Unreal Engine 5 Feature Showcase

I like how the devs got average Joe schmoes with i5's and r5's scrambling to try the demo. A professional's demo that requires an enthusiast PC (aka supercomputer) to run, and especially to build in the first place.
 
Looks amazing tbh, also saw this short forest clip, damn that's the most realistic looking forest I've seen so far and it's just a quick showcase with default assetts....

RTX 2080 with ~30 fps inside the editor, is not too shabby either for all bells and wistless and resolution turned way up.

 
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i love how this engine is so next gen that the editor gizmos contribute to global illumination

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Lumen is really cool.

I set Echo's face material to be emissive as hell, which subsequently turned her face into a fireball... which will actually cast light into the scene.

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And lighting a room with just emissive textures - there's no lights placed in the scene.

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The didn't release an exe. You have to download the engine and the demo files and build it yourself.
 
AnandTech forum member Gideonic has shared some comparison images and videos that suggest Temporal Super Resolution will at the very least serve as an excellent alternative to classic Temporal Anti-Aliasing, providing superior image quality and stability at the expense of slightly lower performance versus its predecessor. Epic Games says that Temporal Super Resolution is capable of output approaching the quality of native 4k renders at input resolutions as low as 1080p.

https://www.thefpsreview.com/2021/05/31/unreal-engine-5-temporal-super-resolution-tested/

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Resolution: From -> toComparison linkPerformance
720p ->1440pTAA vs TSR81 FPS vs 79 FPS
720p ->1440pNative 1440p vs TSR44 FPS vs 79 FPS
1080p ->1440pTAA vs TSR61 FPS vs 58 FPS
1080p ->1440pNative 1440p vs TSR44 FPS vs 58 FPS
2880p -> 1440p (downscale)Native 1440p vs 2880p44 FPS vs 14 FPS
 
I think the nanite stuff is cool but, like, isn't it just more mainstream tessellation or is there actual tech behind it outside of "hardware is good enough to do crazy tessellation now"?

Still looks good don't get me wrong but it still just seems like they're using tessellation more than other engines/developers...like you still have to create all these assets by hand, it's not some magical thing. Like they talk about in one video all the detail in the giants model, how even up close it looks super detailed and rich in polygons. However, someone still made that by hand so it's not really different then having something that high-end modeled in UE4, or Unity, or any other engine that supports tessellation, right? Like, unless you create something this detailed UE5 isn't going to somehow MAKE it that detailed.

Anyways getting hung up on the technicalities I suppose, my bad, but yeah great looking demo regardless. The lighting is definitely great! Playing Days Gone now and it uses screen space global illumination which looks really good too. Not ray-tracing good, mind you, but definitely enjoying a lot of the more subtle lighting effects and WAY better shadows because of it. So I'm definitely glad to see UE5, which you know everyone will be using, finally get this tech on a basic software level.

Starting to get over all this pre-baked lighting and shitty SSAO still being used...I really am thankful, inevitable or not, that Nvidia decided to push the ray-tracing game up SEVERAL notches quick as hell. I've always enjoyed ray-tracing for years and years. Always played the different demos and stuff I could find online back even in the DirectX 9 days. So to see the games that use it now and how good they look (like Control or Cyberpunk) has me really over a lot of these more tradition rasterization techniques. Even then, just give me some sort of global illumination, please! It just looks that much more real even if it's still faked.
 
It is much more detailed than tessellation and runs better. We are talking millions of polygons at good performance without baking it to down to a low poly model.

So you can practically import models straight from ZBrush, which was not possible before without a lot of work. But, yeah, someone still needs to create the model.
 
Dvater said:
I think the nanite stuff is cool but, like, isn't it just more mainstream tessellation or is there actual tech behind it outside of "hardware is good enough to do crazy tessellation now"?

Still looks good don't get me wrong but it still just seems like they're using tessellation more than other engines/developers...like you still have to create all these assets by hand, it's not some magical thing. Like they talk about in one video all the detail in the giants model, how even up close it looks super detailed and rich in polygons. However, someone still made that by hand so it's not really different then having something that high-end modeled in UE4, or Unity, or any other engine that supports tessellation, right? Like, unless you create something this detailed UE5 isn't going to somehow MAKE it that detailed.

Anyways getting hung up on the technicalities I suppose, my bad, but yeah great looking demo regardless. The lighting is definitely great! Playing Days Gone now and it uses screen space global illumination which looks really good too. Not ray-tracing good, mind you, but definitely enjoying a lot of the more subtle lighting effects and WAY better shadows because of it. So I'm definitely glad to see UE5, which you know everyone will be using, finally get this tech on a basic software level.

Starting to get over all this pre-baked lighting and shitty SSAO still being used...I really am thankful, inevitable or not, that Nvidia decided to push the ray-tracing game up SEVERAL notches quick as hell. I've always enjoyed ray-tracing for years and years. Always played the different demos and stuff I could find online back even in the DirectX 9 days. So to see the games that use it now and how good they look (like Control or Cyberpunk) has me really over a lot of these more tradition rasterization techniques. Even then, just give me some sort of global illumination, please! It just looks that much more real even if it's still faked.
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Nanite isn't intended to add detail as it stands, but rather compresses detail down to a sane amount.

