One thousand ships, Unreal Engine 4 with NVIDIA WaveWorks

[N8128]

Hey guys!

 

I wasn't sure where to post this, but I guess it's a bit of a news, since no one has done this before (at least not to my knowledge). And it's one of those PC power showcases, since real-time ocean simulation and buoyancy is not a simple thing to accomplish efficiently.

 

For an in depth look, check out my blog post about this subject.

 

UPDATE: NVIDIA wrote about it on their blog.

 

So, I made this real-time ocean simulation with one thousand ships. There are no visual tricks involved, every single ship is its own physical object, with physical buoyancy simulation.

 

 

Details:

 

Running at 1920x1080 with 133% render target (screen percentage). Graphics settings are all on Epic. (max in Unreal Engine)
Runs at: avg. ~45 FPS, min. ~30 FPS, max ~ 60 FPS.

At this point, 95% of the time, my CPU is the bottleneck.

 

Yes it uses NVIDIA GameWorks (WaveWorks) and I do have a couple of other NV features integrated in my branch of the engine to really optimize it for VR, but honestly GameWorks is really only as good as is it's implementation, khm Batman khm, at it's core is a very polished library of algorithms.

Made and ran on this machine:

Motherboard: Z97-DELUXE(NFC & WLC)
PSU: Cooler Master "V Series" V850
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-4790K 4.6Ghz
CPU cooler: Hydro Series™ H100i Extreme Performance
GPU: GeForce GTX TITAN X
RAM: G.SKILL Trident X Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3 2400 Mhz
SSD0: Samsung SSD 850 PRO 256GB
SSD1: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB
HDD: WD Green 2TB
CASE: NZXT. Phantom 410 Black

 

Thanks!

 

[Bananasplit_00]

huh, pretty neet i guess 

[Boobies Sprinkle]

LET THE WW3 BEGIN! 

[Prysin]

wrong section. Also, not that impressive.

[theninja35]

1 minute ago, Prysin said:

wrong section. Also, not that impressive.

Well, let's see you do it then. Remember the real-time buoyancy, too.

[N8128]

4 minutes ago, Prysin said:

wrong section. Also, not that impressive.

Sorry, moderators can move it to the right section, really didn't want to spam or anything.

2 minutes ago, theninja35 said:

Well, let's see you do it then. Remember the real-time buoyancy, too.

Correct, you can instance hundreds of thousands, heck, millions of static ships, but real-time buoyancy applied to them is a whole other thing.

[Energycore]

Waveworks (tm), the same service that brought you overly tesselated water under the ground in Crysis 3.

[N8128]

3 minutes ago, Energycore said:

Waveworks (tm), the same service that brought you overly tesselated water under the ground in Crysis 3.

I have no idea what Crytek was thinking then, whatever it was, it was pretty crazy to see that much tessellation (in a bad way).

[Energycore]

Just now, N8128 said:

I have no idea what Crytek was thinking then, whatever it was, it was pretty crazy to see that much tessellation (in a bad way).

I wouldn't be surprised if it was Nvidia putting pressure on them or enticing them with "This is the only way it would work" arguments.

[N8128]

3 minutes ago, Energycore said:

I wouldn't be surprised if it was Nvidia putting pressure on them or enticing them with "This is the only way it would work" arguments.

It's possible yes, also when DX11 came out, all you could hear was tessellation here, tessellation there, so Crytek themself might go a little nuts on the tech. And really I would like for AMD to be more competitive, it would only be good for all of us. Even the people from both camps that I know would like that (yes I explicitly asked), both companies have great talent, I do think it's upper management that's the source of AMDs problems, but it's easy to criticize from the outside.

[Timmy-P]

Nobody's complaining about Gameworks yet?  I'm surprised.

 

This is only a tech demo, I presume?

[BuckGup]

6 minutes ago, Timmy-P said:

Nobody's complaining about Gameworks yet?  I'm surprised.

 

This is only a tech demo, I presume?

The kid made it

[Timmy-P]

1 minute ago, SamStrecker said:

The kid made it

Well, you know, maybe if I wasn't an idiot I'd pay more attention to the OP.

[Prysin]

4 hours ago, Energycore said:

Waveworks (tm), the same service that brought you overly tesselated water under the ground in Crysis 3.

and that killed performance in Just Cause if you got too close to the coast.

[ManIkWeet]

4 hours ago, theninja35 said:

Well, let's see you do it then. Remember the real-time buoyancy, too.

 

4 hours ago, N8128 said:

Sorry, moderators can move it to the right section, really didn't want to spam or anything.

Correct, you can instance hundreds of thousands, heck, millions of static ships, but real-time buoyancy applied to them is a whole other thing.

It's a miracle most of those boats didn't sink.

 

What it looks like to me is that you just took the normal of the water mesh at the center of the boat, and rotated the boat with it. This resulted in some boats rolling&flipping due to rounding issues in whatever formula you used.

 

Don't get me wrong, it's still impressive!

[ApolloFury]

You can use Gameworks or just do it yourself 

That way you can modify your own code instead of being locked down in proprietary code. 

