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Unreal Engine 5 Feature Showcase

They have announced PhysX 5.0 and was scheduled to have it out already with its new and shiny features but <insert COVID delay story here> so it's not out yet but they say soon, they are making some pretty grand promises about it so far and if half of them are true it should at long last give Havok a serious contender.

wow PhysX is still alive!...I thought Nvidia might have abandoned it
 
Didn't Microsoft buy Havok?
Yea... from Intel, many years later. Havok showed off GPU accelerated Physics running on AMD and nVidia hardware at GDC March 2006. Intel bought Havok in 2007 and after that *poof*, no more GPU accelerated Havok.

Only due to not hitting critical mass. You couldn't do any gameplay impacting physics with it because most didn't have it yet.
That and if you really tied the game-play to the GPU only PhysX part you would be making your game nVidia only. No one wants to return to that crap.
 
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Only due to not hitting critical mass. You couldn't do any gameplay impacting physics with it because most didn't have it yet.

I doubt it.
It's possible it would have evolved to that, but it was made specifically for superficial things that CPUs could not do.
Like thousands of sparks realistically flying off a wall from machinegun fire and hundreds of bullet casings getting ejected from a chaingun. A GPU can do a whole ton of individual calculations because it has thousands of "cores" that can handle each one versus a CPU that has very few cores (especially back then).

It doesn't make sense to use GPU to do basic things like player collision and hit detection because a CPU can do it much faster.
If there was a critical mass adaption you could have seen games actually utilize it as part of core gameplay, but it would not have been for normal physics CPUs aren't capable of doing.
 
I doubt it.
It's possible it would have evolved to that, but it was made specifically for superficial things that CPUs could not do.
Like thousands of sparks realistically flying off a wall from machinegun fire and hundreds of bullet casings getting ejected from a chaingun. A GPU can do a whole ton of individual calculations because it has thousands of "cores" that can handle each one versus a CPU that has very few cores (especially back then).

It doesn't make sense to use GPU to do basic things like player collision and hit detection because a CPU can do it much faster.
If there was a critical mass adaption you could have seen games actually utilize it as part of core gameplay, but it would not have been for normal physics CPUs aren't capable of doing.
There’s also the fact that more often than not your GPU just doesn’t have the resources to spare to do physics and AI in conjunction with the graphics it’s already doing.

Take physics and AI off the CPU and watch your frame rates take a 20% nosedive while your CPU suddenly sits under 30% utilization.

Having the GPU which is almost always pinned take on non graphical tasks while the CPU goes mostly unused would be a disservice to everyone.

Yeah the effects or the NPC’s would be better but gameplay would suffer overwhelmingly as a result negating any benefit from it. Honestly we would be better served by a small compute card and a dedicated audio processor at this stage.
 
Yea... from Intel, many years later. Havok showed off GPU accelerated Physics running on AMD and nVidia hardware at GDC March 2006. Intel bought Havok in 2007 and after that *poof*, no more GPU accelerated Havok.
Now I remember that, wow, I had almost completely forgotten that somehow.
 
Yea... from Intel, many years later. Havok showed off GPU accelerated Physics running on AMD and nVidia hardware at GDC March 2006. Intel bought Havok in 2007 and after that *poof*, no more GPU accelerated Havok.
That had more to do with AMD, AMD/ATI was working with Havok for Havok-FX which was the OpenCL variant https://web.archive.org/web/2008120...m/news/multimedia/display/20051028224421.html

AMD/ATI later stabbed Havok in the back took the resources they could and launched their own proprietary platform ATI Stream https://www.extremetech.com/computing/80608-amd-introduces-ati-stream, but the SDK never really came together, they built the libraries but they had almost no documentation and AMD/ATI offered little to no assistance with integration so it died a painful death.

After AMD left Havok high and dry they had to look elsewhere which lead them to Trinity https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/trinigy-and-havok-to-integrate-game-technologies

It gets messy from there as talent is shuffled around and things are rebranded but ultimately they landed at Microsoft…

Note:
I say AMD/ATI because they hadn’t killed off the ATI brand yet.
 
