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Has Unreal Engine 5 (lumen, nanite, metahuman) really helped reduce development time/costs?

Has Unreal Engine 5 really reduced development time/cost

  • Yes

    Votes: 29 19.0%
  • No

    Votes: 124 81.0%

  • Total voters
    153

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Running on a 4090 and a kick ass CPU? I am taking about something running on a console.
PS5 is running Wukong on mostly high settings. hellblade 2 used mostly high settings as well.

regardless, nanite and lumen are both the same on PC and console. PCs are using the same software lumen as the console version in both games. the only thing different is the resolution and the nvidia path tracing features which only a few pcs can use. Im not using them and the game looks phenomenal thanks to lumen and nanite, both features that made that PS5 UE5 demo look so great.
 

T4keD0wN

Member
Because that's software lumen. Hardware lumen is superior.
But it uses hardware lumen for reflections and some lightning, not full GI. To be fair the game uses UE5.0 which is before the 5.1 lumen improvements so its far from lumens current full potential.
You can verify your own game if want, but i did a quick check:
r.RayTracing was enabled by default (didnt check any overrides though)
r.Lumen.Reflections.HardwareRayTracing and r.Lumen.HardwareRayTracing are both checked
and r.Lumen.HardwareRayTracing.LightingMode is not disabled
"Shit" is hyperbolic also.
True, i was too harsh, sorry. Itll look good enough, but the gap between pathtracing and lumen is gigantic when it comes to visuals, lumen does not really justify its performance costs imo (its can very easily be a consistent solution which is great). Games like Metro Exodus prove that more can be achieved with way less power, obviously the time investment of not having to create and/or re-create your own solutions will be by far the biggest advantage of lumen and nanite.
 
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Even if it didn't have the performance issues on the XSX and PS5 with the core UE5 technologies enabled, the existence of XSS basically fucked any large-scale adoption of UE5 and use of these core technologies, because the XS tard pack console is just not performant enough that it forces the devs to roll back to using LODs and traditional techniques for that one shitty console.
 

Senua

Member
But it uses hardware lumen for reflections and some lightning, not full GI i think though. To be fair the game uses the old UE5.0 before the 5.1 lumen improvements.
You can verify your own game if want, but i did a quick check:
r.RayTracing was enabled by default (didnt check any overrides though)
r.Lumen.Reflections.HardwareRayTracing and r.Lumen.HardwareRayTracing are both checked
and r.Lumen.HardwareRayTracing.LightingMode is not disabled
Are you sure? Everything I've read about the games tech has said that it's software lumen with RT off and pathracing restir with RT option maxed, with these effects being reduced as you reduce settings,but nothing about hardware lumen being in the game. I'm not 100% on this
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Even if it didn't have the performance issues on the XSX and PS5 with the core UE5 technologies enabled, the existence of XSS basically fucked any large-scale adoption of UE5 and use of these core technologies, because the XS tard pack console is just not performant enough that it forces the devs to roll back to using LODs and traditional techniques for that one shitty console.
its clear from the latest batch of delays that no dev gives two shit about the xs or even the xsx enough to optimize for it.

I highly doubt xs is the reason for how long its taken for us to get UE5 games. It's mostly epic. They didnt release the fucking thing until 2022. And then when they did it was extremely poor performance wise. It wasnt until 5.2 when foliage finally got nanite support and it wasnt until earlier this year when they finally improved CPU performance by 50%.

A LOT of games like Immortal, Lord of the Fallen, Robocop and even Black Myth to some extent were fucked over by Epic. Not XS.

It's been obvious for a long time now that no dev, not even epic, gives shit two shits about the xs. MS had to send Coalition to get the matrix demo working on the xs because Epic didnt want to optimize for it. It didnt hold back the Matrix demo, it didnt hold back Wukong and certainly not hellblade 2. devs just downgrade the shit out of the xs version and call it a day or simply refuse to ship it like we have seen in black myth and dune recently. even indie devs are like fuck this console.

UE5 just like UE4 has taken some years to mature. Remember, Batman AK also shipped on UE3 instead of UE4 despite UE4 releasing a year prior to its release. this delay was expected. we saw some good results last year in Robocop and Remnant 2 at times, and this year Hellblade 2 and Wukong are finally delivering on the promise of UE5. Marvel's 1943 is just going to take it to the next level next year.
 

