Did Unreal Engine 5 live up to the hype?

[Legend]

Came across this video randomly. Knew that Lumen, Unreal Engine's new lighting method, had pros and cons but I didn't know nanite also had issues.

Don't know if I fully agree with the video but it's still interesting to see. I assumed nanite was an easy performance boost. Instead it sounds like it gets worse results compared to traditional optimization methods.

On top of nanite and lumen having mixed results, UE5 games have a reputation for stuttering and not running well. Random example I found on google but I've seen it various places, including with the new monkey game: Stutter is so bad i just skip any game using UE5 :: RoboCop: Rogue City General Discussions


Only UE5 game I've played was Talos 2 and that looked and ran great. So at least so far as a player I haven't had issues.

[nnodley]

It's more a dev issue i'm sure than the engine.  But yeah nanite is really good only in that you don't have to do the traditional LOD stuff. Which is great, but it definitely still has issues.  Those issues will be alleviated over time though.  Nanite and lumen both perform way better than 5.0, imo.

[Legend]

It's more a dev issue i'm sure than the engine.  But yeah nanite is really good only in that you don't have to do the traditional LOD stuff. Which is great, but it definitely still has issues.  Those issues will be alleviated over time though.  Nanite and lumen both perform way better than 5.0, imo.

Has Unreal Engine 5 felt like something special though?

UE4 looked great when it was first being shown but a lot of early PS4 demos looked that good. It felt like a demo of the hardware than anything else. UE5 though, at least to me, was shown as so much more. Every next gen thing just looked slightly better than last gen things and then Lumen in the valley of Nanite came and showed what looked impossible.

As a developer that has only messed around with UE5 for evaluating lumen, I was definitely disappointed with all the drawbacks. Lumen is a great tool but it still couldn't handle the situation I wanted (large indoor space) without having nasty artifacts.

[nnodley]

Has Unreal Engine 5 felt like something special though?

UE4 looked great when it was first being shown but a lot of early PS4 demos looked that good. It felt like a demo of the hardware than anything else. UE5 though, at least to me, was shown as so much more. Every next gen thing just looked slightly better than last gen things and then Lumen in the valley of Nanite came and showed what looked impossible.

As a developer that has only messed around with UE5 for evaluating lumen, I was definitely disappointed with all the drawbacks. Lumen is a great tool but it still couldn't handle the situation I wanted (large indoor space) without having nasty artifacts.

yeah I think the promise of nanite and lumen fell a little flat for most devs. The drawbacks definitely put it out of the production ready territory in some instances.  Lumen artifacts indoors is very annoying. I've found some ways to minimize but usually comes at a cost of adding a ton of blocker meshes around the outside of the scene.

I think nanite is the bigger special thing.  It has issues for sure, but being able to make scenes with 100's of millions of polys/tris without a terrible performance hit is pretty magical.  But i think it needs plenty more optimization before a lot of devs adopt using it in a full game.  I'm going to attempt to in my game but i've gone back to just using mostly lumen and doing proper LOD's for most things. And i'm sure by the time I even release something full it will have come a decent way as new unreal updates come out.

I think the magical thing for me though is it takes almost minimal work to make something look amazing. Lumen does a lot of the heavy lifting for you anymore.

[darkknightkryta]

Is Nanite an iterated voxel rendering method that Carmack demonstrated back in the day?  If so, I imagine it will have a few kinks to work out.  But at the same time, that, tesselation engines, etc haven't panned out as well for whatever reason.  As far as lighting goes, it's been the bane of graphics since 3D engines first started.  I'm actually more of the mind that older quality games (Maybe PS3 level) running with full proper ray tracing would probably look better than anything today.  Lighting/shading is the most important thing in 3D graphics and it's been hard to progress in it.

Ultimately it appears this tech was made for the movie industry more so than gaming.  It's probably a godsend for the movie/tv industry.  It just happened to work well enough for games.

[Legend]

Is Nanite an iterated voxel rendering method that Carmack demonstrated back in the day?  If so, I imagine it will have a few kinks to work out.  But at the same time, that, tesselation engines, etc haven't panned out as well for whatever reason.  As far as lighting goes, it's been the bane of graphics since 3D engines first started.  I'm actually more of the mind that older quality games (Maybe PS3 level) running with full proper ray tracing would probably look better than anything today.  Lighting/shading is the most important thing in 3D graphics and it's been hard to progress in it.

Ultimately it appears this tech was made for the movie industry more so than gaming.  It's probably a godsend for the movie/tv industry.  It just happened to work well enough for games.

Nah nanite is where it runs per polygon lod. So every mesh can be unoptimized at max qaulity and unreal just takes care of it.

Lumen is voxel rendering of a sort. It's software raycasting for lighting.

[darkknightkryta]

Nah nanite is where it runs per polygon lod. So every mesh can be unoptimized at max qaulity and unreal just takes care of it.

Lumen is voxel rendering of a sort. It's software raycasting for lighting.

I remember seeing hearsay that Epic had decided to double down on the voxel rendering instead of polygons, which was for nanite.  Like, everyone else abandoned it, but Epic pushed through, apparently.  Are they storing polygons in a similar fashion?  Like, with trees?

[Legend]

I remember seeing hearsay that Epic had decided to double down on the voxel rendering instead of polygons, which was for nanite.  Like, everyone else abandoned it, but Epic pushed through, apparently.  Are they storing polygons in a similar fashion?  Like, with trees?

They certainly have some acceleration structure for polygons but I don't know the specifics. The big one I remember at least for 5.0 was that nanite is a software renderer and doesn't use the built in rasterization methods that come with gpus.

A problem I saw with ray tracing is that the game needs to have a second copy of every mesh in memory since nanite geometry can't be raytraced against.

@nnodley how does nanite store its polygons?

[nnodley]

They certainly have some acceleration structure for polygons but I don't know the specifics. The big one I remember at least for 5.0 was that nanite is a software renderer and doesn't use the built in rasterization methods that come with gpus.

A problem I saw with ray tracing is that the game needs to have a second copy of every mesh in memory since nanite geometry can't be raytraced against.

@nnodley how does nanite store its polygons?

Honestly I'm not entirely sure. I know that it's basically creating hierarchical clusters of tri groups that are stored in memory. Then those clusters are swapped and LOD'ed on the fly. It's  able to seamlessly connect those clusters based on camera view.

Apart from that it's beyond me

[Legend]

We've actually taken care to eliminate the stutters in The Plucky Squire. I say we, but I mean the amazing @LiloJames from @WhitePaperGames. James implemented our PSO caching by gathering shader data across the game so that it doesn't need to be generated at runtime.

— Bidds (@onebitbeyond) August 25, 2024

I know a lot of people will point at any stutter in an Unreal game and put it down to shaders, but actually, this is just my incompetence.

— Bidds (@onebitbeyond) August 25, 2024

[nnodley]

I can't say i've actually ever noticed any stutter in editor at least. But i've never really been looking for it. And i'm running a 4090