It's looks to be sort of like an extremely fine grained automatic LOD system that works on chunks of triangles within the mesh itself - not the mesh as a whole, with the end goal in keeping a density of roughly a triangle per pixel. So it's not really rasterizing the billion triangles at once in the mesh, but rather roughly what it needs to display it on screen as losslessly as possible (again, at around a triangle per pixel).

And another cool aspect is that you can have tons of the things with seemingly no performance loss. Lots of instances seems to be borderline free.
 
socK said:
I downloaded the engine and the demo.

Nanite indeed works, it's very cool, and the Quixel stuff is extremely seamless. Literally just a couple clicks to open Quixel up and dump whatever to the engine - it's fantastic. The dev experience is exceptional. They really crushed it here. The asset quality is generally immaculate, both in mesh and texture detail. When you export a mesh to the engine, you can pick a couple options, from like Low, Medium, High, and Nanite. I haven't tried the others, but I'm guessing Nanite is the happy medium they came up with where it's not so utterly overdetailed that it's basically completely imperceivable (and basically wasting disk space) but still wildly above any mesh you'd use in a game prior. The mesh I imported was still well into the millions triangle wise.

I picked whatever the craziest looking mesh I could find was and threw it in the scene. It was multiple millions of triangles and drop a couple in. Instantly cleave my framerate from like 60 to 25 with just a couple of them. Couple minutes later, I figured out how to convert them to Nanite. It takes a moment to process the mesh, then bam, done. Framerate is instantly back up. So I keep adding more and more. Eventually I have like a hundred of these rock formations covering every inch of my view and framerate is still smooth and barely seems to budge at fall no matter how many I throw into the scene. It's wild. Literally individual pebbles and rocks and modeled, the detail was astoundingly high. It definitely does what it says on the tin, it's an incredible piece of tech - I've never seen anything quite like it. Nanite seems very cheap and fast from a performance point of view. So yeah, their claim that you can practically throw Nanite meshes around with near impunity seems to be pretty much true, even on older hardware like mine.

I'm not sure what they did to dynamic shadows, but it looks like Nanite plays a role in rendering them. They're EXTRMELEY sharp up close, seem to have no real issues catching even very tiny bits of detail and geometry, and filter out to a nice soft penumbra. Honestly, they're probably among the highest quality I've seen in a game. They're excellent.

Lumen is pretty heavy, but doable. Didn't screw with it much. Looks like it can accelerate certain things if you have hardware raytracing available (I don't, GTX 1080). It's definitely usable on this card. I'm sure I could dial a few things back a little and make the performance more tolerable. The quality looks very good.

The new temporal upsampling definitely works well. It's very clean when you're sitting still. Without much motion, even going to half res was good quality. As the resolution falls, you'll start seeing artifacts in motion around edges, but it resolves to a very clean image. I have a 1440p monitor, and I think I could definitely live with whatever it was pumping out at 75% screen resolution. I don't know if it's as good as DLSS since I haven't used it before, but it definitely works very well as it stands, and I'd presume will continue getting better.


This is definitely feels next gen - the entire thing is amazingly impressive.
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This actually annoys me. The ease of doing things in unreal will make it more likely that more games will use it. I have not really likely the quality of games made in unreal and the unreal look is often easy to spot. But it's popular. Eg. Final fantasy remake in another engine would have had better fidelity in the environment.

Even in their demo it still looks unreal. The amount of environmental blurring in the video is insane, though maybe the slower playback speed is exacerbating it. It's also hard to focus on details in the rocks beside her for example. here



Brings up something i noticed in Final Fantasy remake. It was as if they blurred the objects in the world to hide their low quality. But in this case it might be a side effect of the feature.

It's like its all shifted/blurred. Its a step forward for unreal and if the popular but inferior engine ends up coming up to par with what things like frostbite can put on screen, good. If you can make something like spiderman remastered or anthem in unreal with the same results or better, good.
 
AzixTGO said:
This actually annoys me. The ease of doing things in unreal will make it more likely that more games will use it. I have not really likely the quality of games made in unreal and the unreal look is often easy to spot. But it's popular. Eg. Final fantasy remake in another engine would have had better fidelity in the environment.

Even in their demo it still looks unreal. The amount of environmental blurring in the video is insane, though maybe the slower playback speed is exacerbating it. It's also hard to focus on details in the rocks beside her for example. here



Brings up something i noticed in Final Fantasy remake. It was as if they blurred the objects in the world to hide their low quality. But in this case it might be a side effect of the feature.

It's like its all shifted/blurred. Its a step forward for unreal and if the popular but inferior engine ends up coming up to par with what things like frostbite can put on screen, good. If you can make something like spiderman remastered or anthem in unreal with the same results or better, good.
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That's probably a design choice, its easy to not use depth of field or chromatic aberration effects that produce this blurring effect.
I mess around with unreal engine a lot and UE5 is awesome so far!
 
