Here are a couple of really good comparisons showing just how much better the hair look with virtual shadow maps on. Epic really needs some quality control on these games. VSMs should be standard in every UE5 game.
No version has vsm. They cause some blocky shadows in cutscenes. Probably why bloober left them out because the performance hit isn’t that bad.
Doubtful. When looking at the last vestiges of the old guard, we see development houses like id and games like Doom Eternal. Each of its multiplatform versions were given their own optimisation pass, allowing each version on each console to represent the best-in-class on that hardware. Not only is id tech extremely capable, the developers took the care to make sure each version was as solid as they could realistically get it.
forums.unrealengine.com
none of of these things solve anything.
not in the here and now at least. if you have infinite GPU power... maybe...
at this point, in most games, using any of these is often a sign of devs just pressing a button to get easy results to the detriment of performance.
Nanite is only even remotely good if you use extremely high polygon counts. and even then you can often get better performance by not using Nanite. Nanite is a shortcut for devs that allows them to not needing to do proper LODs.
Nanite Performance is Not Better than Overdraw Focused LODs [TEST RESULTS]. Epic's Documentation is Dangering Optimization.
!!!UPDATED MEGA THREAD!!! This post has been updated to include every major performance test against LODs posted through the current 142 post included here. There is no need for mindless scrolling over opinions and arguments for the facts. Note, these tests get progressively more complex and...
Lumen often looks like absolute shit, especially software lumen, which has a blotchy and unstable look in indirect lighting conditions nearly 100% of the time. while Software Lumen reflections look like absolute crap as well, heavily relying on Screen Space Reflection overlays, and therefore defeating the reason to use RT in the first place.
and games like Silent Hill 2, which have nearly 100% static lighting, should never even think about using Lumen GI, yet they do, due to the aforementioned easy shortcut it is compared to manually adjusting lighting and baking the GI.
and Megalights still has to proof itself.
Unreal Engine 5 often leads to devs using quick and fast solutions that run worse, instead of proper optimisation to run well and look exactly as good or even better than using Nanite or Lumen.
while this isn't UE5's fault, it is clearly influencing developers to go down that path, because it's simply easier and therefore cheaper.
You have such a ridiculous bias against ue5 it's unreal (lol). Developers are gonna cut corners or run into budget issues regardless of engine. UE5 provides a great starting point for devs and they end up looking better than they would otherwise. Nanite is clearly providing a huge jump to geometry quality compared to games without it, and cutting down on work needing to be done for LODs is a huge productivity boost for devs. Software lumen can look quite weak with artifacts, but has improved vastly with new versions of the engine especially with hardware becoming the default. The fact that small low budget teams can put out games with visuals like sh2 and black myth is a great show for UE5 considering these are built on old versions of the engine and newer versions have fixed a lot of issues these games have. Take a look at hellblade 2 for a dev who combined UE5 with proper care for optimisation and attention to detail. Even teams like CDPR and Halo devs(with the massive weight financial backing of Microsoft)are moving to UE5 due not being able to keep up with UE5's features.none of of these things solve anything.
not in the here and now at least. if you have infinite GPU power... maybe...
at this point, in most games, using any of these is often a sign of devs just pressing a button to get easy results to the detriment of performance.
Nanite is only even remotely good if you use extremely high polygon counts. and even then you can often get better performance by not using Nanite. Nanite is a shortcut for devs that allows them to not needing to do proper LODs.
Nanite Performance is Not Better than Overdraw Focused LODs [TEST RESULTS]. Epic's Documentation is Dangering Optimization.
!!!UPDATED MEGA THREAD!!! This post has been updated to include every major performance test against LODs posted through the current 142 post included here. There is no need for mindless scrolling over opinions and arguments for the facts. Note, these tests get progressively more complex and...
Lumen often looks like absolute shit, especially software lumen, which has a blotchy and unstable look in indirect lighting conditions nearly 100% of the time. while Software Lumen reflections look like absolute crap as well, heavily relying on Screen Space Reflection overlays, and therefore defeating the reason to use RT in the first place.
and games like Silent Hill 2, which have nearly 100% static lighting, should never even think about using Lumen GI, yet they do, due to the aforementioned easy shortcut it is compared to manually adjusting lighting and baking the GI.
and Megalights still has to proof itself.
Unreal Engine 5 often leads to devs using quick and fast solutions that run worse, instead of proper optimisation to run well and look exactly as good or even better than using Nanite or Lumen.
while this isn't UE5's fault, it is clearly influencing developers to go down that path, because it's simply easier and therefore cheaper.
