Epic Games Preparing Unreal Engine 5 For Debut In 2021 With Increased Photo-Realism

[ElectricPrism]

"Photo Realistic" -- I wonder if some dude just went around photographing objects XD

There are large segments of their videos that are nearly pitch black, the whole video might as well be a solid #000000 texture

Throw in some motion blurring so you can't see what you're looking at and some JPEG like artifact in the video and bam "realistic".

In all seriousness I'm sure they'll do a good job but it's always the tech demos that look great and the products that look terrible. This boneheaded need to copy the world 1:1 will never make sense to me -- we know what the real world looks like so any facsimile will fall short, things usually look the dopest when they don't try to copy the real world. Also I may not be the average gamer, but I want to escape into interesting fantasy worlds not a fucking Call of Duty IRL clone (not saying a few hours wouldn't be fun).

Still I'm sure their engine improvements are impressive.

[andyprough]

"Real life - what's that??"
"It's like movie CG, only not as good."
"Ooooh. Retro."

[mroche]

I have not tried to compile it in many years, so I could be wrong. My response regarding clang is purely from what I read online. To compile on Linux: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/...ted/index.html as for compiling on Windows this post is from 2014 caveats are listed too https://forums.unrealengine.com/deve...ile-on-windows

I compile UE4 every few months just to mess around, and on Linux it’s gotten mighty simple. They essentially package the entire toolchain together for you integrated into the editor. There’s a handful of system level dependencies, but anything big (the the compiler, Mono, etc) is handled by the install process.

Cheers,
Mike

[Soul_keeper]

I guess a linux supporting unreal tournament update would be out of the question ?

[Jabberwocky]

Ah, I meant Cling (https://root.cern.ch/cling).

My bad. This is very interesting!

"Photo Realistic" -- I wonder if some dude just went around photographing objects XD

What was really funny to me was "Increased Photo-Realism"... what version are they at? Photo-Realism 2.4? xD

If anyone is really wondering about the mega-scans/assets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iQJkSpOoOQ

[ix900]

In all seriousness I'm sure they'll do a good job but it's always the tech demos that look great and the products that look terrible. This boneheaded need to copy the world 1:1 will never make sense to me -- we know what the real world looks like so any facsimile will fall short, things usually look the dopest when they don't try to copy the real world. Also I may not be the average gamer, but I want to escape into interesting fantasy worlds not a fucking Call of Duty IRL clone (not saying a few hours wouldn't be fun)..

This boneheaded need to copy the world 1:1 will never make sense to me

What else are they going to copy, poo world? The moon so that every game has no gravity and is weirdly lit? 16 colors? Might as well base it on cereal.

[Teggs]

The same questions as always:

1. How is the Linux support.

2. How is the Vulkan support.

"Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and in full release late in 2021, supporting next-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android." Classic Tim Sweeney obfuscation there. To some game developers 'PC' does mean Windows and Linux, sharing a single download, with Mac being a separate item. And to some developers PC is "Windows only of course" and they think you are weird for asking. Then there is Sweeney himself, who somewhat supports Linux in his engine, but not in his world-sales-leading game or on his game store. I am not going to play a guessing game with this.

I like to play the games, and it's difficult if the engine is giving the devs so many bugs they don't want to put out a Linux build (i.e. Unreal 4 or Unity), or if they are using Direct X instead of Vulkan for the same reason.

I'm in favour of photorealism being possible for those games that call for it, but those games are a minority in the market. Godot is still going to eat Unreal's lunch, I expect. Also, this may be a preview of what Godot 5 will look like in a few years, given how fast that project is moving.

Still, nice work on the Tech, Unreal team.

[mdedetrich]

Its interesting, apparently the main reason why it looks so good texture wise is that PS5 apparently has custom built SSD's that can achieve speeds of up to ~5.5 gigabytes a second (reference here https://www.ign.com/articles/ps5-ssd...ts-high-end-pc ). This is around 10 times faster than the fastest SSD's right now for PC's, it appears that for the first time a console actually beats high end PC's.

Basically all of the textures are being streamed realtime through the SSD, with 8k textures it seems like such a thing would only be possible at such speeds.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Epic have never been very good at making character models that look like real people. They always look like steroid-abusing psychopaths, plasticine models, or robots. But (with the exception of Unreal Engine 3, and its issues with widescreen aspect ratios) they do write engines which can give some nice results.

