UE 5 demo featuring limitless detail: Gaze upon Unreal Engine's true form!

[Delicieuxz]

 

This video shows off two new systems, Lumen - a global illumination system, and Nanite - a micro-polygon modelling system, running on a PlayStation 5, to create scenes that appear as though they have limitless, life-like detail - with full freedom of movement for models as well as dynamic lighting and shadows. There are hundreds of billions of triangles making up the scenes throughout the entire demo.

 

Looking pretty awesome, there.

 

Without understanding the tech in more detail, I have the question: If this can run on a PS5, what does that imply for the future of AMD's and Nvidia's GPU businesses?

 

Screenshots (source) :

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BTW, remember when Euclideon came out with their Unlimited Detail voxel-based engine demos, and people pointed-out that it's only a static image and said there'd never be 'unlimited' detail? Euclideon were savaged for even claiming the concept is attainable.

 

It seems that the things people say today can't be done invariably end-up being done - and often a lot sooner than people anticipate. Just not when it comes to mainstream flying cars or new CPU architectures from Intel.

 

 

 

[TempestCatto]

Reminds me of the movie Tintin. It was mocap and extremely realistic. Hands down one of my fav movies of all time.

[732]

1 minute ago, TempestCatto said:

Reminds me of the movie Tintin. It was mocap and extremely realistic. Hands down one of my fav movies of all time.

The books are really good, too!

[soldier_ph]

lol didn't know triangles and polygons were so important in a game engine.

[WereCatf]

Well, that was a very impressive video and if they didn't "embellish the truth" or anything, ie. it was actually running in real-time on a PS5, that's some fricking major technological feat. I was irked by the unstable framerate, but eh, that's probably just a matter of some tuning.

[3 Lions]

19 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

Looking pretty awesome there.

Aye impressive, but in my opinion the engine used for the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is better. 

[williamcll]

The downside is probably half the games running on this will be an epic games exclusive.

[straight_stewie]

There's still work to be done. The world may look more real, but the character still hasn't caught up to it: It looks like a plastic toy doll walking around the real world.

 

They talk about their cloth simulation system, yet they are only able to simulate a single simple thing with it. The flags, tarps, and clothes other than her scarf are static, even though at times there is a significant amount of wind noise.

The fluid simulation still isn't perfect, there is some non realistic behavior behind the characters legs when she's in the stream.

 

The light ball in her hand was nice, but lackluster in terms of effects around it.

And they didn't even attempt to do a hair simulation.

49 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

Without understanding the tech in more detail, I have the question: If this can run on a PS5, what does that imply for the future of AMD's and Nvidia's GPU businesses?

All of what I just said isn't to say that what they've done here isn't amazing, it's just to say that there is room for computationally expensive things to be done yet, all of which are candidates for GPU acceleration.

Additionally, modern GPU technologies, like Tensor, bring the possibility of NPC AIs that are driven by actual AIs.

Desktop graphics cards are leaps and bounds from what's in even the most modern consoles, and I'm sure that game developers will use them to great effect to augment the new capabilities of this engine system.

[Delicieuxz]

 

 

[CarlBar]

20 minutes ago, straight_stewie said:

There's still work to be done. The world may look more real, but the character still hasn't caught up to it: It looks like a plastic toy doll walking around the real world.

 

They talk about their cloth simulation system, yet they are only able to simulate a single simple thing with it. The flags, tarps, and clothes other than her scarf are static, even though at times there is a significant amount of wind noise.

The fluid simulation still isn't perfect, there is some non realistic behavior behind the characters legs when she's in the stream.

 

The light ball in her hand was nice, but lackluster in terms of effects around it.

And they didn't even attempt to do a hair simulation.

All of what I just said isn't to say that what they've done here isn't amazing, it's just to say that there is room for computationally expensive things to be done yet, all of which are candidates for GPU acceleration.

Additionally, modern GPU technologies, like Tensor, bring the possibility of NPC AIs that are driven by actual AIs.

Desktop graphics cards are leaps and bounds from what's in even the most modern consoles, and I'm sure that game developers will use them to great effect to augment the new capabilities of this engine system.

 

Cheers for doing an analysis, preparing to wind down for the day so didn't want to sit through trying to analyse a video.

 

People need to remember that this kind of thing happens every once in a while. i remember when DX9 first came out and we got proper lighting and everyone was touting it as the best thing ever for graphical fidelity and where did they go from here, (and complaining about how bad the FPS with it on was), look at us now all these years later.

[IAmAndre]

Plot twist: it then gets downgraded upon release.

[Commodus]

7 hours ago, LinusTechTipsFanFromDarlo said:

Aye impressive, but in my opinion the engine used for the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is better. 

I wouldn't say better, just different.  Microsoft's engine is designed exclusively for flying over outdoor environments.  Its ability to pull data from the cloud is amazing, but it's highly limited in some ways.  You probably wouldn't use UE5 for a flight sim, but it looks to be outstanding for most anything on the ground.

[Astronautical]

wait so what happened to Euclideans tech? was it overhyped and under delivered or did it just fade? what was its issue?