I am all for baking in lighting and not using nanite. Callisto is a great example of a game using both of those features to produce a stunning looking next gen game. But thats an exception. its an extremely polished game which is roughly 8 hours long. In an era where everything is either open world or 20-30 hours long, its an exception, not the norm. We have seen from other UE4 games this year alone like FF7 Rebirth, Suicide Squad both of which look a gen behind UE5 games released this year. It's not an accident. Oh and Callisto uses RT reflections and RT shadows to really enhance its rendering. DF found that the reflections are so high quality that they reflect light from across the room even on non-reflective surfaces like walls. Thats almost getting into GI light bounce category. Alan Wake 2 is another great example, but thats about it.
What I've never really understood was why devs never make the sun actually bright like real life. Battlefield 3 is probably the closest non RT'd game to what I mean. The lighting in that game is still better than many games that have come out even this year.I am all for baking in lighting and not using nanite. Callisto is a great example of a game using both of those features to produce a stunning looking next gen game. But thats an exception. its an extremely polished game which is roughly 8 hours long. In an era where everything is either open world or 20-30 hours long, its an exception, not the norm. We have seen from other UE4 games this year alone like FF7 Rebirth, Suicide Squad both of which look a gen behind UE5 games released this year. It's not an accident. Oh and Callisto uses RT reflections and RT shadows to really enhance its rendering. DF found that the reflections are so high quality that they reflect light from across the room even on non-reflective surfaces like walls. Thats almost getting into GI light bounce category. Alan Wake 2 is another great example, but thats about it.
Lumen is the future. Lumen is basically software GI which is something Epic promised last gen but took out of UE4 when they realized last gen consoles didnt have the GPU power to run it. Realtime GI can handle AO really well. Everything feels more grounded compared to baked GI. We have seen examples time and time again of realtime GI producing a far more consistent image. Even ND cant bake everything right. Especially now that they are making very long games. It leads to some very uneven looking areas. Especially indoor ones. But even in outdoor areas, the dynamic GI can have striking differences under some time of day changes.
I used to be a big proponent of baking in lighting and shadows into textures, but the last couple of years have opened my eyes. The results speak for themselves. The consistency speaks for itself. These games with Lumen, especially lately have some really good lighting that holds up under any lighting condition. Unlike say TLOU1, GOW Ragnorak, HFW, Ratchet and Spiderman 2. Ratchet, HFW and Spiderman 2 can stand toe to toe with the best looking games this gen, but you can see that the consistency is not there. Ratchet's open world levels look like crap. Spiderman 2 only looks great when you are flying or swinging. HFW looks next gen around 50% of the time and dated the other 50%.
And it's not just Lumen, games like Starfield, Forza 8, Avatar and Star Wars outlaws use their own form of sofware GI (massive uses RT cores to accelerate it but its essentially software ray tracing like Lumen), and they are all far more consistent than games with baked lighting.
With Silent Hill 2, a team like bloober has managed to match and maybe even top an AAA studio like Remedy. Look at the material work on this cop car. Reminded me of that cop car in Alan Wake 2. I think this might look even better.
insider-gaming.com
Another point pro real-time GI is the amount of time baking the lighting takes and how much slower it makes the development pipeline. When you bake everything you have to leave PCs overnight to do the baking, seeing any changes you've made to lighting takes hours and guess what, if someone moves a bush, a tree, etc you have to rebake the whole thing. It wastes a lot of time/money besides having the obvious visual limitations in the final product.I am all for baking in lighting and not using nanite. Callisto is a great example of a game using both of those features to produce a stunning looking next gen game. But thats an exception. its an extremely polished game which is roughly 8 hours long. In an era where everything is either open world or 20-30 hours long, its an exception, not the norm. We have seen from other UE4 games this year alone like FF7 Rebirth, Suicide Squad both of which look a gen behind UE5 games released this year. It's not an accident. Oh and Callisto uses RT reflections and RT shadows to really enhance its rendering. DF found that the reflections are so high quality that they reflect light from across the room even on non-reflective surfaces like walls. Thats almost getting into GI light bounce category. Alan Wake 2 is another great example, but thats about it.
Lumen is the future. Lumen is basically software GI which is something Epic promised last gen but took out of UE4 when they realized last gen consoles didnt have the GPU power to run it. Realtime GI can handle AO really well. Everything feels more grounded compared to baked GI. We have seen examples time and time again of realtime GI producing a far more consistent image. Even ND cant bake everything right. Especially now that they are making very long games. It leads to some very uneven looking areas. Especially indoor ones. But even in outdoor areas, the dynamic GI can have striking differences under some time of day changes.
