Unreal Engine 5 unveiled by Epic Games, Lumen & Nanite tools showcased
Demonstrated on the PS5, Lumen provides new lighting technology while Nanite provides micropolygon geometry in the upgraded Unreal Engine 5.
As we get closer to the next generation of console gaming, developers are crafting all-new tools to develop in the new space. Epic Games took the opportunity to share their latest build of their iconic engine with the announcement of the Unreal Engine 5. During a tech demo on the PlayStation 5, Epic Games showed off lighting tool Lumen and micropolygon tool Nanite to demonstrate what the Unreal Engine 5 can do on next-gen systems.
Epic Games shared the first glimpse of the Unreal Engine 5 in action during the Summer Game Fest stream on May 13, 2020. During the stream, Epic Games focused in very specifically on the Lumen dynamic lighting tool and Nanite micropolygon geometry tool that form core aspects of the new engine. Lumen is a dynamic global illumination system built to react immediately to scene and light changes. The system is built to be entirely dynamic to positions, appearance, or disappearance of various light sources. Meanwhile, Nanite is built to provide a way for graphics artists to pack as much geometry into an asset as the eye can see. The goal is to provide the opportunity for movie-quality assets with geometry composed of billions of triangles that can be easily designed in realtime without polygon count budgets and can be transferred easily without loss in quality along the way.
With tools like Lumen and Nanite sitting at the core of Unreal Engine 5, not only is the next generation engine meant to bring unparalleled visuals to console and PC gaming, but it will also streamline a lot of designer experiences. What's more, Unreal Engine 5 is meant to be a technology that won't just be utilized in gaming, but is instead also built with numerous other applications and careers in mind, such as assets for movies and television, architectural design, and much more. Unreal Engine 4.25 was released as a means to start development on the next generation of gaming. However, even though the first look at Unreal Engine 5 was demonstrated on the PlayStation 5, it will most certainly be available for development on PC and Xbox Series X in the future.
With only the first reveal of Unreal Engine 5, there's assuredly more to come from Epic Games as we move towards the next console generation and the development and utilization of Unreal Engine 5.
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TJ Denzer posted a new article, Unreal Engine 5 unveiled by Epic Games, Lumen & Nanite tools showcased
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Engine demo running on a PS5 https://youtu.be/qC5KtatMcUw
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Yeah, I did see, looking very carefully, some texture pop in when she first goes into the room with all the statues around the entryway. The loading is very quick, but I wonder if it's quick enough. There is a little jitter in the demo, and strangely I felt the character model was the worst looking part (still good, but the skin seemed fake) as well as some physics issues with the water. For being dynamically rendered though the terrain and lighting was stupendous.
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They explained at the end of the Keighley interview that the tools drop to devs in early ‘21 and that the first available projects will be starting to appear in the fall and beyond.
They did make a huge deal about how they were intent on creating this framework in a way that would let developers move seamlessly from UE4 into 5, so perhaps this explains how we will see some titles so quickly.
Certainly a game like The Medium, that does real time environment shifts will at least see a performance enhancement, even if it wouldn’t be making use of uncompressed assets .
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I mean ship on whatever you like, but the ~100GB capacity that a bluray can hit is still going to be the most cost effective option, and if you don't want to have performance issues accessing a USB drive you're going to have to pay for the onboard controller and flash to not be trash-tier stuff.
You're still going to have size limits, at the very least the ~800+ GB internal drive on the PS5 itself.
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http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=39599259
Article was still “developing” when I posted
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As I mentioned below, this should work on both platforms, but as designed I'm betting it works better on the PS5, and therefore actually looks better on the PS5 even though the XSX could render it faster. I'm guessing the data simply isn't being read into the CPU/GPU fast enough on the XSX for how this is designed.
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That's quite the opposite of what I'm seeing - there's examples of games making their own tech, sure, but Unreal is used in everything from Borderlands 3 to The Mandalorian.