T4keD0wN

Member
Are you sure? Everything I've read about the games tech has said that it's software lumen with RT off and pathracing restir with RT option maxed, with these effects being reduced as you reduce settings,but nothing about hardware lumen being in the game. I'm not 100% on this
Yes, you enter the game and try enabling it there through console commands to see it it looks different or you can dump the game and examine the console variables. But it all kind of hinges on if the r.Raytracing or some other option is overriden (possibly in the user config files) somewhere which could make it fallback to software, but if it isnt then its definitely hardware. There will be a lot of configuration done there to waste time and read through, the main flags seem all enabled so while it could actually be the case i dont think its too likely. Worst case you can try forcing it in user config files.
 
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john2gr

Member
Just take a look at Nobody Wants to Die, Still Wakes the Deep and the upcoming Black State. These games wouldn't look THAT impressive without UE5. They can compete with triple-A games (in terms of graphics). So yes, UE5 has made it easier for smaller teams to create games that can look amazing.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
If i wouldnt have the matrix demo still installed on my ps5, i wouldnt know what unreal 5 can do.
play some UE5 games.

It can do this:

C6ooSw9.gif


4aPWxUK.gif


li1meRd.gif


SghHdvT.gif


BgMuo6n.gif
 

blastprocessor

The Amiga Brotherhood
The lighting in this looks old and unimpressive. Which is why it can run at 60fps with higher resolution. Lumen and every other RTGI solution is the best thing to happen to gaming graphics in recent years.

The updated engine should have GI and I'm pretty sure Death Stranding 2 will be using it.
 
Next-gen lighting and next-gen VFX require a next-gen pipeline.
You can achieve similar results with baked lighting, but it takes a lot of effort and craftsmanship, which means time equals money.
The idea is to make development easier, faster, and better, but this comes with a price.

UE5 came too early. But this is the way—create software that requires better hardware, don't wait for hardware to catch up.
 
Are there any actual developers here who can give a better insight?
You don't have to be a developer to know why, the Unreal Engine is free to download to try for yourself. It doesn't matter how many features your engine has, you have to still produce content. Look at the Unreal Engine 5 reveal demo, you think the engine made those rocks fall by itself in some of those scenes? Someone had to model, animate and script that stuff; Look at the bats in one of the scenes in that reveal demo, you think they automated and mocap that with the metahuman feature? An artist had to make that.

I can guarantee you if posters in this thread just tried for once to put together a level in the Unreal Engine they would literally stop saying games like Wukong ect. look like the Unreal Engine 5 reveal demo. Speaking from experience knowing how Epic Games work, that Unreal Engine 5 reveal demo was probably running on a 2080 ti; Not even Epic Games own PC demo was able to match the quality of the reveal demo.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Unreal Engine 5 reveal demo was probably running on a 2080 ti; Not even Epic Games own PC demo was able to match the quality of the reveal demo.
Its been confirmed that it was running realtime on a PS5.

The demo is literally a series of corridors. Its not a surprise it looks that good. Even the flying section outdoors is a corridor, just a very large one. Black Myth and Hellblade 2 have very similar graphics and hellblade 2 has higher fidelity corridors.

aid9kFm.gif


X00dBad.gif


PS5 is running wukong, a much larger game with way better lighting, at 1440p 30 fps. Exactly the resolution of the PS5 UE5 demo. Had they used the UE5.4 build, it wouldve likely run at either a higher resolution or higher framerate but they are running on the OG 5.0 build. Hellblade 2 isnt 1440p since its using black bars but its within 20% of the 1440p 30 fps pixel budget, and it looks way better than the UE5 demo.
 

