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Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
If you're talking about the SciFi RPG made on UE5 for Sony that was leaked in 2023, it's not People Can Fly who are making it and i don't think they are working with Sony on anything.

Right now they are helping on the next Gears and working on a game for Square Enix.
I see. Well, i hope we see something like that from Sony. i am tired of seeing all these third party GaaS games sony invested in so it was good to read a rumor that they also invested in a single player game from a known studio thats not a moneyhat.
 
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The hate for ue5 on gaf is never gonna be not funny



tears.gif
What is the best open world or semi-open world game released on UE5? I can't even think of any AAA games coming out this year that are utilizing UE5. Why is that?There are real questions about UE5 engine processing populated big game worlds. Sure, it is a beautiful engine, but I am somewhat expecting unoptmised games with baron worlds
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I have the machine for it so why should i say bad things about the engine? Because people with inferior hardwares can't run the engine as good as me? Sorry, i'm not THAT empathic :lollipop_grinning_sweat:
UE5 can run just fine on consoles. I did a compilation of pixel counts and 99% of the games were 1440p 30 fps reconstructed to 4k using TSR just like Epic claimed when they released that first PS5 UE5 demo.

it's the 60 fps modes that have issues, and they are not the only ones. Massive's snowdrop is another great next gen engine and they are also dropping to 720p in the 60 fps mode. RE Engine was exposed last year when they finally released a title that wasnt build on last gen hardware. FF7's performance mode looks like actual garbage so simply going back to UE4 isnt the answer either. Bethesda's engine was notoriously CPU bound and shipped at 30 fps on consoles. 1440p 30 fps internal resolution as well. Final Fantasy 16 also dropped to 720p in all of its combat scenes while struggling to maintain 50 fps during exploration. Frostbite isnt that much better either. Dead Space was a fucking disaster at launch and still has the worst stuttering of any game ive played on PC.

I think it's fair to say that aside from a few exceptions, and cross gen games built on last gen specs, 60 fps modes on consoles are problematic. But UE5 is an easy target because A LOT of games ship on it. I think Demon Souls, Ratchet, Spiderman 2, and Indiana Jones are the only games with decent image quality and stable 60 fps modes. Thats it 4 games in 4 years. And Spiderman 2 looks cross gen, while Indy looks like a PS3 game at times. Thanks but no thanks.

They should've simply focused on shipping stable 30 fps modes like Ninja Theory did with hellblade 2. Console gamers never cared about 60 fps despite a cross gen period last gen that lasted almost 2 years. they wouldve been ok with 30 fps and appreciated what UE5 has been bringing to the table. I cant imagine what it must be like to play these games at lower resolutions. Actually i can, i switched to 60 fps when i recently went back to FF7 solely to enjoy the combat, and i cannot stress just how ugly it looks in that mode. 30 fps mode actually looks rather pleasant. last gen, but decent. Performance mode is utter garbage and its a shame that 75% of console gamers have played UE5 games in that awful mode.
 

GymWolf

Member
What is the best open world or semi-open world game released on UE5? I can't even think of any AAA games coming out this year that are utilizing UE5. Why is that?There are real questions about UE5 engine processing populated big game worlds. Sure, it is a beautiful engine, but I am somewhat expecting unoptmised games with barren worlds
Yeah super gigantic open worlds like witcher 4 are an incognita, but we already have decently sizez open worlds, Stalker 2 is open world and most important, some areas of wukong are extremely big with the last area beinst straight up open world size and you use a fast traversal method to explore it, and wukong straight up look better than almost everything.

But yeah these 2 are pretty barren, i give you that, i think stalker is improving with patches tho.

But w4 is being made with the last version of ue5 so i expect huge improvements if what slimy says is true.

And don't forget that the open world with arguably the most shit on screen from last gen was days gone and its huge hordes, and days gone was a ue4 game, so open worlds with a lot of life are not completely off the table.

What open world have you seen in id engine of doom\indy? and yet gaf suck that engine's balls like they were lime skittles...
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
What is the best open world or semi-open world game released on UE5?
Stalker is open world.
Black Myth is semi-open world.
I can't even think of any AAA games coming out this year that are utilizing UE5. Why is that?
Mafia is coming out this year and it should be open world. Though maybe not on a scale of say GTA or Horizon.

Avowed has open world areas to explore and its coming out this friday.

Expedition 33 is coming out in April and it is also wide linear like Black Myth.

The Outer Worlds 2 is also coming out this year and should be open world like the first game, but it looks like shit in comparison to the other games. not sure if the B or C team at obsidian cranked this out while the rest of the studio were working on Avowed.