For years at QuakeCon keynotes Carmack would estimate how many engines he had left in him and would postulate that at some point in the future some game engines would get to the point where most people use them for a game instead of writing a new one every time. Analogy I heard from him or elsewhere is that it when Stephen Spielberg wants to make a new movie he doesn't stop for a year or more to invent a new camera every time, he just uses existing cameras and makes his movie with them. And there's companies out there whose job is to invent new cameras, he just goes to one of those.
Today Carmack is working for Facebook and playing with helmets, id Tech has become an internal to Bethesda trade secret, and Unreal and Unity have pretty much taken the mantle on most large projects that don't want to write their own.
And I haven't checked lately but last I looked Unreal was so far ahead of Unity in terms of graphics and performance it's not even funny. But of course it is - it's an engine that's been in development since the 90's, whereas Unity started out life as a protoduction fluke designed to show off .NET-based middleware.
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The interview is particularly valuable because they discuss the big picture for the next decade: creating a set of assets that can merge a film or show or commercial product like a car purchase demo straight into a real time shared interactive experience, that can also accept any amount of user generated content, since all the pixels and lighting and positional audio is processed in real time. It’s a beautiful vision, even though it’s obviously ripe for being commercially utilized as a new way to shove advertising and marketing juggernauts down everyone’s throats.
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OMG!!!!! That was the most insane engine tech I have ever seen!!!!! I will bet money that everyone is going to be upgrading in the next year or so. One way or another PS5, XBSX and new GPUs will be rolling into gamers homes in order to have this tech in our games, believe that! Next Gen is no joke this is a MEGA massive Ultra Omega jump in hardware and tech in the coming year!!!! LOL some thought Next Gen only equals faster loading times, if I hear one more streamer or person say that I am going to loose it.
Man once games have this tech PS5, XBSX, and new GPUs for PC are going to be flying off the shelves into homes!
Feels good Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-BkrwO_Dck let's freaking GO!!!! \m/ :) \m/ + My mind is 1000% blown!!!!!
Jesus Christ!!!!! Did you Guys see that...... fwwwwwwww..... Damnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!
[ WOW ]-
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No your 100% right, it 100% relies on this. Having said that you could scale the engine back and have it stream in small amounts of data and still use it even on the slowest HDD.
Basically different speeds of IO -> NMVe's to HDD will equal a X amount of data that you can stream into your game, so think of it like TF in a GPU and how much you can render etc. Basically there will now be a IO amount that is rated per hard drive no matter what the technology is.
Well this is how I would design it so it could scale from junk old HDD to the fastest Gen 4 NVMe + console Gen 4 NVMe and this way everyone can use the dope tech + adapt it!!!!
Honestly I think it will be used for everything, but your 100% right this sort of IO load that is in the demo will only be for high end and the Next Gen consoles.
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At this point, I guess it is. To me it's more like those things are just the most common, simplest, least crucial implementations - used for minor effects that when taken away on hardware that can't do ray tracing or disabled for performance reasons, the game doesn't really lose all that much as a whole. The new PhysX.
The ultimate ray tracing promise and end goal was always more realistic lighting and shadows, it was hyped and sold on that over all else, but when the tech arrived it was still too weak to actually do that properly, so much so a lot of us assumed it would take at least a few more console generations to get there, even with DLSS picking up the slack in some ways.
Barely any games have even taken a stab at even the most basic ray traced global illumination, Metro Exodus is the only one I've played (and actually know about at this point I suppose?). While it was only a single bounce, the results were impressive as hell and potential was thrilling. No one has bothered to try and match or top that, which is disappointing. And now with stuff like Lumen in UE5 that appears to approximate that sort of GI just as well or better with probably far less performance impact, it almost seems kinda pointless to even keep chasing the fully ray traced lighting at all, it's a fools errand. Which is a bummer in a way, but really not that unexpected with how much lighting (faked, baked, and real-time) has improved in game engines over the years, and how young the RT hardware still is.