FeastYoEyes

Member
I can't speak to development time or costs but I can say the impact to performance isn't justified by how it looks.
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
That's because the hardware isn't fast enough. I grabbed a screenshot from his own gif so please excuse me for the size, but I wanted to make a comparison on why the reveal demo is higher quality. You got two points of entry from the same light source happening in the Unreal Engine 5 demo scene as well as in the Hellblade 2 scene in these two shots. The Unreal Engine 5 demo is flexing way more capability of drawing, check out the amount of unique colors in the scene because of the multiple bounces of light, you will never see Hellblade 2 draw as much.

w6y6G2f.jpeg

cMGUxBy.jpeg
Even if you ignore the lights, wukong texture\geometry work is not as even detailed as the demo, you have rocky formations with like 3 different tiers of textures in it and the statues are not as perfect and pristine as the statues in the demo (they look great from distance, but you can notice the small flaws in geometry if you zoom enough).

But it's a big, full game and not a small tech demo.
 
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Mattyp

Gold Member
I love the "yes, this is an actual PC game screenshot", graphics were crude as fuck early on :messenger_tears_of_joy:
Those graphics were mind blowing back then but the first time I booted Unreal, every game release pushed the boundaries more.

The last time this effect was probably Oblivion, we’re at the end of diminishing returns now that’s for certain. Another 10 years of progress and it’s small steps now to photo realism then we’ll plateau.
 
That's because the hardware isn't fast enough. I grabbed a screenshot from his own gif so please excuse me for the size, but I wanted to make a comparison on why the reveal demo is higher quality. You got two points of entry from the same light source happening in the Unreal Engine 5 demo scene as well as in the Hellblade 2 scene in these two shots. The Unreal Engine 5 demo is flexing way more capability of drawing, check out the amount of unique colors in the scene because of the multiple bounces of light, you will never see Hellblade 2 draw as much.

w6y6G2f.jpeg

cMGUxBy.jpeg
You arnt taking into account different possition of the sun 😃. Your comparison is misleading people.
 
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Even if you ignore the lights, wukong texture\geometry work is not as even detailed as the demo, you have rocky formations with like 3 different tiers of textures in it and the statues are not as perfect and pristine as the statues in the demo (they look great from distance, but you can notice the small flaws in geometry if you zoom enough).

But it's a big, full game and not a small tech demo.
There's also a skill level, this is why a game like Gears of War 3 (if you exclude the characters and look at the multiplayer environment levels) visually looks better than some of these games on Unreal Engine 5 in my opinion. I don't think y'all understand how skilled a developer like Epic Game is, these guys can build worlds without having to reference the real world at all at ridiculously high detail, the only other developer that had this skill was Arkham Knight Rocksteady.

You arnt taking into account different possition of the sun 😃. Your comparison is misleading people.
You missed my point. There's a reason why the sun is position like that in Hellblade 2, it's a compromise, if they had the capability they would of flex the amount of draw like you see in the Unreal Engine 5 demo to improve the visual fidelity.
 
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ZehDon

Gold Member
Well certainly not on compute side of things:



I highly recommend this video, given its probably a reason UE5 isn't used it as much and certainly it isn't what initial hyped might have suggested

TLDR: Nanite introduce a lot of overdraw, which means you are wasting GPU cycles, LOD even generated one is far better for optimisation. Given what has been said in this video and by own account, while playing with it extensively, I think Nanite will be something like a ID Tech mega texture down the line. Not the mention the strain on CPU, which isn't handled in a way ID Tech 7 is for example. But one director core and other aux ones, which limits performance based on Single Core performance, which is especially problem in consoles.

id's mega texture feature was, effectively, adopted by hardware vendors and manifests today as the progenitor of things like partially resident textures that we see in the PlayStation and Xbox. Carmack, as usual, was a generation head of everyone else. After Rage, Carmack stated he believed the next barrier - after virtualised textures - was virtualised geometry. He moved over to Oculus after that, so we never really got to see his work on that front. UE5's Nanite in merely an implementation of REYES, which is a geometry virtualisation approach. Offloading the overhead to the hardware is the next logical step, given how it contributes to both image quality, performance, and asset production - the trifecta of things hardware vendors can sell new hardware on. In addition to NPUs, for things like advanced image upscaling, I imagine we'll see hardware support for virtualised geometry in the next generation of hardware.
 
You missed my point. There's a reason why the sun is position like that in Hellblade 2, it's a compromise, if they had the capability they would of flex the amount of draw like you see in the Unreal Engine 5 demo to improve the visual fidfideliy
That's only your assumption and you have nothing to prove that. You need to match the lighting conditions within the scene, which means the same position of the sun relative to the cave opening (also known as a sinkhole or cenote) and even comparable size of the opening to make a meaningful comparison.

