[HN Gopher] Unreal 5.5 is a big deal [video]
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Unreal 5.5 is a big deal [video]
Author : RobinHirst11
Score : 109 points
Date : 2024-11-18 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Gotta love videos with useless titles and almost no text in the
| description...
|
| Unreal 5.5 changes: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-
| us/unreal-engine/...
|
| Page on MegaLights, which appear to be the focus of the video:
| https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...
|
| Key quote from the above:
|
| MegaLights is a stochastic direct lighting technique, which
| solves direct lighting though importance sampling of lights. It
| traces a fixed number of rays per pixel towards important light
| sources. If a light source is hit by a ray then that light's
| contribution is added to the current pixel.
|
| This approach has a few important implications:
|
| Direct lighting is handled by a single pass in an unified manner,
| replacing multiple existing Deferred Renderer shadowing and
| shading techniques.
|
| MegaLights not only reduce the cost of shadowing, but also reduce
| the cost of the shading itself.
|
| MegaLights has a constant performance overhead, but quality may
| decrease as lighting complexity increases at a given pixel.
| wslh wrote:
| I jumped directly to the video and understood the deal pretty
| quickly! I wonder if there are super amateurs here in HN using
| this for creating short movies.
| ActionHank wrote:
| With Unreal becoming the Chrome of the game engine world, Unity
| dying a slow death triggered by their corporate overlords, I
| can't help but feel like it's a matter of time until they
| become the bad guys.
|
| I don't want them to, just seems like the circle of life.
| ljm wrote:
| They don't have to be bad guys to be at the forefront of a
| growing monoculture, precisely because Unity shit the bed and
| the remaining competition for indie devs tapers off.
|
| I love Godot for game dev, but it's not the full stack
| package, and last time I checked it wasn't great for 3D, but
| it's basically the best you have short of modding Doom.
|
| RPG Maker and Adventure Game Studio corner the market on a
| niche genre of pixel-art RPGs and point-and-clicks if you
| want to stay 2D.
|
| It's expensive to build a new engine from scratch, especially
| when Unreal says it can cross-build to PC, Xbox, PS4/PS5,
| Switch, Mobile, etc.
|
| The problem is that making a generic does-anything engine
| means it can't be optimal, and more and more these days
| studios are using the engine but don't understand how to
| optimise within it. So now you're downloading shader caches
| from Steam because you can pull a pre-compiled shader across
| the network faster than it will build at runtime, and you
| still expect the game to run smooth as butter.
|
| I build shit for the web, and this is the exact trade-off you
| make when you, say, choose Rails for your server over a more
| hands-on setup. I can spin up web apps in Rails with my eyes
| closed, it's that easy, but the performance has a high floor.
| getcrunk wrote:
| It would be cool if companies in their position make two
| versions of their products. One continues on this trajectory
| that {adds bloat | becomes more modern} and another that
| prioritizes avoiding performance regression by a few metrics.
| darknavi wrote:
| Luckily there are still loads of games using their own engine
| tech out there, but the pool is shrinking.
| echelon wrote:
| I wouldn't worry. This cool tech looks mid when the games are
| in motion. It's great for static renders and tech demos, but
| a lot of folks are just turning it off.
|
| There are still a lot of engines. Plenty of people are
| starting to incorporate Godot, Unity hasn't disappeared, and
| companies build and leverage their own engines all the time.
|
| The main reason Epic Games is so big is Fortnite, not Unreal
| Engine. They're still incredibly focused on that metaverse
| play.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Unity is still a lot more popular then Unreal and
| alternatives exist and are created all the time-- others have
| mentioned Godot, or Cry Engine which are old. People are
| working on Rust engines. Lots of commercial developers use
| their own tech. Game engines don't have to gravitate toward a
| standard. They only do when the cost/benefit works in their
| favor.
| torginus wrote:
| No it's not - I know a few people who work in the industry
| and Unity's dead on new projects - everyones moving to
| Unreal. Indies, etc. might still use it (or other engines),
| but professionals have been constantly moving away from the
| engine for years, for all sorts of reasons, the recent
| licencing shakeups being one of them.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.
|
| Unity took all the buckets outside, burned them, then
| demanded money from all their customers. I've not seen new
| projects using them, because stakeholders are concerned
| about surprise expenses down the line.