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More details on UE5 @: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/a-first-look-at-unreal-engine-5
[ Key] "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."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-BkrwO_Dck let's freaking GO!!!!!! \m/ :) \m/-
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My question is whether this will have VR-specific features, either to make VR dev easier and improve performance.
My impression is it's yet another layer of complexity for devs to make VR games, and though I'm reasonably happy @1440p on my monitor, higher quality settings in VR are unobtainable at 120hz or even 90hz with consistent framerates. This will be the #1 thing I'm looking at with nextgen videocards, and hope it's being addressed in these new engine updates.
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Meme roundup:
Low-hanging fruit:
https://twitter.com/RobinStethem/status/1260647850112765952?s=20
Friendship ended:
https://twitter.com/sterlingcrispin/status/1260654995612954624?s=20
Is this...
https://twitter.com/devonsoft/status/1260617527316578304?s=20 -
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The interview after feels like epic is shilling for Sony. They can’t even say “Xbox” https://youtu.be/VBhcqCRzsU4 all while praising PS5 nonstop.
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The PS5 has over double the internal storage throughput for the SSD than the Xbox. If it comes down to technical limitations then it makes sense that they would only be talking about PS5 here. I wouldn’t be surprised if the sequence at the end is something only PS5 is capable of, but we won’t know for sure until they actually say so.
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On paper the difference is the Xbox at 2.4GB/s decompressed and 4.8GB/s compressed while the PS5 is at 5.5GB/s decompressed and 9GB/s compressed. Its over a 2x difference in data throughput.
The downside will be limited storage space. That internal SSD is going to run out very fast. I could be wrong but I assume that you won't get the same benefits from external storage. It will be custom SSD cards for Xbox and certified compatible third party SSDs that will plug in for PS5. I don't know if the PS5 will support Thunderbolt 3, we'll see.-
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I can see slower drives being used strictly as data backup like you're saying. I do know that if a PS5 game is going to actually run off of an external drive it has to be from an NVMe drive that is certified. Cerny himself said that the console itself runs a test on the drive to see if it is capable.
I'm pretty certain that slower external drives can still run PS4 games on the PS5, so it would make sense that they'll allow you to store PS5 games on them so you can copy to the main SSD as needed.
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Why would the end sequence be only something the PS5 can do? Everything is already on screen, which means everything is already loaded from the drive. They're generating the GPU-ready mesh from the high res in memory model. It's possible that the transition from indoors to outdoors would be slower, since even in this demo that part looks like it's chugging while it's loading assets, but once it's loaded that's it, the rest is just on the fly polygon reduction and rendering, nothing to do with the drive.
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Bouncing between I think this will change everything, to being scared someone else will beat me to the punch, to wondering if the public can even tell the difference in graphics nowadays. Expect no. Hope for yes. All of it was expected to go down differently too as this was originally meant to be revealed on stage at GDC before COVID changed everything. I was going to be on the stage and we'd play the demo live to an audience. Then we rapidly pivoted to recording the video before the office shut down. Then waited for the moment to release and whether anyone would even pay attention with all the other shit going on in the world. I guess we timed it right in the end.
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Can confirm, Sweeney gives you credit here in this VB article
Sweeney: The first Unreal Engine 5 work began a couple of years ago. Brian Karis, a young graphics programmer who was in the video, began experimentation with the Nanite technology, as well as Lumen.
....
Libreri: Brian himself is an amazing engineer, but — he gets wound up when we call him part-tech artist, but he has a real empathy for art and visuals. I’ve been at Epic for six years. He was talking about doing this all the time I’ve been there. A couple of years ago we said, “Go on, do some research.” And then finally last year, around this time, we looked at the early results and said, “That’s amazing. It’s going to work.” We dogpiled the whole demo team on it and built this demo.
https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/13/how-epic-games-is-tailoring-unreal-engine-5-to-make-next-gen-graphics-shine/2/
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Congratulations!