There are real questions about UE5 engine processing populated big game worlds. Sure, it is a beautiful engine, but I am somewhat expecting unoptmised games with baron worlds
Yes, the original UE5.1 build was extremely single threaded which is why Matrix ran like shit when you started driving really fast. it struggled to stream in the world. That was fixed in UE5.4 but we havent seen many games on that build. Avowed is 5.3 so it might also be CPU bottlenecked but they had several improvements to Lumen GPU performance and support for nanite foliage added in that version.
 
Yes, the original UE5.1 build was extremely single threaded which is why Matrix ran like shit when you started driving really fast. it struggled to stream in the world. That was fixed in UE5.4 but we havent seen many games on that build. Avowed is 5.3 so it might also be CPU bottlenecked but they had several improvements to Lumen GPU performance and support for nanite foliage added in that version
Yeah, the engine will surely continue to get better with updates, but it makes reports of CDPR struggling using UE5 still very concerning. I'm all for great graphics, but I would much rather have game worlds that are lived in and populated
 
Yeah, the engine will surely continue to get better with updates, but it makes reports of CDPR struggling using UE5 still very concerning. I'm all for great graphics, but I would much rather have game worlds that are lived in and populated
This seems to be a developer issue if I had to say, devs in Unreal are choosing not to have lively worlds for reasons.
 

dgrdsv

Member
I´m a software architect and project manager who regularly does business projects with the likes of big car manufacturers etc.
I´d kill for some insight here. I simply don`t get where all the manhours go and I´m dying of professional curiosity.
What happened in the last years that made development time and budgets explode like this? I always thought it was just more and more complex asset creation and scope, but with recent releases that conviction is seriously flattening as I don`t see that reflected in the end products.
screaming tell me GIF
It's a mix of more expensive art production (which you spread over time unless you want to up the team size) and general project mismanagement.
The latter leads to lots of reboots and remakes which remain invisible to the public.
 

Lethal01

Member
The hate for ue5 on gaf is never gonna be not funny



tears.gif

I loved UE5 since its first announcement, its got it's big issues though especially with open worlds much like UE4 did.
And people seem to not want to acknowledge these faults until 3 years pass and epic announces a beta build that work to fix it.

The tons of, "Oh my god these idiot dev should just switch to UE5 that will fix everything for they're specific game, just look at "X game thats good, ignore all the one that came out bad, those one are just made by idiot devs."
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
This seems to be a developer issue if I had to say, devs in Unreal are choosing not to have lively worlds for reasons.
the CPU bottleneck in the early days of UE5 could be a reason why. It was very single threaded.

Though i dont see the reason to shoe-horn NPCs in games like Silent Hill 2, hellblade 2, black myth and Lords of the Fallen. Robocop and immortals have several hub worlds that have NPCs and the upcoming Kingsmaker game has literally thousands of NPCs on screen at once so i dont know if UE5 is still a big CPU hog.

It's a mix of more expensive art production (which you spread over time unless you want to up the team size) and general project mismanagement.
The latter leads to lots of reboots and remakes which remain invisible to the public.
CD project also wasted 3 out of those 4 years on fixing Cyberpunk. They said they spent $120 million just fixing it and making the Phantom Liberty DLC. Thats all on project management who didnt scope out the original project and then spent the next 3 years fixing it.

ND wasted 2 years on a remake that they HAD to take over because they kept meddling with the remake which was being helmed by another studio forcing that studio's main people to quit in protest. They also had a lot of people working on Factions for 5 years before it was quit. Yes, it was MP but im sure a lot of game designers, artists and engineers worked on that game.

Bluepoint and bend just wasted 4 years on a GaaS game that was cancelled. So yes, mismanagement is everywhere. And its plaguing even the best studios like cd project and Naughty dog.
 
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he said it's not graphics, but simply poor management from the top.
It's a mix of more expensive art production (which you spread over time unless you want to up the team size) and general project mismanagement.
The latter leads to lots of reboots and remakes which remain invisible to the public.
Unless suddenly 6-7 years ago 2/3rds of all western managers in this industry got a heavy case of "the stupid" all at once the mismanagement stuff can't be the deciding factor, can it? Or maybe that actually was the case given that we're suddenly seeing a surge of Asian developers stepping up.
I'd love to pick the brain of some middle management here.....
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Unless suddenly 6-7 years ago 2/3rds of all western managers in this industry got a heavy case of "the stupid" all at once the mismanagement stuff can't be the deciding factor, can it? Or maybe that actually was the case given that we're suddenly seeing a surge of Asian developers stepping up.
I'd love to pick the brain of some middle management here.....
Look up Jason's expose on Rocksteady, Bioware, ND's meddling within Bend and VSG, Arkhane's Redfall and CD project's troubled Cyberpunk production. The devs are still working. They are just being led by utter morons.