For example, this comparison shows exactly the same lighting conditions, so we can definitely say witch looks better without making assumptions.


Screenshot-20240904-114043-You-Tube-2.jpg
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
There's also a skill level, this is why a game like Gears of War 3 (if you exclude the characters and look at the multiplayer environment levels) visually looks better than some of these games on Unreal Engine 5 in my opinion. I don't think y'all understand how skilled a developer like Epic Game is, these guys can build worlds without having to reference the real world at all, the only developer that had this skill was Arkham Knight Rocksteady.


You missed my point. There's a reason why the sun is position like that in Hellblade 2, it's a compromise, if they had the capability they would of flex the amount of draw like you see in the Unreal Engine 5 demo to improve the visual fidelity.


Maybe i forgot how good gears 3 look because tbh i think that even cheap stuff like remnant 2 utterly destroy gears3 so i have no idea what you mean.
 
That's only your assumption and you have nothing to prove that. You need to match the lighting conditions within the scene, which means the same position of the sun relative to the cave opening (also known as a sinkhole or cenote) and even comparable size of the opening to make a meaningful comparison.

For example, this comparison shows exactly the same lighting conditions, so we can definitely say witch looks better without making assumptions.


Screenshot-20240904-114043-You-Tube-2.jpg
Here's Epic Games PC demo using the exact same assets as the Unreal Engine 5 demo-


Here's a link to the Unreal Engine 5 demo-


Which one looks better to you?
 
Maybe i forgot how good gears 3 look because tbh i think that even cheap stuff like remnant 2 utterly destroy gears3 so i have no idea what you mean.
Unreal Engine 5 games like Remnant 2 and Robocop are good looking games especially for their budgets, but you also have shit like Immortals of Aveum and Lords of Fallen that look like ass.
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
Unreal Engine 5 games like Remnant 2 and Robocop are good looking games especially for their budgets, but you also have shit like Immortals of Aveum and Lords of Fallen that look like ass.
I think fallen is the ugliest of the bunch and probably the worse nanite implementation, geometry on a lot of things is just not there, i was surprised when i played the game.

Immortals looks a bit better imo.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
It certainly made devs lazier in regards to optimizing their games thats for sure. And what was supposed to be a miracle for stuttering turned out to be a dud. UE5 are still massive stutter fests when it comes to loading assets. CDPR had massive issues with their own built-in engine and I dread how Orion will run.

/facepalm

Here we go again with people of zero experience stating with certainty about how dev works.

Newsflash: As complexity increases there are MORE things needing optimization, not less.

Example, the more shader programs you need to compile, the more script compilations will need to run, the more times the compiled versions will need to be shuttled in and our of memory. Meaning there's way more pressure on the caching mechanism and the system I/O that underpins it.
 

The Cockatrice

Gold Member
/facepalm

Here we go again with people of zero experience stating with certainty about how dev works.

Newsflash: As complexity increases there are MORE things needing optimization, not less.

Example, the more shader programs you need to compile, the more script compilations will need to run, the more times the compiled versions will need to be shuttled in and our of memory. Meaning there's way more pressure on the caching mechanism and the system I/O that underpins it.

Nothing you said was remotely relevant to what I said. Its how Epic marketed UE5, their own words, not me.
 
I think fallen is the ugliest of the bunch and probably the worse nanite implementation, geometry on a lot of things is just not there, i was surprised when i played the game.

Immortals looks a bit better imo.
You're talking about the cutscenes in Immortal? ..because the gameplay rendering is not good at all man. This made me go back and look at Unreal Tournament that came out ten years ago.

Unreal-Tournament-4-looks-freakin-gorgeous-You-guys-should-come-play-s-free


This is the quality that's missing from games today, just a focus on raw gameplay rendering where it matters.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Nothing you said was remotely relevant to what I said. Its how Epic marketed UE5, their own words, not me.

You used the "lazy devs" trope. Which is, as I explained, unsupportable because its based on the assumption that complexity and therefore workload is a constant. It isn't.

The premise is you use the newer version of UE and its feature-set because it facilitates doing MORE than you could when using earlier versions. Does that sound like the same workload?
 

