Unreal Engine 5 Hits Early Access, Linux Still Supported

[theriddick]

UE4 DX12 performance is pretty good, Vulkan however, not so much. Needs allot of work. Probably same deal with UE5, Vulkan performing on par or worse then DX11 and DX12 being optimal.

[mdedetrich]

What makes you believe that? PS3 and PS4 certainly had per-sector encryption, backup drives are only readable on your account.
Might be that for PS5 you could argue that the soldered flash is harder to access, but since it will one day be extendable via "retail" M2 nvme I am pretty sure everything's encrypted as well.

Sure your user data may be encrypted, but I highly doubt that the games asset files are encrypted. The PS5 would need to both decrypt and decompress game assets (using kraken) at 8-15 g/s at very low latencies

Encryption and also compression, as offered by both NTFS and btrfs.

Surely a CPU can handle those easily, but I thought the general idea was to bypass the CPU?

Well for current usecases not on a PS5 a CPU can handle them, I mean currently its difficult to get more than 4-5 g/s on the highest end SSD (and there are reasons as well we are topping out sooner, i.e. our filesystems are not designed to handle such high speed SSD's).

However if you have FDE using something like btrfs/ntfs, you cannot avoid such encryption so it has to go through the CPU (which is the point).

[discordian]

Sure your user data may be encrypted, but I highly doubt that the games asset files are encrypted. The PS5 would need to both decrypt and decompress game assets (using kraken) at 8-15 g/s at very low latencies

Game assets are fully encrypted on PS3 and PS4, I would be really surprised if they weren't on PS5. Again, where do you get the idea thats not the case?
Decryption would have to be done at 5-6GB before decompression. Past consoles did this on CPUs (PS3 certainly, PS4 already had a io coprocessor that can continue downloading/storing while the main CPU is powered off), PS5 has to use fixed function hardware for that, wouldn't be possible otherwise - I remember some quotes that you otherwise would need 6-8 Zen cores just for decompression.
The most interesting thing will be how this will be handled with extensible storage, ie. whether Sony just trusts built-in encryption from a SSD (someone just could "fake" encryption) or uses their own. For the internal, soldered flash there certainly is trusted hardware doing the en/decryption.

Well for current usecases not on a PS5 a CPU can handle them, I mean currently its difficult to get more than 4-5 g/s on the highest end SSD (and there are reasons as well we are topping out sooner, i.e. our filesystems are not designed to handle such high speed SSD's).

However if you have FDE using something like btrfs/ntfs, you cannot avoid such encryption so it has to go through the CPU (which is the point).

With multiple GB/s you will be drowned with interrupts coordinating reading from disk and piecing together the data. Needs an entirely different API and kernel framework to get this to work in the background with minimal to no CPU intervention, on PS5 you have a custom io processor with alot of fixed function hardware.

[mdedetrich]

Game assets are fully encrypted on PS3 and PS4, I would be really surprised if they weren't on PS5. Again, where do you get the idea thats not the case?
Decryption would have to be done at 5-6GB before decompression. Past consoles did this on CPUs (PS3 certainly, PS4 already had a io coprocessor that can continue downloading/storing while the main CPU is powered off), PS5 has to use fixed function hardware for that, wouldn't be possible otherwise - I remember some quotes that you otherwise would need 6-8 Zen cores just for decompression.
The most interesting thing will be how this will be handled with extensible storage, ie. whether Sony just trusts built-in encryption from a SSD (someone just could "fake" encryption) or uses their own. For the internal, soldered flash there certainly is trusted hardware doing the en/decryption.

Well the whole point of the PS5 is to avoid these bottlenecks which the PS3/PS4 had. When they said "avoiding the CPU" they really did mean it, the data from the NVME ssd is designed to go straight into the VRAM bypassing the CPU.

In order to achieve this they have a dedicate HW chip for the kraken decompression but iirc there isn't any such dedicated HW chip for decryption (at least according to the presentations given by Mark Cerny)

With multiple GB/s you will be drowned with interrupts coordinating reading from disk and piecing together the data. Needs an entirely different API and kernel framework to get this to work in the background with minimal to no CPU intervention, on PS5 you have a custom io processor with alot of fixed function hardware.

Agreed hence why I said beforehand that the current design of filesystems isn't going to work when dealing with such high amount of IOPs/bandwidth

[discordian]

In order to achieve this they have a dedicate HW chip for the kraken decompression but iirc there isn't any such dedicated HW chip for decryption (at least according to the presentations given by Mark Cerny)

This is no indication that there is not HW-decryption at work, this wasnt announced for PS4 either. At one point you will have the feature to add an SSD and then connect that to a PC, at which point you will see the reports of full encryption.
SSDs usually have encryption HW, this is no complicated thing to add nowadays.

[Slartifartblast]

Sadly Unreal Tournament 4 died before it was finished, Unreal Tournament 5 ?

At least the original is still getting patch love with 469b and lots of Linux fixes.

https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches/blob/master/ReleaseNotes.md

[AdamOne]

"Still" supported?

Is Linux nearing the end of support or what is going on?

[kpedersen]

There is a full tech demo project on the Epic Games GitHub exercising these features...

I don't think anyone is going to be interested in maintaining a tech demo in 20 years time. But if Fortnight got leaked, then I assume it would be worthwhile the community hacking on the code to preserve / restore it.

[rabcor]

Honestly I think it's a bit disappointing.

Yes Lumen and Nanite are pretty cool, yes the new dynamic animation system thingy is cool (not new, not really, but cool and hopefully well implemented unlike most places it already exists)...

But honestly, our graphics are already great, we have decent workarounds for the LOD and we have pretty good ones for global illumination too, and these are just... wlell.. better workarounds for the same things...

But what ever happened to fucking physics? I mean they keep teasing us physics engines as far back as the early 2000s but we don't get any fucking physics. Even their chaos destructible environment thingy hasn't actually been used in anything and it's been out for 2 years, it has the potential for something cool but it's probably only really ever gonna get used in cinematics to be honest...

[marlock]

I don't know, but Windows as part of DirectX has this thing called DirectStorage which loads things directly from the SSD into the graphics card, bypassing the CPU, RAM and all that stuff.



That is the tech created and provided by AMD for the new PS5 and XBOX consoles (note how Unreal Engine 5 Demo is mentioned):

https://wccftech.com/tim-sweeney-explains-exactly-why-the-ps5s-ssd-and-i-o-architecture-is-way-more-efficient-than-pcs/

It is available in AMD's recent PC hardware too (but only works if you pair both a GPU and a CPU that support it)

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/smart-access-memory

It has been available for a little while in one form or another in the Linux Kernel:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-21.0-AMD-Smart-Memory

IIRC it has reached Vulkan specifications, but can't find any AMD or Khronos.org links in a quick search now...

And Linux drivers (opensource in Mesa and closed source Radeon) seem to have it implemented already... at least some of it:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RADV-Mesa-21.0-SAM

Shouldn't need a lot more bringup before game engines can support it on Linux.