[BlackManINC]

If only A.I got this much attention, we would see a meaningful improvement in the gameplay. As impressive as this demo is, it doesn't really excite me, knowing the games themselves will still be dull, uninspired, micro transaction ridden, cookie cutter piles of shit. We all should be well past the point of letting pretty graphics suck us in after the suffering we endured this generation. 

[Delicieuxz]

1 hour ago, Astronautical said:

wait so what happened to Euclideans tech? was it overhyped and under delivered or did it just fade? what was its issue?

I don't really know, but it sounds like they're doing some limited amount of business with their tech.

 

https://www.euclideon.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclideon

 

"In March 2017 the Gold Coast Bulletin announced that Euclideon will be opening numerous Holoverse centers around the world with the next center opening in Oman. In November 2018, Euclideon announced that they will be opening their second Holoverse location in Muscat, Oman."

 

Maybe their tech is what inspired or led-to the UE5 feature. I wonder if they're going to feel like Epic are stealing their thunder.

[RejZoR]

The whole Nanite thing is hilarious (for wrong reasons). If only we had such a technology before. Oh wait, we had it for many many years. It's called TESSELLATION. Except EVERYONE freaking used it wrong. Like, totally wrong. Instead of plugging high detail models into games and let tessellation do the job of cutting down detail where it's not needed, EVERYONE used it in opposite direction. Plugging in high detail models and pumping out even more stupid pointless polygons that did nothing to visuals but caused ridiculous performance drops because GPU still had to manipulate hundreds of millions of polygons that served no purpose. Visuals basically never changed except few silly examples like with Metro 2033 where they were pointing at gas mask filters and saying "look, it's round now". And the rest of the world was all blocky and ugly. Or Aliens vs Predator. Pumping out stupid levels of polygons all over the place and railings that are most obvious things when rendered with low poly count looked like Lara Croft's pony tail back in 1996... I always facepalmed so hard when everyone was showcasing tessellation and all the games ran like turd because of it and still looked like one. Turd that is. Good thing we have Epic who can finally use tessellation for what it was really meant for...

 

Rambling apart, Unreal Engine 5 looks good. It's a bit of a shame that it's unlikely to see many games in UE5. Epic should really remaster Unreal the way Crowbar Collective did Black Mesa for Half-Life 1. Just imagine, original Unreal totally rebuild using UE5 and not just engine swap, actual rebuild of all assets and run it with UE5. I'd pay full price for that and do it on EGS. I don't need the silly Fortnite or any new iterations of it. But Unreal, hell yes. Or a proper sequel to it or a full remaster/redesign. Put the great engine to good use and I think Unreal game was perfect to showcase amazing alien world.

[JZStudios]

7 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

 

My favorite part is that sick ass mesquite logo in the background.

My second favorite part is the girl just Spider-Man crawling up a sheer rock face with no handholds at all.

55 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

The whole Nanite thing is hilarious (for wrong reasons). If only we had such a technology before. Oh wait, we had it for many many years. It's called TESSELLATION.

This is incorrect. Nanite is working in reverse. It takes a super high poly model and at runtime reduces the polygon count based on screen space. Tessellation takes a low poly model and adds in more geometry to be determined typically by a displacement map of some sort. This has downsides in that it can't do anything with acute angles, and high values of tessellation or tessellation offset can lead to a lot of jagged geometry. It's also limited by the texture resolution of the displacement map, which are usually designed in an imperfect science sort of way. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if tessellation works in screen space so further items have less tessellation or not.

 

You could argue that the end result should be similar, but Nanite is better. Sampling down from a higher quality mesh will produce better results than trying to fake it and sample up.

 

Anyways, it's a bit like the adaptive subdivision in Blender, where you give an object a ridiculously high poly count and at render time it determines how big the geometry is in pixel screen space and scales it to whatever value you assign. Except UE5 seems to do it natively, Blender requires you start with a low poly mesh and use it's internal modifiers.

Timestamps for the impatient, because he kind of drags on, 

1:50 explains why you'd use it and the advantages

5:00 shows what it actually does compared to standard methods.

The end result is that now there's far more detail that's actually visible, and far less detail that isn't. Even with traditional LODs you're still potentially rendering a lot of geometry you can't possibly see because it's sub pixel size, meanwhile what's right in front of the camera looks low res. Nanite now makes what's immediately in front of the camera high res with a linear drop off maintaining the same detail level across the entire scene.

[JZStudios]

6 hours ago, Delicieuxz said:

 

 

They mentioned that normal maps aren't needed, which I didn't really think about. Normal Maps and displacement maps aren't the same and are often used in conjunction. But they're correct, you can just have straight geometry and not need to fake it with normal and displacement maps, which actually also helps reduce texture calls and render times, which in turn means the diffuse map can potentially higher res.

They then discuss that it eliminates pop-in, which... frankly isn't true. At some point the asset is going to have to pop into existence. It's possible it could bring those assets into memory before they're big enough to be in screen space, thus actually having zero pop-in, but I'm doubting that's realistically going to happen.