The Cockatrice

Gold Member
You used the "lazy devs" trope. Which is, as I explained, unsupportable because its based on the assumption that complexity and therefore workload is a constant. It isn't.

The premise is you use the newer version of UE and its feature-set because it facilitates doing MORE than you could when using earlier versions. Does that sound like the same workload?

Ok Tim Sweeney, keep living in your delusions lmao. Wake me up when we get what we were promised with UE5 and wake me up when devs stop being lazy.
 
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FireFly

Member
Ok Tim Sweeney, keep living in your delusions lmao. Wake me up when we get what we were promised with UE5 and wake me up when devs stop being lazy.
It's the management who decide the resources that should be allocated for optimization vs. adding new features vs. working on other projects. Being "lazy" means getting to do something else, not sitting on your hands. And shipping titles before they are ready to meet an arbitrary deadline so the quarterly projections can be met is classic publisher behaviour.
 

GymWolf

Gold Member
You're talking about the cutscenes in Immortal? ..because the gameplay rendering is not good at all man. This made me go back and look at Unreal Tournament that came out ten years ago.

Unreal-Tournament-4-looks-freakin-gorgeous-You-guys-should-come-play-s-free


This is the quality that's missing from games today, just a focus on raw gameplay rendering where it matters.
It has been a while since i played immortals and i only did the intro but i remember looking at least decent.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Ok Tim Sweeney, keep living in your delusions lmao. Wake me up when we get what we were promised with UE5 and wake me up when devs stop being lazy.

And you can keep spending tons of cash upgrading your GPU and then pissing and moaning that it doesn't fix bottle-necking on your system's IO! The functional equivalent of re-wiring you house and then complaining when your water system still gets blocked-up.

The consequences of your ignorance are my reward for knowing better :D
 

The Cockatrice

Gold Member
And you can keep spending tons of cash upgrading your GPU

I dont. If anything if you've seen my posts in the PS5 threads I'm against getting new systems and whatnot, because developers used to pull insane things with engines such as TLOU2 and HFW running on a fucking PS4 despite these games looking next-gen. UE5 was also supposed to be the savior, an engine that could simulate RT even on lower-end hardware, lumen and all that marketing BS and so far, it's been a fucking mess. Even to this day devs still refused to do shader precomp which is as basic as shit and even when they do, games still stutter as fuck. No, I dont want to upgrade my GPU every year because lazy devs cant optimize their games. They spend 8 fucking years making a game that runs like ass and ure telling me in all those years they they didnt have time for optimizations? We're getting a million fixes post releases. Safe to say they are lazy as shit, dev times tripled in the last years. You seem offfended so Im assuming u might be one, not saying all of them are in the same boat, but yeah.
 
Here's Epic Games PC demo using the exact same assets as the Unreal Engine 5 demo-


Here's a link to the Unreal Engine 5 demo-


Which one looks better to you?

Lighting quality look exactly the same on both. This cave however is (obviously) very dark, so the lighting creates hard light and much higher contrast allowing you to see more details (even small rocks stand out because of that hard shadows). The UE5 tech demo was made to WOW people.

The Coalition did the same, they showcased a cave with hardlight coming from the sky to accentuate fine details on the rocky textures.

UQgoyHG.jpeg


H7XlwLl.jpeg


There are many UE5 tech demos that showcase hard lighting:









 
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The Cockatrice

Gold Member
So the developers can tell management that they don't want to work on optimizing the game further, because they don't feel like it, and management will say "ok, sounds good"?
Management in corporations arent simply "do that or else". Developers, as well as lead devs, will estimate how much time they need and most management will approve.
 

FireFly

Member
Management in corporations arent simply "do that or else". Developers, as well as lead devs, will estimate how much time they need and most management will approve.
Yes, so if developers are not correctly forecasting the time needed to optimize then that is the real issue. And ultimately the people in charge of the game's development are the ones that make the call as to whether the game is ready for release. So if the allocated time is over and the game is still a mess, they decide whether to release it or not, or allocate another optimization period and announce a delay. If they decide that everything is fine, then the decision to release is on them, not the developers, and blaming the developers obscures their culpability.
 
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