I used to be a big proponent of baking in lighting and shadows into textures, but the last couple of years have opened my eyes. The results speak for themselves. The consistency speaks for itself. These games with Lumen, especially lately have some really good lighting that holds up under any lighting condition. Unlike say TLOU1, GOW Ragnorak, HFW, Ratchet and Spiderman 2. Ratchet, HFW and Spiderman 2 can stand toe to toe with the best looking games this gen, but you can see that the consistency is not there. Ratchet's open world levels look like crap. Spiderman 2 only looks great when you are flying or swinging. HFW looks next gen around 50% of the time and dated the other 50%.
And it's not just Lumen, games like Starfield, Forza 8, Avatar and Star Wars outlaws use their own form of sofware GI (massive uses RT cores to accelerate it but its essentially software ray tracing like Lumen), and they are all far more consistent than games with baked lighting.
With Silent Hill 2, a team like bloober has managed to match and maybe even top an AAA studio like Remedy. Look at the material work on this cop car. Reminded me of that cop car in Alan Wake 2. I think this might look even better.
When a developer finds a good use for it. Good AI is hard and kicks normies asses.Whoreish graphics with fancy pants ray tracing is all well and good but when will enemy ai evolve? It's been decades of the same stupid ai.
yeah, village had some stunning lighting and asset quality. at least indoors in the castle. RE4 felt like a step back. I believe they used RT reflections and a very crude form of RTGI to simulate better AO and bounce lighting.
Wrong thread?Whoreish graphics with fancy pants ray tracing is all well and good but when will enemy ai evolve? It's been decades of the same stupid ai.
Yeah I agree here. I’m actually on my 2nd playthrough and the game has its moments of being a stunner still. I’m really interested to see how much RE9 is gonna knock our socks off. I expect that to set the benchmark again like RE7 did when that released. There are some things that show its age in Village, but there are so many parts that are stunning as you mentioned. I’m at the factory and a lot stunning areas here.
they were targeting 60 fps in the rt modes which is why they used very low quality rt effects. RE engine has improved a lot since, but it's not built for open worlds and the next one is supposedly open world.
REX Engine can't arrive soon enough, last time they talked about it sounded real ambitious.
wow. reading up on this and they specifically mention the need to efficiently handle more and more assets. apparently the number of assets have increased by 5x since RE7.
The insomniac tech director said that their entire city bake used to take 7 days and this gen they were able to bring it down to a mere 4 days lol.
And that's why we have different difficulty modes to chose, so people can have the dumb ia or the human like ia.
Hell yeah, as it's supposedly going to be a linear game, I hope they can avoid some of the weak points from Outlaws and Avatar. They should be able to spend a lot more time focusing on cutscenes and character rendering and have generally better texture quality.Splinter Cell Remake will be on Snowdrop. Lets fucking go.
From Tom Henderson:
EXCLUSIVE - Update on Splinter Cell Remake's Development
Insider Gaming has learned some new details on the Splinter Cell Remake's development, including the game's engine and release date.
Unfortunately, the way our current in-game enemy AI works, instead of being human-like at harder difficulties, they are simply setting toggles on for the same type of route based enemy AI we normally see in these games.
My point was that being too hard is a shitty excuse when you have multiple difficulty mode to chose and people can literally tailor the experience they want from the game, devs are just not capable of making a realistic human like ia that is fun to play against without being TOO unfair, they just say "it would be too hard for the players" but what they really mean is "it would be too hard for us developers to find a sweet spot because ai is though as nails to develop".
Oh, apologies, I got the wrong impression from our back and forth, I see that you just wanted to rant about devs being lazy instead. I suppose some of them can cut corners around the enemy AI when the importance of budget and time come up.
Some of them is the understatement of the century unfortunately, 99% of devs cut corners on ia, and even the few that try, usually just upgrade the smoke and mirrors that make enemy look and sound smart but not the base core ia, because they are still super dumb, exploitable and suicidal, tlou2 being a glaring example, i had a dude seeing me in a extremely small room with only one door that he was covering, and he still left after his internal timer told him to do so, even if he clearly saw me, was in alert state and there was one single door in that small room so there was no way for me to escape without being noticed by him, and tlou2 is considered one of the "good" ones
I was curious about your opinion on how much of an impact or non-impact these new AI models and features will have on gaming years from now. Like what do you think might be used and what won’t be?
Conversational ai would be super fucking big in some genres of games, but i was more talking about classic ia like in stealth\combat.