Also, the fascination with making 100 hour games. We went from 8-10 hour games in the PS3 era to 20-40 games in the PS4 gen, and are now making 50-100 hour games. FF7 Rebirth is so big it is insane. Makes no sense after the first game was just fine at around 25-35 hours. Perfect for an RPG. But now its 100 hours. Why? I dont know.

I guess its easier to take a 10 hour game and copy paste it 10x over than make a 20 hour game with a bunch of new innovative ideas and systems.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
One day…it will be.

Maybe the day when UE6 happens.
Its a real-time cutscene. It will always be touched up with lens flare, motion blur, depth of field and scene composition simply impossible during gameplay.

What’s important is that the assets, environment and lighting are the same thanks to namite and lumen. You can see the gameplay shot here.

ecZZo8X.gif


It looks insane.

iXWALVu.gif
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
"Lets see if anything tomorrow matching this level of fidelity."

Well, of course not.

But anyway, hopefuly we will see some good stuff tomorrow
I’m ok with cutscenes looking this good as long as they are real-time and not prerendered like that useless Witcher 4 trailer.
 

Hugare

Member
I’m ok with cutscenes looking this good as long as they are real-time and not prerendered like that useless Witcher 4 trailer.
... But I'm 100% sure this one is also prerendered.

There's no way that you would see smoke, fire and dust like that in real-time during a helicopter crash.
 

Zuzu

Member
FF7 Part 3 really must switch to Unreal Engine 5. I think the world would look amazing with Nanite. Just imagine the biomes in FF7 looking like Black Myth Wukong.
 

dgrdsv

Member
Unless suddenly 6-7 years ago 2/3rds of all western managers in this industry got a heavy case of "the stupid" all at once the mismanagement stuff can't be the deciding factor, can it? Or maybe that actually was the case given that we're suddenly seeing a surge of Asian developers stepping up.
I'd love to pick the brain of some middle management here.....
Cost of error is much higher now as the budgets have increased considerably. This puts more pressure on making sure the project is successful which paradoxically maybe lead to more "mismanagement" as studios and publishers begin to chase the trends amidst game development.
When it works it works despite all the mismanagement and we get Fortnite for example which started as a completely different project but ended up being this huge cash cow for Epic.
When it doesn't then we get stuff like Concord or I dunno The Veilguard.
In both cases a lot of time is being wasted on trying to shoehorn the project into something successful in the midst of said project development which naturally increase the development time.
What is puzzling to me thus far is that there seem to be no insight on part of the industry into actual benefit of such practices. How many projects have actually ended up being a success as the result of this? Does it even worth it?
 

Gonzito

Gold Member
FF7 Part 3 really must switch to Unreal Engine 5. I think the world would look amazing with Nanite. Just imagine the biomes in FF7 looking like Black Myth Wukong.

Black Myth Wukong has at times very low res textures too in the environment, so UE5 will not solve the issue. Its the skill of the programmers that can fix this, nothing else
 
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Toots

Gold Member
What happened in the last years that made development time and budgets explode like this?
The tools used to make games did not get more expensive, did they ?
I think one of the big vg industry problem is that an incredible amount of morons are paid way too much without adding any value, in the management and marketing departements.
 

GymWolf

Member
Hardwares are not capable enough to have hb2 texture quality in huge worlds but ue5 is the engine that get the closest so by logic it is our best hope for the future.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Hardwares are not capable enough to have hb2 texture quality in huge worlds but ue5 is the engine that get the closest so by logic it is our best hope for the future.
yeah ue5 is actually very light on vram. Wukong without Path tracing was like 5.5-6gb of vram on my 3080 with textures set to cinematic. So it was clearly not a vram constraint.

Meanwhile the so-called best looking game of last year that was super well 'optimized' was constantly vram bound on my 3080 locking me out of path tracing with textures and assets that looked like this with some of the worst pop-in ive seen this gen.

GgBH92EWIAAR6QT


I think this whole 'optimized' talk is just code for laziness. Anyone can make a last gen looking game run well on 10 tflops hardware with a much more powerful CPU than we had last gen. The trick is to do next gen stuff AND hit 60 fps at higher resolutions which is something almost every single next gen game has struggled with. At least on consoles.

The exceptions are literally Demon Souls and ratchet both of which run at 1440p 60 fps in their performance modes. But Demon Souls is running a PS3 game underneath with an extremely linear game world so its not like its super taxing on the hardware. Still credit where credit is due and at least they dont look like last gen games.