Its interesting, apparently the main reason why it looks so good texture wise is that PS5 apparently has custom built SSD's that can achieve speeds of up to ~5.5 gigabytes a second (reference here https://www.ign.com/articles/ps5-ssd...ts-high-end-pc ). This is around 10 times faster than the fastest SSD's right now for PC's, it appears that for the first time a console actually beats high end PC's.

I'm sure PCI-E 4.0 NVMe SSDs are currently hitting speeds in the range of 4.5GB/s, and PCI-E 3.0 NMVe SSDs are in excess of 3GB/s, so the PS5 SSD isn't that much faster. Samsung announced recently that they have an SSD capable of 8GB/s - the PM1733.

Sure, the PS5 is ten times faster than SATA SSDs... but NVMe has been a thing for a while now.

[polarathene]

"Photo Realistic" -- I wonder if some dude just went around photographing objects XD

In all seriousness I'm sure they'll do a good job but it's always the tech demos that look great and the products that look terrible. This boneheaded need to copy the world 1:1 will never make sense to m

Fun fact, these two UE4 projects are made from taking many photographs and then having a computer convert all those 2D images into 3D data, followed by several months of preparing that data and optimizing it for real-time use in VR, I worked on both:

Fancy art gallery: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7...The_Homestead/

Egyptian tomb (off limits to public tourists): https://store.steampowered.com/app/8...y_to_Eternity/

They're fairly small scene size wise, done on what I understand is considered a small budget in the industry. Technically tech demos, not something I see people pulling out their wallets for, but still pretty neat to experience with a decent VR headset.

Original data for the egypt one was like over 100GB in binary mesh data. It's been a while since I worked on them, but I think one was about 20GB in textures alone which is understandably overkill for any practical products like games(content ratio wise), I wasn't the one who made such decisions though, projects like these are still effective at generating good PR for a company to attract new clients and sponsorships/partnerships.

That 20GB of textures was spread over 100 8k UDIM tiles, each with multiple 8k textures(colour, normals, roughness, etc). Mesh went from well over a billion triangles down to less than 2 million, that gets further sub-divided into smaller chunks that then receive LODs to reduce further at runtime based on distance to camera. Likewise, textures have a similar optimization with mipmaps, so the 8k textures are only when you're right up close with the headset, while stuff in the distance can get away with less. In addition to that there is a texture packing/streaming technology UE provides which basically dices up those 8k textures as well into smaller blocks of data for streaming it efficiently. Still required at least a GTX 1070 I think to run, and even that might not achieve acceptable frame rates for VR, I had only tried it via GTX 1080TI and Titan XP.

Lot of the technical work I did and optimizations seem to lose relevance once UE5 drops, so long as file size is a non-issue(doubtful people are going to want games that are terabytes in size?). Guess I need to adapt and build skills elsewhere

What was really funny to me was "Increased Photo-Realism"... what version are they at? Photo-Realism 2.4? xD

Well, each advancement is a little more closer to photo-realism, I guess they're just being a bit more honest about that? :P

Marketing speak... like those comparison images for certain technologies showing a competitor as washed out low contrast and blurred/pixelated image..

The rendering tech...renders better, more fancy algorithms, more performance, more etc, equals increased photo-realism

This is some pretty big achievement though, traditionally you'd have to do a lot more effort to deliver content at that level that'd work at real-time.

This is around 10 times faster than the fastest SSD's right now for PC's, it appears that for the first time a console actually beats high end PC's.

Basically all of the textures are being streamed realtime through the SSD, with 8k textures it seems like such a thing would only be possible at such speeds.

While it certainly helps to have faster read speeds, you can deliver quite a bit already. See the two projects I linked above that were done in 2017, those have over 100 8k textures and stream them through some fancy tech available in UE4 without needing super fast read speeds from disk(20GB of texture data for small scenes).

I imagine the mesh streaming is similar to the texture one, and you can fit quite a bit of mesh data into binary files, I think the scene meshes we delivered were only around 100MB, vs the 100GB source data(compressed binary), which also contained colour information. It certainly will be interesting to see how it plays out, but I don't think games will be delivering multi-TB payloads for a faster time to market?

The projects I linked still required some reasonable hardware to work well in VR, and there's not much going on like there would be in a game. loading of assets is one thing, but rendering and logic performance are going to be more important I would think.