[vanished]

5 hours ago, Energycore said:

Waveworks (tm), the same service that brought you overly tesselated water under the ground in Crysis 3.

yeah when I saw a video on that I laughed so hard how any developer could be that stupid!  Hence why he said:

6 hours ago, N8128 said:

...GameWorks is really only as good as is it's implementation...

 

[N8128]

6 hours ago, Timmy-P said:

Nobody's complaining about Gameworks yet?  I'm surprised.

 

This is only a tech demo, I presume?

Correct, tech demo indeed, it's actaully a strees test map in my VR game that really has nothing to do with ships, but uses a lot of water.

5 hours ago, ManIkWeet said:

 

It's a miracle most of those boats didn't sink.

 

What it looks like to me is that you just took the normal of the water mesh at the center of the boat, and rotated the boat with it. This resulted in some boats rolling&flipping due to rounding issues in whatever formula you used.

 

Don't get me wrong, it's still impressive!

Thanks! That's a great guess! And that's exactly what I didn't do for any of the physics (but did do for the noise/fome masking around/under the ships) and that makes it quite impressive from a tech point of view. I made a conservetive mathematical physical model of the ships, it's real physics! It's not perfect obviously  yeey awesome, you noticed, the ship flipping is actually the result of physcis, when ships get rotated to a point of "no return", you can also notice some inconsistent velocities, that's the result of my GPU getting bottlenecked at the sun rise/set, when the light shafts and light scattering are kicking in. Also there are no tricks used, like, the ships in the far distance or out of sight are really static, every single ship ticks at the same rate, all the time.

 

EDIT:

I may also point out that the best community effort (that I know of) is about 50 ships, until now. So I think it's a pretty big leap. Honestly it's probably the result of me really caring a lot about this and implementing it (I'm a engine contributor as well), what I want to say is, I'm not going to win any grand prizes for this, but it's still pretty cool.

[DXMember]

needs more tesselation, I can see the plygons in the waves

[vanished]

5 minutes ago, DXMember said:

needs more tesselation, I can see the plygons in the waves

Maybe if we added a second layer of water under this one and tesselate the shit out of the flat surfaces on those ships...

[N8128]

3 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Maybe if we added a second layer of water under this one and tesselate the shit out of the flat surfaces on those ships...

And even then, we would have to disable any culling of the second water layer. I do however wonder why people make such a big deal out of it, to my knowledge you can force tessellation multiplier to a lower value in AMDs software and nullify the performance impact it had.

[samcool55]

Tbh that looks quite bad, just look at watch_dogs, that had nice water, yes it's a crappy game but the water stuff looked great, better than this tbh...

And the amount of ships doesn't say anything, they also look quite low detail and we all know DX12 is much better at this. AotS has shown us that this stuff shouldn't be too difficult...

 

I mean come on nvidia, can you just not do this crap? Waveworks is nothing new and some older stuff imo looks better and a thousand ships is nothing impressive now we know what DX12 can do.

[VerticalDiscussions]

14 hours ago, N8128 said:

-snip-

Aha at 95% of the times your 4790K oced to 4.6Ghz was the bottleneck? Wasnt the Titan X at 100% load already? Anyways, even cooler would be making an asteroid fall on those boats. Explosions!

[N8128]

33 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Tbh that looks quite bad, just look at watch_dogs, that had nice water, yes it's a crappy game but the water stuff looked great, better than this tbh...

And the amount of ships doesn't say anything, they also look quite low detail and we all know DX12 is much better at this. AotS has shown us that this stuff shouldn't be too difficult...

 

I mean come on nvidia, can you just not do this crap? Waveworks is nothing new and some older stuff imo looks better and a thousand ships is nothing impressive now we know what DX12 can do.

That may be true, sure, but as we pointed out in recent replies, it really isn't that much about the visual quality of ships or the rendering of the amount of ships. I could replace the ship with a very high quality, high poly count ship, and it would run the same (given the same amount of materials/shaders), but this is the one that I had at hand. It's really the real-time physics on all the vessels that is a real highlight, DX12 does not perform any better (in this scene) as I do support DX12, but run on DX11 because of the better optimized drivers. There are quite a few tech highlights here, that I didn't yet talk about because that discussion might get to deep, but I'll be speaking about it at VR conference next month and showing it off at PODIM conference this month, unfortunately all in Slovenia, so I didn't mention it. To kind of sum it up, it's a pretty nice balance of a bunch of interesting tech that produced this result, whatever that is.

23 minutes ago, VerticalDiscussions said:

Aha at 95% of the times your 4790K oced to 4.6Ghz was the bottleneck? Wasnt the Titan X at 100% load already? Anyways, even cooler would be making an asteroid fall on those boats. Explosions!

Titan is close to maxed out, I've hit a nice balance, but yes, the CPU is limiting it a few percentages, to be exact, the buoyancy physics it hitting the CPU the hardest, you know what, that would be totally epic!

[Thony]

This is not a news article. U just tried to used a technology to create meaningless animation. That's my opinion.