 

Personally, as someone with a proper 5.1, I'm interested in the audio engine. UE4 was supposed to have a big audio engine overhaul to properly support surround sound and binaural audio and I don't think it ever actually happened. Guess it went into UE5.

[Commodus]

3 hours ago, BlackManINC said:

If only A.I got this much attention, we would see a meaningful improvement in the gameplay. As impressive as this demo is, it doesn't really excite me, knowing the games themselves will still be dull, uninspired, micro transaction ridden, cookie cutter piles of shit. We all should be well past the point of letting pretty graphics suck us in after the suffering we endured this generation. 

Please don't get mired in cynicism here.  Yeah, some games will be mediocre, but some will be great... and hey, if I'm going to look at a middle-of-the-road game, it should at least be a pretty middle-of-the-road game.

 

Besides, AI is a much tougher problem to solve.  It's easy to say "if the player does X, do Y," but it's harder to simulate more realistic traits like instinct, logical inference and group dynamics.  Some of these problems are the same ones that robot designers are tackling.

[FezBoy]

45 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

This is incorrect. Nanite is working in reverse. It takes a super high poly model and at runtime reduces the polygon count based on screen space. Tessellation takes a low poly model and adds in more geometry to be determined typically by a displacement map of some sort. This has downsides in that it can't do anything with acute angles, and high values of tessellation or tessellation offset can lead to a lot of jagged geometry. It's also limited by the texture resolution of the displacement map, which are usually designed in an imperfect science sort of way. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if tessellation works in screen space so further items have less tessellation or not.

 

You could argue that the end result should be similar, but Nanite is better. Sampling down from a higher quality mesh will produce better results than trying to fake it and sample up.

 

Anyways, it's a bit like the adaptive subdivision in Blender, where you give an object a ridiculously high poly count and at render time it determines how big the geometry is in pixel screen space and scales it to whatever value you assign. Except UE5 seems to do it natively, Blender requires you start with a low poly mesh and use it's internal modifiers.

 

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Except EVERYONE freaking used it wrong. Like, totally wrong. Instead of plugging high detail models into games and let tessellation do the job of cutting down detail where it's not needed, EVERYONE used it in opposite direction. -snip- Good thing we have Epic who can finally use tessellation for what it was really meant for...

 

RejZoR knew how this worked, they just called it the wrong thing, thinking that tessellation could mean going either way, adding or removing polygons, not just adding polygons

[Goliath_1911]

It looks awesome and all, but i doubt it will look anything like that when it`s actually out on the ps5 ,it will look good, but not as good as that video.

I`ve seen plenty of trialers of gameplay footage running on a xboxox,ps4 pro to know that it won`t look like that lol

[FezBoy]

15 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

They then discuss that it eliminates pop-in, which... frankly isn't true. At some point the asset is going to have to pop into existence. It's possible it could bring those assets into memory before they're big enough to be in screen space, thus actually having zero pop-in, but I'm doubting that's realistically going to happen.

I think what they're saying is that when it does "pop in" it can be far enough away that it's only one pixel rendered, as there would theoretically be enough memory savings via reverse tessellation to have an "infinite" render distance (obviously excluding things that render to be smaller than 1px*1px)

[Commodus]

Just now, Goliath_1911 said:

It looks awesome and all, but i doubt it will look anything like that when it`s actually out on the ps5 ,it will look good, but not as good as that video.

That's fairly likely, if just because full-fledged games will have multiple AI characters, more physics events, that sort of thing.  With that said, this is probably as close as many tech demos get to reflecting actual gameplay, since it's genuinely controllable, includes complicated physics events and taxes the character animation system.  The sacrifices may be hard to notice unless you're looking for them.

[Goliath_1911]

10 minutes ago, Commodus said:

That's fairly likely, if just because full-fledged games will have multiple AI characters, more physics events, that sort of thing.  With that said, this is probably as close as many tech demos get to reflecting actual gameplay, since it's genuinely controllable, includes complicated physics events and taxes the character animation system.  The sacrifices may be hard to notice unless you're looking for them.

yeah i know, but talking mainly on it being on a console, there is a lot of gameplay trailers that are stated to be running on either the xbox or ps that look better than they actually do, on pc it probably looks like that, heck it might actually be rendered on a pc 

its also funny how Epic games who was pushing so hard into pc gaming would go reveal UE 5 running on a console lol

[Commodus]

Just now, Goliath_1911 said:

yeah i know, but talking mainly on it being on a console, there is a lot of gameplay trailers that are stated to be running on either the xbox or ps that look better than they actually do, on pc it probably looks like that, heck it might actually be rendered on a pc 

its also funny how Epic games who was pushing so hard into pc gaming would go reveal UE 5 running on a console lol

In this case, it really was running on a PS5 (dev kit, but still).  The Game Awards had a follow-up interview where Epic stressed that they really did just load it on to the system and record what came from the HDMI output.

 

The choice of the PS5 was probably due to the storage more than anything.  Sony's system not only has an SSD, it has a highly optimized pipeline that makes it possible to load massive amounts of data very quickly.  The demo looks so good in part because Epic doesn't have to wait for gigabytes upon gigabytes of geometry and textures to load, it's just... there.