Epic has done a good job improving the performance of UE5. But they need to get these developers onboard and ship games on the latest build. They make what $3 billion a year from fortnite alone? Just send some engineers at these studios and get games ported to the latest build.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Crysis 4 is no longer in development. Crytek laying off 15% of the workforce and going back to Hunt Showdown.

So this studio has made a total of one game in the last 11 years since shipping Ryse. 1 game. And that a garbage game like hunt showdown. Even if we assume, they have hundreds of engineers working on Cry Engine, only one big game seems to be using it. Kingdom Come. So what have they been doing for the last 11 years?
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
AC Shadows PC features confirms RTGI, RT Reflections, and Virtualized Geometry.



I dont know why despite all these things it looks cross gen as fuck lol. Lighting is so goddamn important. Shouldve gone for a more realistic look.

Still, destruction, different seasons/weather, lots of new particle effects, great looking hair, on paper, this sounds amazing and next gen, but it just doesnt look it. Going to get it day one though. maybe it just doesnt showcase well on youtube. Lets hope the AC Black Flag remake and AC Hex are going for a more photorealistic look than this.
 
AC Shadows PC features confirms RTGI, RT Reflections, and Virtualized Geometry.



I dont know why despite all these things it looks cross gen as fuck lol. Lighting is so goddamn important. Shouldve gone for a more realistic look.

Still, destruction, different seasons/weather, lots of new particle effects, great looking hair, on paper, this sounds amazing and next gen, but it just doesnt look it. Going to get it day one though. maybe it just doesnt showcase well on youtube. Lets hope the AC Black Flag remake and AC Hex are going for a more photorealistic look than this.

I noticed that RTGI has been omitted from the Playstation page trailer, there’s only mention of Virtualised Geometry.

It will be shameful if they ship the game on the Pro without such features, oh well.

 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I noticed that RTGI has been omitted from the Playstation page trailer, there’s only mention of Virtualised Geometry.

It will be shameful if they ship the game on the Pro without such features, oh well.


Thats disappointing. i guess those extra few months of 'optimization' basically meant taking out next gen lighting.

curious how they showed PC footage in the so-called PS5 trailer.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
Crysis 4 is no longer in development. Crytek laying off 15% of the workforce and going back to Hunt Showdown.

So this studio has made a total of one game in the last 11 years since shipping Ryse. 1 game. And that a garbage game like hunt showdown. Even if we assume, they have hundreds of engineers working on Cry Engine, only one big game seems to be using it. Kingdom Come. So what have they been doing for the last 11 years?

Probably flew too close to the sun again

Crysis 1 also put them at risk

Very sad that we won't see a brand new spanking iteration of crytek engine to go along with Crysis 4. We need more engine options, not less.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
I noticed that RTGI has been omitted from the Playstation page trailer, there’s only mention of Virtualised Geometry.

It will be shameful if they ship the game on the Pro without such features, oh well.


This is from reddit. seems like they only use ray tracing for hideouts which can be built from scratch into entire villages. They also fall back to software ray tracing (or software lumen) so maybe thats what consoles are getting? hard to tell from the other three PC modes if everything is getting ray tracing.

Hello everyone, following the release of our PC specs for Assassin's Creed Shadows, we wanted to share additional insight directly from our tech team on the use of raytracing in the game.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows features three distinct raytracing modes on PC:

Selective Raytracing
: This mode uses raytracing only within the Hideout portion of the game. The reason behind this, is that the Hideout allows extensive player customization at a level never seen before on Assassin’s Creed. Because of that, we cannot use traditional, pre-calculated, global illumination techniques, and therefore need to adopt a real-time approach with raytracing. In all other gameplay situations, such as in the open world, raytracing will not be used.

However, if your GPU does not support hardware raytracing, such as pre-RTX GPUs, we have developed our own solution to allow competent, yet older, GPUs to run Assassin’s Creed Shadows. The game will use a proprietary software-based raytracing approach developed specifically for that. This was made to ensure Assassin's Creed Shadows remains accessible to as many players as possible.

Standard Raytracing: This mode uses the hardware raytracing capabilities of the GPU to compute real-time global illumination.

Extended Raytracing: This mode uses the hardware raytracing capabilities of the GPU to compute both real-time global illumination and reflections. This is the most extensive usage of raytracing.

On GPUs that support hardware raytracing, the choice will always be given to the player. It is one of numerous settings available to players to customize their experience on PC.

- The AC Team
EDIT: Looks like they did a tech Q&A on this and it doesnt look like PS5 and XSX have ray tracing. they wanted to hit a higher resolution in the 60 fps mode.