I wanted to know if there are any plans to release a less compressed version of the demo on the website. On Youtube there are compression artifacts that normally wouldn't bother me (I'm viewing the 4K stream on a 4K IPS display). Since this is a tech demo that's a little different. There is so much detail here, especially things like displaying the scene with false color, that I'd love to see a version with fewer compression artifacts.
Thanks, and congrats again!-
There's this https://vimeo.com/417882964. The ProRes video is 79gb I'm told. Not sure where we would put such a thing. AFAIK there isn't a plan to post that somewhere. We too are annoyed about the compression artifacts.
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I also assume that even the original video source would have some pixel chasing and smearing on the false color section. I'm going to assume that the live render is the only way you're really going to see it the way its supposed to.
The Vimeo link has less compression artifacts for sure, shadows look better, etc. Thanks again-
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I'm not sure. I do know that with video content (say UHD) you make one master for UHD HDR output and another for standard.
I don't know what they do for Netflix shows, it may be one and the same thing but I can't say for sure. HDR is generally treated as its own deliverable though.
In any case, things like the false color image would presumably require INSANE fucking file sizes to render each pixel perfectly, with no visible compression artifacts or motion/color interpolation, as if it was running live and in front of you.
I guess what I'm saying is I want to see it running live and in person. :)-
Yep that was the part we were the most concerned about. I just went looking for screenshots of the triangle view and was surprised we didn't send those in the press pack. I thought we were. At least that would allow you to see it outside of video.
This demo was originally made for a GDC stage announcement and shown on an LED wall behind the stage. It wasn't really appropriate to target HDR for that specific display and context so we didn't. -
You can master for both as you say which is common. Hybrid Log Gamma is a way to encode once and view on either HDR or LDR. Designed for broadcast for that reason. I don't think there's much special to the video encoding beyond putting it in the right color space PQ and rec2020 for HDR10 but I've only dealt with this from the game side, not video encoding.
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I would toss it up as a download on the Epic Games Store. Epic is fine with throwing dozens of games of numerous GBs at millions of people for free, and this is also promotion for their tools, current and future. Worth the bandwidth.
If not, is bittorrent still a thing? I'd actually install a client to check out that 79GB monster. -
Just so you know if you Guys have VEGAS Pro 17 in house you can pick the 8K profile and bake your video at that profile/rez no matter what the source is recorded in: like 1080p 60 FPS , 4K etc. All you do then is upload that 8K cooked video to YouTube and it will be published under their new top of the line 8K bitrate profile. I have tried this My self and the bitrate is extremely high and near 1 : 1 , well not 100% 1 : 1 but as close as your gonna get and 100% worth looking into. The only problem is you will want a 3970x or 3990x Threadripper to cook the video since it does not have a GPU accelerated processor for the 8K profile and is only CPU driven. So a 8 min video will take a couple days to render on an old 32 logical core CPU like My 1950x.
Anyways I am sure you have some crazy CPUs and configs in the office that can easily crunch the video in their 8K profile!!!! Hope that helps!-
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Cool! Yeah, cause you know gamers :) or the internet for that matter. You would have to have a disclaimer in the title or splash screen and say something like: running at 1440p + dynamic resolution on a PS5 dev kit nativley but processed on a 8K profile to take advantage of the best bitrate on YouTube to simulate a Direct Feed video. Heck you could even have the first few frames say that/or similar as the disclaimer so no one freaks out and thinks it's running at 8K native and then have no worries!
Glad I could potentially help,YouTube can be brutal on small detail(especially if it is moving/changing all the time) and your video deserves the very best for the detail is freaking insane!
Good luck!
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Freaking amazing Man \m/ :) \m/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-BkrwO_Dck , seriously Dude My mind was blown away by everything that was going on in that video it was truly historical, mind blowing and the next step to game engine tech with out doubt!