| npinsker wrote:
| Unity is not dying.
| kasool wrote:
| Unity is not dying lol. Unreal is only becoming the "Chrome
| of the game engine world" in the AAA space. It's not a nice
| tool to use for independent projects at all, speaking as
| someone who works with it professionally. Most aspects of
| what makes Unity great for Indies are missing from Unreal
| (good docs is the big one).
| superxpro12 wrote:
| Strongly feel that Epic is playing the long game to
| monopolize game dev. Their "free games" teaser on EGS is an
| attempt to gain market share. /
|
| Once they have captured both the engine and distribution
| market share, the anti-consumer policies will begin.
|
| In the long run, I remain highly pessimistic and suspicious
| regarding Epic's long term strategy.
| ozten wrote:
| Any evidence to back up "With Unreal becoming the Chrome of
| the game engine world"?
| 42lux wrote:
| It's his stick he uses the same title for every minor ue
| release.
| teach wrote:
| *shtick
| cdiamand wrote:
| Blender has the famed Donut Tutorial, which is a blast if you're
| even slightly interested in learning about it.
|
| Does Unreal have something similar?
| JCoder58 wrote:
| Your First Hour in Unreal Engine 5.2:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peUO_55ck4o (link to course is
| in description)
| nickthegreek wrote:
| 2min papers released their vid on 5.5 a few days ago at about
| half the length. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzPxWXEZZcc
| coldcode wrote:
| What are the performance requirements for all these new fancy
| features? What kind of systems (console, PC+video card) can
| actually use them at a predictable frame rate?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| A mid tier one of 2030 should do the trick, I'd think
| drexlspivey wrote:
| The model or the year?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Hah! Sorry I meant the year 2030
| __alexs wrote:
| Call me when the motion clarity isn't garbage.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Tell us more?
| bakugo wrote:
| Unreal Engine 5 relies very heavily on temporal algorithms
| and upscaling to deliver playable performance, which looks
| fine for stationary shots but often makes it look like
| someone smeared vaseline all over your screen whenever the
| camera is moving.
| bakugo wrote:
| Can't wait to play all these stunning Unreal 5 games at 1080p
| 60fps (upscaled from 720p with DLSS and frame gen) on my $2000
| RTX 5090 that draws 500W. Truly next-gen.
| paol wrote:
| 5090 is rumored to draw 600W. I'm afraid reality has overtaken
| your satire.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| My hair dryer pulls 800W. Are you telling me the 5090 doesn't
| even support basic features like drying my hair?
| WithinReason wrote:
| It does as long as you stick your head in the right place
| luqtas wrote:
| yeah but how about the photorealistic power draw WITH game
| mechanics and animations based on collisions of simple cuboids
| & capsules?
| RantyDave wrote:
| I still like Brotato.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I still don't have WR in Celeste, no point buying a GPU
| seanw444 wrote:
| We're gonna get to the point where peoples' gaming rigs won't
| even start because they continually trip standard circuit
| breakers. Gonna need to build a special service to play games
| in 5 years.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| "infinite lighting sources and infinite models" reality : 8 times
| higher frame rate in optimal case when using multiple light
| sources.
| ethagknight wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 how Megalight works so much better than the
| prior approach, and what the tradeoffs might be? (Im not a game
| developer)
|
| Reading the link below, the best I can surmise is that they
| shifted the prioritization from following a lightsource through
| all the different interactions it has, to the opposite of
| identifying, per pixel, how each pixel is illuminated via a
| prioritization scheme for light sources, including any nearby
| pixels. So it's a per-pixel approximation that results in a
| something far more accurate than the prior 'declared brute force'
| approach? Each pixel gets 2-5 inbound rays that have the highest
| impact.
|
| How did I do?
|
| https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...
| wilberton wrote:
| In essence mega-lights is ray tracing one shadow ray per pixel,
| then using some temporal de-noising to try and smooth away the
| noise. This is in contrast to how games traditionally calculate
| shadows, which is by rendering a shadow map from the point of
| view of each shadow casting light in the scene. For a small
| number of lights, the shadow map approach will be considerably
| faster. What mega-lights enables is effectively an unlimited
| number of shadow casting lights for a fixed cost (because it
| only ever traces a fixed number of rays per pixel), but at a
| much higher base performance cost, and with the potential for
| noisy artefacts caused by the denoising.
