[Digital Foundry] Inside Assassin's Creed Shadows - The NEW Anvil Engine Deep Dive

Xtib81

Member
For some reason, this game looks surprisingly cross gen. Idk, there's a lot of tech behind it, but it doesn't wow me.
 

ChiefDada

Member
UE5 is looking like more and more like a joke from a relative performance perspective. Where are all the neogaf experts who said nearly every developer should adopt UE5 because Nanite-like tech would be impossible to replicate in a timely fashion?

Confused Looking For GIF by Looney Tunes
 

Bojji

Member
UE5 is looking like more and more like a joke from a relative performance perspective. Where are all the neogaf experts who said nearly every developer should adopt UE5 because Nanite-like tech would be impossible to replicate in a timely fashion?

Confused Looking For GIF by Looney Tunes

Mesh shaders allow devs to create such system more easily than before. But thing is, it still takes time and money to do that.

Outside of UE5 and Anvil in ACS, what other games use systems like that?
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
UE5 is looking like more and more like a joke from a relative performance perspective. Where are all the neogaf experts who said nearly every developer should adopt UE5 because Nanite-like tech would be impossible to replicate in a timely fashion?

Confused Looking For GIF by Looney Tunes

The character models in Shadows are still a far bit behind.

More solutions like Meta Human will help there.
 

intbal

Member
Mesh shaders allow devs to create such system more easily than before. But thing is, it still takes time and money to do that.

Outside of UE5 and Anvil in ACS, what other games use systems like that?
Avatar (Snowdrop) and Alan Wake 2 (Northlight) are both mesh shader based.

Also, Saber said they were investigating mesh shaders for Swarm Engine well before Space Marine 2 released, but I don't think it released with support for them.
 
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Bojji

Member
alan wake 2 does mesh shaders too I think

Avatar (Snowdrop) and Alan Wake 2 (Northlight) are both mesh shader based.

Also, Saber said they were investigating mesh shaders for Swarm Engine well before Space Marine 2 released, but I don't think it released with support for them.

Yes, but I don't think MS alone can be compared to Nanite or what ACS is doing.

The character models in Shadows are still a far bit behind.

More solutions like Meta Human will help there.

Yep, character models can look like shit with weak textures and low poly meshes. Some of them are good but it's very inconsistent.
 

Darsxx82

Member
UE5 is looking like more and more like a joke from a relative performance perspective. Where are all the neogaf experts who said nearly every developer should adopt UE5 because Nanite-like tech would be impossible to replicate in a timely fashion?

Confused Looking For GIF by Looney Tunes
UE5 optimization is improving by leaps and bounds, and it will be noticeable in upcoming releases (among the games of top studios at least). Not to mention that it's increasingly including new technology that other engines can't even dream of.

Anvil has only just begun to offer something similar to Nanite, and there's still a long way to go to match it. And we're talking about a game from the creators of the engine itself, with a budget investment coming from just 1% of existing studios.
Not that other proprietary engines can stand out either.

UE5's problem is one that has also affected other engines: very long development times and legacy games desing for past generation hardware (PS4/XBO).

These are just now starting to be properly optimized, just as games designed 100% for this generation are starting to be released.

In an ideal situation, the current state of graphics engines (not just UE5) is what should have been the case at the beginning of the generation. We would all have liked to have AC Shadows with RGTI + "Nanite" and not AC Valhalla or Origins, for example.
 
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Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
UE5 is looking like more and more like a joke from a relative performance perspective. Where are all the neogaf experts who said nearly every developer should adopt UE5 because Nanite-like tech would be impossible to replicate in a timely fashion?

Confused Looking For GIF by Looney Tunes

Mesh Shaders were announced in like 2019.....a full year before UE5 and Nanite were announced.

mesh-shaders_lead.jpg


mesh-shaders_nvidia.png


F3ri4W_WkAAiFTi.jpg:large



Alan Wake 2 in 2023 was i believe the first mainstream game to actually use them.
Thats like 4 years for team of wizards like Remedy to implement.
And even Shadows took time to implement it and they dont even have full coverage yet.

So yes, the time to actually use meshshaders/virtual geometry has NOT been timely and likely studios would take the advantages that Epic and Unreal have in their solution rather than spend dev time creating their own.
 
The game looks nice, but all this praise and no talk of performance is suspect.