Really impressed by the level of detail in Silent Hill 2. It may not be using nanite, but its still very high quality and the stunning lighting only helps.
I have never been this impressed by literal garbage lol. Sucks that the second big area the apartments are a fucking stutter fest. cant believe they released the game in this condition. hopefully the rest of the game is mostly set in bigger areas. the game performs fine there.
Conversational ai would be super fucking big in some genres of games, but i was more talking about classic ia like in stealth\combat.
I don't even see conversational ia as actual ia, but just a way to make npcs unique and the end of pre-written answers and dialogues.
For me AI is more how enemies\npcs react in real time to the player stimulus more than what they say, that's why i don't really consoder tlou2 enemies calling dead names as actual ia, because it doesn't really change how the enemies move and think or how dumb they are, it's just a neat thing for immersion but has zero value when it comes to artificial behaviour, conversational ia is gonna be the same.
Unless they integrate conversational ai with actual behaviour change so you can hear enemy having a non-scripted discussion and the ia following through, something like:
Enemy 1: i think i heard something over there
Enemy 2: yo chickenshit, why don't you go check by yourself instead of telling me that
Enemy 1: come with me dude, i only have a pistol with me, you have a machine gun
Enemy 2: i bet 10 dollars that you are not brave enough to check by yourself
Enemy 1: are you ready to lose your money?
And then the enemy search for you with the other dude laughing or trolling him.
How fucking cool it would be if enemies had (better written) random dialogues like these and the ia acting accordingly, we are probably like 20 years away from something like this
Yeah but they it's still pre-written stuff, like they can't over what the devs have wrote for them to say.
Yeah, members at the camp will comment on a variety of things regarding you (Arthur). If you kill a big animal and bring it back to camp, your crew will mention how monstrous it is, how much food they’ll have, how you managed to kill something so big etc. If you haven’t bathed in a while, they’ll have a more negative opinion towards you, and make comments on how you really need a bath. If you haven’t paid money to the camp in a while, you’ll get some snarky comments.
Geez, why do rockstar games take 10 years to be made? (And thank god for that)
Yeah, not surprised by those timelines at all. 7 days for a bake and then you need to iterate on your game world so you need to constantly rebakeThe insomniac tech director said that their entire city bake used to take 7 days and this gen they were able to bring it down to a mere 4 days lol.
He also said that 1/3rd of the game disc was lighting data. And its not just disc space, their artists and programmers had to worry about compressing and compressing that data and ensure it streamed in. you make lighting fully dynamic and you free up those resources so they can do other work.
He did say that RTGI in a fast moving city like this wouldve been too noisy but its something they wont ignore for future games. Looks like wolverine will support realtime gi as well. Even they know its the future.
It has only gotten worse as fidelity has gone up and the expectations are higher which means that bake quality needs to go up as well. We're still some ways away from having RTGI be the default but those asking for lighting to be baked are basically asking for games to be even more expensive and take longer still to develop. We're still stuck in a weird transitional period that will continue for some time to come and devs need to look at the solution that is best for their individual project but migrating to a solution like Lumen and Megalights, etc is inevitable.
That’s not AI. All of that is scripted by the devs.
Last of us part 1's AI was very good towards the player. but then i noticed that ellie just sneaking in front of them and they are just blind.Whoreish graphics with fancy pants ray tracing is all well and good but when will enemy ai evolve? It's been decades of the same stupid ai.
Before I say anything, i just want to say good post, agree with nearly everything you said.
MGSV did this. If you were headshot people, they would start wearing helmets. if you were using sleep gas, they would start wearing gas masks. If you go rambo, they would begin wearing armor.
Yep, it's an ingame script more than ai.
I don't think the hardware is ready for massive groups of dinobot destroying a city, maybe something on a smalled scale.
i would be fine with that. just kill the NPCs. keep the essential ones alive. like i said, days gone had this tech on PS4. Thats all AI. They just dont want to do it for whatever reason.
I told you why i think they don't do it.
Prime opportunity to evolve the ai in specific games like Bloodborne
imagine the shit posts on here complaining about the ai's sick moves.
thats because day time lighting usually sucks. Even in movies, directors do color grading to make it more orange or straight up use the mexican filter just to avoid the boring lunch hour look no one likes in real life. I was actually watching Jackfrags play BF3 the other day and it still looks great for a 2011 game, but the day time lighting is still kinda boring compared to say BF1's lighting which is very orange in the desert levels and tries to mimick saving private ryan's saturated look in the urban city levels like Amiens. I think it's by design since BF3 is supposed to be set in modern times while BF1 is trying to emulate the war torn grounded look.