Question 2​

Danghunk on Reddit "Given the game is using heavily resource demanding features like RTGI and with current-gen console hardware being what it is, what is being done to ensure that the console versions won't be too heavily compromised with regard to image quality in order to accommodate these features? "

Pierre F: That is really a good question from Danghunk! Reaching 60 FPS on a game like Assassin's Creed Shadows while using RTGI would mean sacrificing quite a lot to accommodate for its relatively high cost. Thus, the direction we took for Shadows was to use a hybrid approach.

Anvil, our in-house engine with which AC Shadows is built, has featured an industry-leading baked (offline) global illumination pipeline since AC Unity, and we have kept improving that over every game built since. Unity introduced it, Syndicate added support for dynamic time of day cycles, Origins introduced what we call a sparse GI system to support drastically larger open worlds, and Valhalla added support for multi-state environments, as it was necessary for the settlements. On Shadows, we continued to improve this technology by adding support for the new dynamic seasons - the global illumination of a scene is drastically different if there is a snow cover compared to lush vegetation with colorful flowers blooming - as well as supporting much thinner walls.

The advantage of this proven, yet modernized technology is its relatively low GPU cost. This allowed us to target a 60 FPS experience on Xbox Series X and PS5 that is still impressive, in which we still had room for new gen improvements. For example, it is worth noting that all the vegetation in AC Shadows is physically animated on the GPU based on a dynamic wind system driven by a fluid simulation!

Finally, we didn't want the image in performance mode to be so low resolution that it becomes blurry, and targeting 60 FPS with raytracing on console would have meant we would not have had enough GPU budget to improve other rendering systems.

However, it was clear to us that there are undeniable advantages to raytraced global illumination. First and most importantly is that it adapts to change in the scene. In a game such as Shadows, in which we had strong ambitions with destructible objects and a changing environment, the benefits in image quality of having a global illumination that adapts to the change in the scene are numerous. Furthermore, raytraced global illumination implicitly introduced raytraced ambient occlusion, which adds subtle, yet noticeable details to the image. Furthermore, we are no longer bound to fixed size world space resolutions for our GI, which increases lighting quality details. But, most importantly, we had one game feature that we really want to introduce, the Hideout, that simply could not exist without raytraced global illumination to make it as we wanted it to be.

They also talk about the CPU cost of having dynamic/destructible objects and what they did to reduce their cost on the CPU. Very interesting stuff.

Compusemble on UCP: "How much additional stress has the addition of destructible environments placed on the CPU, if any?"

Pierre F: This is a great technical question! It is very true that more dynamism, notably lots of destructible objects and physically simulated add an undeniable cost on the CPU. Combined with a much denser world in terms of assets per similar area compared to what we used to have in the past, the stress on CPU should be higher. In practice, we've implemented a lot of clever systems to handle the increased amount.

For example, in typical game engines, physically simulated objects are deactivated, or sleeping, unless a condition triggers them to be active. However, each object remains an atomic entity in the world, and this approach scales to maybe a hundred objects, but doesn't scale that well with thousands, when you factor in all of the other systems that need to simulate, such as AI, animation, audio and graphical systems.

In Anvil, we combine objects automatically as part of our build generation process into a single object, which limits CPU processing cost as a single object within the engine represents maybe dozen objects in the world. While this approach allowed us to have dense open worlds, most of those objects end up being static, or with very limited interactivity. We solved this problem in AC shadows by dynamically removing object from the optimized batches at runtime when we detect a condition that needs to "awake" a dynamic object. This might sound simple, but given the complexity of the merging system, and the number of complex destruction sources, this was quite the endeavor.

Furthermore, we have offset this increased cost in physics simulation by leveraging more and more our GPU instance renderer, which is our cutting-edge system to submit objects to the GPU for rendering, which in the past was a huge burden on the CPU.
 
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H . R . 2

Member
3kKtsDV3RjKPXjheQbLSSW-650-80.jpg.webp

"One thing we tried with Shadows was to be as scalable as possible," technical architect Pierre Fortin says in a new Q&A blog. "We want the game to cater to the high-end of the spectrum without putting the bar too high in terms of requirements. As such, we believe that our minimum required specs reflect this commitment. A GTX 1070, the minimum required GPU, is quite old at this time, yet we made efforts to support pre-RTX GPU (GTX 1070, GTX 1080TI and equivalent) that are still competent today but lack hardware level raytracing capabilities."
 

mrqs

Member
Assuming this game will use UE5 they should halve this level of graphics fedilty in real time in ps5 pro I don't know why they use cgi.

To be honest, it totally looks like an UE5 game. maybe its just pre-rendered to the highest quality? not sure, but it says "not actual gameplay" so I assume cg
 
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