| WithinReason wrote:
| It's actually much less accurate, but much faster.
| YesBox wrote:
| Very impressive! I have to wonder, as someone in the game
| development world working on 2D game, what the budget of a game
| would be to take full advantage of Unreal 5+.
|
| City Skylines 2 is a good accessible example (even though it's
| made with Unity). Via mods, editing a single property takes
| several hours to make it look amazing. Time is spent adding
| texture decals, doodads, importing new textures, and playing
| around with the texture geometry (e.g. adjusting the grassy area
| size).
|
| It seems like this depth of detail requires exponential time
| investment on the devs part. Small wonder CS2 launched with very
| few building options?
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Does anyone know how megalights works? What's the major
| innovation there? Is it using neural nets to approximate stuff?
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| Character meshes were taking up 1GB? I wonder what surprising (to
| me, a non-gamedev) things are hiding in modern 100GB+ games...
| jzig wrote:
| but why does the street look like wet plastic
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I supposed I am getting older and that's the reason but I
| recently tried playing Horizon Zero Dawn LEGO and Cyberpunk
| and... the lightning was too much. I can't focus on what matters
| on the screen (can hardly find the hot spots), to the point where
| I'd tried to lower the quality settings to have less lightning
| elements and flatter textures. I noticed for those games that I
| really need high FPS (>60) otherwise I can't focus well enough.
| kasool wrote:
| It's not just you. There's a real problem right now with the
| push towards graphical fidelity (specifically "realism") coming
| at cost to readability -- most of which is informed by careful
| choices in the game's art (lighting, level design, style, etc.)
|
| The main example I can think of is the "yellow paint" discourse
| w.r.t to games like Resident Evil 4 remake Final Fantasy 7:
| Rebirth. Freya Holmer has a really great thread on the latter:
| https://x.com/FreyaHolmer/status/1756276112462627119
|
| To be clear, I don't think the push towards realism is at odds
| with having a stylish and readable game. But the more
| dimensions you're dealing with (greater complexity in lighting
| models, materials etc.) the more difficult it gets to tie
| everything together into something cohesive.
| kleiba wrote:
| There's two things going through my mind after watching this
| video:
|
| 1st) What an amazing piece of technology this tool is.
|
| 2nd) How many years I would probably have to spend to learn all
| the ins and outs of that program from scratch.
| mrandish wrote:
| The advanced capabilities of state-of-the-art game engines are
| extremely impressive in a technical sense. Unfortunately, in
| recent years this cutting-edge tech is rarely the enabling
| element in delivering games I enjoy playing. This is one reason
| I've changed my gaming focus to retro-gaming (of course, the DLC
| and other monetization-centric sins of big game studios are also
| a major factor).
|
| While there are a few newer games I do enjoy, as far as I can
| tell, the bleeding edge features aren't needed to create what I
| find enjoyable about them. For me, I think the issue is that,
| outside rare exceptions, beyond a certain point increasing
| fidelity doesn't add value to game play. Admittedly, this is my
| own subjective assessment. Although I'm not in the game industry,
| I also worry that the increasing breadth and complexity of SOTA
| engines requires increasingly specialized knowledge and skill
| sets to leverage thus raising the bar out of reach of the smaller
| developers who often create the new games I do enjoy. It would be
| reassuring to hear from smaller and indie game developers who've
| found the new engine features in recent UE versions to be both
| accessible on small-team time budgets and enabling of significant
| new game play value.
|
| Outside of gaming, I think newer capabilities like using SOTA
| engines for real-time virtual sets during film production are
| more creatively exciting because they can enable big budget
| story-telling on smaller and indie budgets.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Slightly on topic for anyone interested; Unreal Engine 5 now runs
| on WebGPU!(unofficially through my company, a third party)
|
| Demo here:
|
| https://play.spacelancers.com/
| echelon wrote:
| Are you looking to get acquihired?
|
| What's to stop Epic Games from building their own?
|
| Is this a lot of effort to build and maintain? Seems like they
| could easily pull something out of Apple's playbook and leave
| you with a lot of tech debt.
|
| Not trying to insult or belittle, just really curious about the
| line you're walking and your thinking about the ecosystem
| you're in.
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