER 2 may prove a challenging fit, but for now the Deck is well-suited to typical UE5 workloads.
 
Marees said:
UE 5 games run equivalent or better than series S version on steam deck OLED at 720p

However if there is no series S version (PS5 exclusive) then there could be trouble

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-is-unreal-engine-5-too-big-for-steam-deck

So is Unreal Engine 5 "too big for Steam Deck"? I don't think so - but you need to accept some brutal compromises in resolution. Even so, they work and these early titles are a good indication that UE5 titles can scale well to the Steam Deck. Granted, these are somewhat less complex games than we're likely to see in the coming years, but they manage to run decently well on Steam Deck hardware, with the exception of Fort Solis. Key parts of the UE5 feature set, like Lumen, can function on the Deck and even excel, depending on the game. And performance is firmly in playable territory, with broadly 30fps and above frame-rates.

We aren't getting the full high-end PC or console experience here, but considering the hardware, the results are quite good. Given the way other high-end titles can run on the Deck, I really wasn't expecting these UE5 titles to run as well as they do. And the Steam Deck OLED's display is a great way to show off the kind of dynamic lighting detail UE5 is capable of.

Unreal Engine 5, despite all my expectations, proves a decent match for the Steam Deck. Titles like Hellblade 2 or STALKER 2 may prove a challenging fit, but for now the Deck is well-suited to typical UE5 workloads.
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The fact it works at all in the Deck is a bit of a miracle, a cut down custom GPU with performance around GTX 1050. FSR3 will let them do some fun upscaling things but overall the package is cut back in ways where it will then suffer in other ways.

The newer AMD mobile SoC packages will handle it better but there’s only so much you can do on 15-20w.

I’m very interested to know how UE5 will work on the new Switch, it is replacing Unity as the default development environment.
 
GoldenTiger said:
Where did you find this out from?
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Combination of rumours, it was Unity, but Unity lost a big contract which was the one of the precursors to their much loved pricing structure change.

The others come from job postings from developers who are picking up UE5 developers who are working on titles who are likely to have switch releases.

Some settings and profiles that have been making their way into the UE5 tool set which seem oddly geared towards a low power device with both hardware ray tracing and DLSS.

And lastly, games to date that have all been rumoured to be shown as the demos for the upcoming switch have all been running in the UE5 engine.

So no one thing, but a combination of them.
 
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