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This is made in Unity but is still in experimental phase of development.


I wish they'd used a fictional character that wasn't white, but black and a fellow LGBQT-zer.

Kidding. Very impressive for Unity, we're heading towards the golden age of high quality cinematography/games without the need for high dollar studios.
 
Very impressive for Unity, we're heading towards the golden age of high quality cinematography/games without the need for high dollar studios.
Only problem is these experimental features are taking too long to reach development version.
 
Something I have yet to see is how the file sizes will be handled. Without low poly models, how much larger do the art assets become in file storage?
 
Something I have yet to see is how the file sizes will be handled. Without low poly models, how much larger do the art assets become in file storage?

Wouldn't that help with file size if there aren't lower LoD models?
 
The artist renders a high polygon model and then it's optimized and rendered again as the "low poly" which is smaller by orders of magnitude. The high poly model is kept in the developer storage and the low poly is the one that's used in-game. But as I understand it, UE5 allows this part of the pipeline to be completely eliminated which is absolutely incredible. But then without those optimizations in polygon count I would assume the storage issue is passed onto the user. I haven't seen anything addressing this but with UE5 released we'll probably see any issues aroudn this in the next few months I'm guessing. A high poly model is so much larger in size than a few LoDs combined for any specific asset. Maybe I'm out of date with my knowledge, I wonder if anybody has made anything with UE5 yet and can chime in!
 
Something I have yet to see is how the file sizes will be handled. Without low poly models, how much larger do the art assets become in file storage?
From what I understand of how Nanite works it will lead to smaller file sizes, in a talk they put up on Youtube they say that 1M triangles of Nanite data is about 13.8MB of data. That is going to be quite a bit less than the file size of that same object as an HD 4K render, at the same perceivable image quality.

 
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The artist renders a high polygon model and then it's optimized and rendered again as the "low poly" which is smaller by orders of magnitude. The high poly model is kept in the developer storage and the low poly is the one that's used in-game. But as I understand it, UE5 allows this part of the pipeline to be completely eliminated which is absolutely incredible. But then without those optimizations in polygon count I would assume the storage issue is passed onto the user. I haven't seen anything addressing this but with UE5 released we'll probably see any issues aroudn this in the next few months I'm guessing. A high poly model is so much larger in size than a few LoDs combined for any specific asset. Maybe I'm out of date with my knowledge, I wonder if anybody has made anything with UE5 yet and can chime in!
Starts coming down to compression tech and the ability to rapidly access that. From my understanding, on Windows we should start seeing games using stuff like MS's DirectX "DirectStorage" to help with that.
 
Starts coming down to compression tech and the ability to rapidly access that. From my understanding, on Windows we should start seeing games using stuff like MS's DirectX "DirectStorage" to help with that.
The Nanite data compress better as well and decompresses faster (with the help of the GPU), from what I am seeing from the source the assets from Valley of the ancients are about 100GB raw and only 26GB compressed and compiled, using a normal technique on those assets would probably have landed the demo in the 60GB range.
 
Wow that's absolutely incredible! I can't imagine what kind of wizardry is happening under the hood. This is going to change the industry. I have a strong feeling there are going to be lots more indie games produced with UE5 now that a huge chunk of the art pipeline is just eliminated. That makes for faster and cheaper development which should mean more quality games!
 
Wow that's absolutely incredible! I can't imagine what kind of wizardry is happening under the hood. This is going to change the industry. I have a strong feeling there are going to be lots more indie games produced with UE5 now that a huge chunk of the art pipeline is just eliminated. That makes for faster and cheaper development which should mean more quality games!
Most of the new projects that have been announced for the upcoming release cycle are all UE5 titles
https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/unreal-engine-5-games
 
The Nanite data compress better as well and decompresses faster (with the help of the GPU), from what I am seeing from the source the assets from Valley of the ancients are about 100GB raw and only 26GB compressed and compiled, using a normal technique on those assets would probably have landed the demo in the 60GB range.
Awesome!
 