Dvater said:
If this, along with lens flare, isn't the most annoying and fucking STUPID "graphical effect" I've ever seen in games I don't know what is. What's the fucking OBSESSION developers have with making games look like we're viewing them through a camera lens from the 1930's???
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Or motion blur, as if every single LCD screen today doesn't already have plenty of it.
 
Delicieuxz said:
Remember when Euclideon came out with their Unlimited Detail voxel-based engine demos, and people pointed-out that it's only with non-animated objects and said there'd never be 'unlimited' detail? Euclideon were savaged for even claiming the concept is attainable.
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IMO that is the real next generation, where you can have an earth size planet, go anywhere, walk into a stranger's house, cut them up in any way you wish to see their insides, then maybe mix it into your own poop and bake a cake out of it, feed it to the neighbors, etc...
 
Youn said:
IMO that is the real next generation, where you can have an earth size planet, go anywhere, walk into a stranger's house, cut them up in any way you wish to see their insides, then maybe mix it into your own poop and bake a cake out of it, feed it to the neighbors, etc...
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Sounds a little too well thought out to be a fantasy... You sure you didn't already do this in real life?!
 
Youn said:
IMO that is the real next generation, where you can have an earth size planet, go anywhere, walk into a stranger's house, cut them up in any way you wish to see their insides, then maybe mix it into your own poop and bake a cake out of it, feed it to the neighbors, etc...
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Bro

original.jpg
 
Youn said:
IMO that is the real next generation, where you can have an earth size planet, go anywhere, walk into a stranger's house, cut them up in any way you wish to see their insides, then maybe mix it into your own poop and bake a cake out of it, feed it to the neighbors, etc...
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this is the fucked up shit that goes on in those shady worlds alluded to at the beginning of Ready Player One
 
Youn said:
IMO that is the real next generation, where you can have an earth size planet, go anywhere, walk into a stranger's house, cut them up in any way you wish to see their insides, then maybe mix it into your own poop and bake a cake out of it, feed it to the neighbors, etc...
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I certainly understand what you're saying. Even with a game like Horizon Forbidden West with all it's detail and years of "water tech" being created I STILL can't just go grab a handful of sand. I still can't scoop a cup of water out of a lake.

For all our realism in "visuals" the actual realism in games is disgustingly limited. Almost feels intentional when you consider the various technologies we have to achieve these things...I think it was like 10 years ago when they were showing procedural room building in CryEngine...something that allowed limitless open buildings in games. Same with fluids...we had real time fluids in a game called "Cryostasis" in 2008!!!

Then you have other games like Red Faction with it's geometry being destructible, Red Faction Guerilla with it's fully destructible environments...likewise more recently with Teardown.

What you are talking about though is basically impossible right now. I don't see this happening until we legit just have real life simulators that mimic every atom in an object.

But hey, with this Nanite tech maybe this is just the very first distant relative to one atom per pixel?
 
i can't wait to die irl when i step on a claymore in COD 326 and it subsequently blows me out of my chair and splatters me across the room

then the nurse removes my neuralink and tells me it's time to take my medication
 
socK said:
i can't wait to die irl when i step on a claymore in COD 326 and it subsequently blows me out of my chair and splatters me across the room

then the nurse removes my neuralink and tells me it's time to take my medication
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So are you hooked into a video game or just going senile???
 
Dvater said:
What you are talking about though is basically impossible right now. I don't see this happening until we legit just have real life simulators that mimic every atom in an object.
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Maybe, but I didn't say what visual fidelity it should be. Procedural generation of a lot of things is certainly possible, as is voxels, they just be chunky lookin:
 
polonyc2 said:
Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial- UE5 Starter Course!

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Don't sleep on this! This may be the biggest infodump of UE5 training that isn't behind an expensive paywall.

The amount of graphical power that anyone has access to learn and create with now is staggering. Historically you'd have to grind your way up the ladder for many years before you could dream of being able to work with a game developer's multimilliondollar, proprietary engine.
 
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DPI said:
Don't sleep on this! This may be the biggest infodump of UE5 training that isn't behind an expensive paywall.

The amount of graphical power that anyone has access to learn and create with now is staggering. Historically you'd have to grind your way up the ladder for many years before you could dream of being able to work with a game developer's multimilliondollar, proprietary engine.
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Yeah, I downloaded it just in case it gets removed for some reason.
 
polonyc2 said:
how are you downloading/saving it?
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Open VLC Player, go to Media at the top toolbar and select Open Network Stream.

Copy and paste the YouTube video URL you want to download into the bar under Network Protocol and click the Play button.

Then go to Tools and choose Codec or Media Information (I don't think it matters which) in the Tools menu. Copy the link from the Location box (at the bottom of the screen) and paste it into the address bar in your browser.

Right-click on the video and choose Save video to download it to your system.
 
Youn said:
IMO that is the real next generation, where you can have an earth size planet, go anywhere, walk into a stranger's house, cut them up in any way you wish to see their insides, then maybe mix it into your own poop and bake a cake out of it, feed it to the neighbors, etc...
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I uh … wow.
 
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