Still can't get over it's using 8K textures, direct model imports as is... I mean shit that there was 500 of those MEGA ZBrush models in that scene it was freaking crazy. And that new lighting model is bananas it just looks so full and so freaking good and crazy, beautiful depth and un flat like so many models today. LOL you sure took tessellation to the next level, am I right [ MEGA Ultra Omega high five ] :) . I still just can't get over what you have achieved here it is... just.... incredible I feel so complete after watching that video and like thee is hope. Then you got the shadows turned up to 1000 it's basically all real time on all the insane detail with you amazing global illumination which again I have to say looks so damn sexy, I love it!!!!!
Next the audio, that part was cool it is great that you Guys are working on that as well, thought I mention that. So yeah back to the demo, that scene with the light reacting to the beetles in your particles system... Dude that was sick what an amazing touch! Always cool to see mega tech also used in gameplay, so good! Also that new animation system that works with all your other details/work it looks sooooooo good, makes Me never want to play Skyrim or Fallout 4 ever again LOL.
Anyways I can't get over the detail and how this makes current tessellation look like old school 90s OG 3D, we final got the real deal never thought I see it! As an amateur modern 2D engine Guy I always love to see the top Guys engine tech and find it MEGA inspiring and of course it makes Me hungry to plan My next comp I will build, so mega thank you for this tech and all the hard work you Guys have done \m/ :) \m/ massive love and respect! I have to do it again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-BkrwO_Dck this is Me the whole day thinking of the video and when I replay it.
So again MEGA congrats Man, you must feel amazing right now!!! Enjoy and I wish you Guys all the best \m/ :) \m/
Before I go and watch the demo again I have to ask... that end part when She goes out side and fly into that Mega open world where the detail is still ultra omega crazy and high is that all real time at that speed....!!!!!? That was even more crazy if I think about it then the rest which was beyond crazy!!!!!!
Take care plus thanks again.-
Thanks! Yes, everything is real-time 30hz on PS5. Recorded off the HDMI from the back of the devkit. The last flying part wasn't interactive. Once you walk to the door a cinematic triggers since we didn't have flying controls implemented. For a while during development we were planning for it to be playable on the GDC floor but that got nixed because Sony didn't want people trying to mess with it and purposefully try and make a the ps5 crash and get secret info or something. If the flying was interactive you could potentially fly somewhere we didn't have time to art up so it was easier to put it on rails for that bit.
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Awesome! Well even if if you can't control that flying part and it's on rails that is still freaking amazing! Huh no way, very cool info plus you know if it was in demo(free flight) everyone would of tried to fly where ever they can to try and break it LOL, so I totally get why that was blocked. You Guys would have had to do a lot of work to lock that area down.
Honestly I am still blown away by it all and digesting the video and still feel like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-BkrwO_Dck feels good Man :) , anyways thanks for the response and have an awesome night + sleep and mega congrats!!!!!
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Demo was amazing. You’ve got the VFX crowd furiously learning UE right now. Does this old blog post of yours have any link to this new geo streaming technique? http://graphicrants.blogspot.com/2009/01/virtual-geometry-images.html
Can you say how much preprocessing is involved with high resolution meshes?
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May I ask a question from someone who doesn't know all the in's/out's of the technical side? This kind of stuff is amazing but how does it translate to real world game creation in so far as how much longer does it take to make a great game with these insane details? Can we expect to see a GTA 6 with such fidelity? Does this level of graphics mean years of development? I never expected games to become what they have when I was a wee lad long ago but I love how it's been exceeding my expectations.
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I asked a similar question to a game dev on reddit today. The new tech adds a lot to world design, but also takes away a lot of labor intensive optimization routines and lighting design. In the video they mention the statue that comes directly from Zbrush (3D modelling software) without any need to downsample or re-texture. So the gyst of it was, "About the same".
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