I've seen terrible performance on pc, even on high end configs. Like not reaching 60fps not even at lower res on powerful cpus/gpus.
 
Some people are deliberately only showing the hideout, which on consoles is locked at 30 and is probably the most demanding area in PC because for some reason it has full RT locked on in that area.
I've seen videos testing different scenarios in-game with really strange performance. Even settings that don't change performance no matter what.
 

UnrealEck

Member
The game looks nice, but all this praise and no talk of performance is suspect.

I've seen terrible performance on pc, even on high end configs. Like not reaching 60fps not even at lower res on powerful cpus/gpus.
There needs to be more info on what settings those people are running the game at.
The PC version is very very customisable and scaleable.
 

Buggy Loop

Gold Member
Mesh Shaders were announced in like 2019.....a full year before UE5 and Nanite were announced.

mesh-shaders_lead.jpg


mesh-shaders_nvidia.png


F3ri4W_WkAAiFTi.jpg:large



Alan Wake 2 in 2023 was i believe the first mainstream game to actually use them.
Thats like 4 years for team of wizards like Remedy to implement.
And even Shadows took time to implement it and they dont even have full coverage yet.

So yes, the time to actually use meshshaders/virtual geometry has NOT been timely and likely studios would take the advantages that Epic and Unreal have in their solution rather than spend dev time creating their own.

Fun fact, PS2 basically had the ancestor of mesh shaders. Vector units. It didn't operate on work groups(?) and not much local memory (it had a tiny scratchpad) but maybe that was sufficient for the generation compared to geometry nowadays, probably quite a few things it wouldn't have handled but still the ancestor :messenger_grinning_sweat: F Fafalada would probably know a lot more. Weren't they programmable only in assembly? That's fucking nuts.



Was never meant to be a nanite back then, but they were fully programmable.

Geforce then introduced hardware T&L which I guess acceleration was the biggest point to it all back then, programmability be damned, the geometry needed to be faster. To hardware T&L → vertex shaders → geometry shaders (avoided at all cost it performed like shit)→ Mesh shaders. I wonder what would have happened if Sony had kept the vector unit idea and improved on it.

So the industry turned to fixed-function hardware to speed things up but they are at a point where now its back to compute, if of course you have enormous geometry details, otherwise fixed function is still faster.

Nanite is a tiny part what Mesh shaders can do, in this case it was for meshlet LOD. Nanite is also still hybrid with vertex shaders and not all assets was using mesh shaders, although they are slowly transitioning to mesh shaders more and more each iterations, like 5.5 having skinned mesh tessellation/displacement.

AMD / Nvidia / Apple / Intel have meshlet compression/decompression which happens in pipeline while I believe nanite was CPU (? so many versions It might not be anymore)

Mesh shaders are in infancy, like when programmable shaders were introduced in 2001.

Mesh shaders are insane for the concepts of procedural instancing such as loading say, procedural hair on a bunny and go directly to rasterization within the same pipeline without ping-ponging back to device memory. The old method for hair is a compute kernel for the hair geometry and then back to device memory and then back to render encoder for traditional draw calls and back to device memory. I mean it works but its a slower, takes more memory, more latency and is a bit clunky and not really exploiting current hardware capabilities. It can also have its algorithm to change that geometry on the fly without exiting pipeline because everything is programmable and custom. Mesh shaders can also do isosurfaces like metaballs, fluids, marching cubes, etc. Think Blender offline rendering geometry tricks but real-time.
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Why is Anvil, Decima, and Cry Engine are performing better in Ps5 pro compared to RE and UE5 engine?
Are they?

Ac shadows doesn’t support ray tracing in the console 60 fps modes.

Decima doesn’t seem to support any ray tracing. DF thought last years ds2 trailer might have supported rtgi but this year’s trailer made them doubt it.

Kcd2 is one game and while it does have a software rtgi solution like lumen, it doesn’t have anything like nanite and looks fairly cross Gen when you look at the asset quality compared to ue5 games.

RE engine is just going through growing pains every engine goes through in the early days. Just like ue3 did back in the ps360 era and frostbite did early last gen. Re village, dmcv and re4 supported ray tracing at relatively high framerates and resolutions. The engine itself has a roadmap they showed a couple of years ago. They know the limitations.
 