Wouldn't that help with file size if there aren't lower LoD models?
Yes, this is one thing that helps Nanite saves space.

The rest is you maybe being able to get away with avoiding high resolution textures. Even at over a million triangles, the Nanite mesh is smaller than a single 4k normal map.

Plus Epic also bought RAD Game Tools, the company. One of their products was... extremely fast compression. They were the authors of the compression scheme the PS5 and Xbox implement in hardware.
 
Yes, this is one thing that helps Nanite saves space.

The rest is you maybe being able to get away with avoiding high resolution textures. Even at over a million triangles, the Nanite mesh is smaller than a single 4k normal map.

Plus Epic also bought RAD Game Tools, the company. One of their products was... extremely fast compression. They were the authors of the compression scheme the PS5 and Xbox implement in hardware.
This is going to get interesting, the smaller resources means more fit in memory, which means fewer fetch requests and faster ones at that. Which frees up more room for other effects.
 
if you were keen to see just how Unreal Engine 5 games will perform on your PC, now’s your chance, thanks to EzBench, a free Unreal Engine 5 benchmark...it’s available as a free download on Steam...the benchmark includes 8K textures plus ray tracing support...

 
Is RTX3050 enough to do optimal raytracing in UE5 at 1080p?
Based on the demo’s you can expect a 3060TI to average in the mid 40’s. So a stock 3050 would be averaging in the upper 20’s with an occasional dip into the single digits.

But I’m sure you could play with some settings to bring it to a playable place.
 
MegaLights Demo

MegaLights, a new experiential feature in 5.5, enables artists to use orders of magnitude more lights...they are movable and dynamic, with realistic area shadows, and can light volumetric fog...


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_p5AvHA9h8


More detailed video

MegaLights demo:

View: https://youtu.be/zefkuPfvpKw?t=4585

Some other things of note on the graphics side from 5.5
- Hardware Lumen also significantly optimized and supposedly viable for 60 fps on consoles.
- Nanite has initial support for skeletal meshes

So, with that, they have a system that solves for direct light (MegaLights), another that solves for indirect (Lumen), and Nanite covers another major hurdle.
 
Unreal Sensei covered stuff at a high-level for 5.5 now that it's out:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcmUZpdChhA
TL;DW:
- Megalights and performance implications
- Optimized Metahumans (~60 MB and very little quality lost vs ~950 MB+ per Metahuman)
- Nanite displacement mesh painting; mesh painting/blending was not supported for Nanite meshes previously
- Much improved sky/cloud and daylight cycle system
 
Since Lumen came along I can light scenes so much faster now. I am sure upgrading my project to 5.5 is gonna be awesome... vert painting on Nanite meshes was a much needed feature.
 
the lighting is neat, but man if only folks put as much effort into realistic animation... the stuck-in-the-2000s jankyness is just unreal
 
Yeah, but I have seen some really good character movement in the last handful of years, hopefully it gets more common.
 
the lighting is neat, but man if only folks put as much effort into realistic animation... the stuck-in-the-2000s jankyness is just unreal
They have actually. They added some sort animation transition stuff and it makes switching from walking to running sliding crouching, running in a curve, etc. look way better, it's also much smarter about choosing which animation to play like if you have variable speeds you can run it can blend and pick much better, and the artists have full control over this and can tweak it and whatnot.
They also added a bunch of physics stuff to animations so running on uneven surfaces, stairs etc all look good with the feet actually touching the surfaces properly and the legs bending correctly, etc. Hands and arms rubbing up against a wall don't clip through, they actually have physical interactions as you're walking.
When games use all this stuff the animations look a hell of a lot better.
 
the lighting is neat, but man if only folks put as much effort into realistic animation... the stuck-in-the-2000s jankyness is just unreal
Rigging is hard, UE5 has some baked in models that offer a better than average result with minimal effort, but transition states are hard and takes effort and thats where most fail.
Running to walking, walking to crouching, running to crouching, jumping... jumping is a hard one as clothing and hair physics tend to get computationally expensive so they tend to skimp it and man does it show...
 
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