FewRope

Member
Continually impressed with this game. The LOD is remarkable, there are tons of physically destructible assets that actually react to the way in which you’ve hit them with your sword, the RTGI is immense and is at full bore on console, and stuff like the lighting and seasonal changes are beautiful. The only real mark against this game’s visuals are the character faces; those are still a little weak. But overall, Shadows is a damn stunning game, one that has made me forgo my horse for the time being to walk and traverse on foot instead, so that I can experience the world and visuals more intimately.
Same, I barely use the horse because I dont want to miss anything, I cant remember the last time I did that. Probably Oblivion
 

yogaflame

Gold Member
Are they?

Ac shadows doesn’t support ray tracing in the console 60 fps modes.

Decima doesn’t seem to support any ray tracing. DF thought last years ds2 trailer might have supported rtgi but this year’s trailer made them doubt it.

Kcd2 is one game and while it does have a software rtgi solution like lumen, it doesn’t have anything like nanite and looks fairly cross Gen when you look at the asset quality compared to ue5 games.

RE engine is just going through growing pains every engine goes through in the early days. Just like ue3 did back in the ps360 era and frostbite did early last gen. Re village, dmcv and re4 supported ray tracing at relatively high framerates and resolutions. The engine itself has a roadmap they showed a couple of years ago. They know the limitations.
Those engine I mentioned had a different technique that makes it more beautiful and immersive. That is why, I dont like companies, especially those using UE5 , focuses to much on use of ray tracing instead of focusing more on excellent IQ and physics. Yes RT is great, but if its take a hit on performance especially IQ, frame rate and fewer physics base, RT is not worth it.
 
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sachos

Member
. On top of that, the level of interactivity with objects its amazing. In Ghost of Tsushima, you can't cut anything, here you can cut absolutely everything you encounter with your sword.
I think they can do that because of RTGI.
With real time lighting devs can make way more interactive enviroments knowing the lighting wont brake if the object is destroyed, something that would happen if they used pre baked lighting.
This is what i've been saying all the time when people shit on RT.
 

hussar16

Member
Watch/Read.
To see why the probe GI is worse in some cases.
Unity had a single time of day so they could place the probes really close all the time.
This game has multiple times of day, multiple season and wide wide open scapes so the same level of density of probes would make the game like 100s of GBs just for lighting.
So they are sparce in open areas and denser in cities and other areas......so without RT certain areas will match or beat Unity, but the open world wont.
With GI RT it trumps Unity hands down.

And Unity is still one of my favorite graphic showcases.
quality over quantity in this case. unity is far more impressive
 

DanielG165

Gold Member
In Ghost of Tsushima, you can't cut anything, here you can cut absolutely everything you encounter with your sword
GoT’s open world has always been a very beautiful post card to me. The surface is nice and visually stunning, thanks very HEAVILY to the game’s art style. However, when start trying to actually, well, engage with it… You really can’t? I went back to Tsushima on my PC last night after playing Shadows a few hours on SX, out of curiosity. And, I know I’ll probably get tons of flack for this… But Shadows is the better Japanese/ninja-samurai open world game.

The two games are a generation apart, I know, but GoT almost feels a little sterile now in comparison as far as how the world presents itself, and what you can do in it.
 

ZehDon

Gold Member
UE5 is looking like more and more like a joke from a relative performance perspective. Where are all the neogaf experts who said nearly every developer should adopt UE5 because Nanite-like tech would be impossible to replicate in a timely fashion?

Confused Looking For GIF by Looney Tunes
Well, Nanite is just a REYES implementation, which has been around forever. Heck, Carmack was talking about virtualised geometery as the next big step for this kind of auto-LOD back when RAGE shipped, and as always he was a decade ahead of everyone else. The lead time on Engine-level implementation actually would take a while, which is why we're only seeing it starting to flow now - it was likely started years ago for AC:Shadows. Performance wise, the heavy part of UE5 is that it's a general purpose Engine and thus Nanite is a general purpose solution, albeit with some caveats. For Shadows, there's likely an enormous amount of hard-coded optimisations going on that only work because they can make some key assumptions because it only needs to work for their current game.
 

Pimpbaa

Member
Might get it when it eventually goes on sale. I think Ghost of Yotei (can’t really compare it to GoT, games is a bit dated now especially texture quality) will be a better game both in terms of graphics and gameplay. I have some concerns about story however.
 
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