Reizo Ryuu
Gold Member
Not even remotely the same, a flash light is not a moving light source like a tv or monitor, it's a static light source with a uniform intensity.
Unreal engine 5,5 mega light tech demo
- Thread starter Msamy
- Start date
Dirk Benedict
Gold Member
It's impressive, but the video looks like the insides of a baked bean eating champion. 1080p 
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Vick
Member
Got you. But isn't the underlying concept the same? You pick a fire torch and it's going to source an entirely different light compared to the flashlight, and still affect every texture all the same.
Lumpyoatmeal
Member
Good looking, Noire.
ArcaneNLSC
Member
Not too dissimilar to how I see everydayNeeds moarJPEGVP9..!
When you compress something so much it becomes art.
Jokes aside this looks really good. Hopefully they can cough up a high quality encode.
Bojji
Member
They really are ahead of everyone else right, they even fixed a lot of performance problems with never versions (and cpu performance).
Still there are issues with traversal stutters but I bet collaboration with CDPR will allow them to improve this.
Right now only thing left for specialized engines is something like Spider-Man 2, massive open world game with quick traversal (specialized Insomniac engine is great for that). Other than that UE5 might be better than all other engines for most genres.
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kevboard
Member
sure, but this many lights and shadows... I can't see this running at 1440p.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
They have been doing that. Consistently.
They released UE5 in 2022. By the end of year 1, they had optimized it so much that they were able to hit 60 fps which allowed them to add Nanite and Lumen support for Fortnite.
This year, they completely overhauled their CPU bottlenecks, resulting in performance improvements of 50-80% in the Matrix demo.
They also reduced the memory requirements for nanite (this was a direct result of the new adaptive tesselation feature they added for Amy Henning's Marvel game) and further improved GPU performance by 25%.
Yes, it's taken some time and i sympathize with the devs who got fucked last year by being forced to build games on an unoptimized initial release. But Epic are continuously improving the performance of their engines.
Technically this feature is a performance improvement since it will allow devs to add more light sources without worrying too much about the cost of shadows from those light sources. Though im sure it has a cost of its own.
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Reizo Ryuu
Gold Member
It's not so much about the light affecting a texture, it's about the texture informing the lighting what to do, a torch will still be a "static" light with parameters that inform how the light should act in order to mimic a fire. Textured area lights do the opposite, the texture is the light so to speak, this allows them to mimic moving light sources like a screen that's playing dynamic content with lighting that's perfectly in sync with the dynamic content that's being played.
Astray
Member
Engine enabled the devs to fulfill their vision.
Vick
Member
Spider-Man 2 Engine isn't even remotely on the same page.
The Matrix: Awakens handles those speed in a much more photorealistic looking city with zero pop-in whatsoever on a PS5, and only drops frames while colliding against vehicles. Insomniac Engine sure as shit doesn't have anything equal to Nanite, and they still have to prove they can do good with dynamic light sources or times of day.
Bojji
Member
Spider-Man 2 is fully featured game with quests, enemy ai and a lot of shit going on vs. tech demo where there is nothing like that - just pretty graphics. CDPR said that current UE5 won't work with open world game like CP so they decided to improve it:
DF discussion about this:
Currently UE5 is bad for open world games but this will probably change.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
It's one light source. This demo shows hundreds. Each casting its own dynamic shadows. The whole point of the flying bots demo towards the end was to basically show that you can have hundreds of flashlights each casting its own shadow.
Shadows are extremely expensive on PC. I can get somewhere between a 25-35% performance improvement just switching from ultra to medium shadows in games like starfield and wukong. And they feature fairly basic light sources. Either sun shadows with some lights or torches here and there. this will allow devs to make their games more dynamic. Something we dont get because it kills performance.
This is one of my favorite graphics this year. Sadly the game doesnt look this good at all times but i love the simple flickering light. now imagine dozens of them, if not hundreds.
Radical_3d
Member
What's the game?This is one of my favorite graphics this year. Sadly the game doesnt look this good at all times but i love the simple flickering light. now imagine dozens of them, if not hundreds.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Yep. And its running on the very first UE5 version. So no performance improvements that we've seen in 5.4. No nanite support for foliage. No virtual shadow maps. (though these were modded in on PC). And it still looks amazing.
And let's not forget Hellblade 2 which exceeds the PS5 UE5 demo in many of its levels doing far more than the UE5 demo ever did.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
No One Wants to Die. An adventure (detective) game released earlier this summer. only $20.
yeah I'm thinking the fact that they decided to Brand it at all (MegaLights) suggests that it is a feature some may want toggleable meaning theres probably tradeoffs there not mentioning.
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ap_puff
Banned
Would be really funny if thats how it looked on a ps5 instead of shitty video encodingNeeds moarJPEGVP9..!
When you compress something so much it becomes art.
Jokes aside this looks really good. Hopefully they can cough up a high quality encode.
Vick
Member
Watch those videos I linked. In ND games it's not about the light source, but how every texture and shader reacts to light bounce from other assets.
Again, not about the assets being lit by a source (and flames aren't fixed either, they change in instensity) but how they change based on the bounced characteristics of other assets. You make one step the entire scene changes, in terms of light, color, everything, based on what asset of what color is lit by the source.
I unfortunately have bad examples at hand due to lack of colorful assets, will see if I can provide some where it's more apparent.
Didn't know having more game systems made such a drastic difference. Thought RoboCop looked and ran great on PS5, but sure, wasn't a true open world.
Totally agree, that's what really impressed me.
I simply didn't find the textured area lights as impossibly impressive, as from a visual perspective was kind of playing with similar looking stuff already in the original TLOU on PS3.
Shadows are extremely expensive everywhere. Always have been.
This is why RT shadows are possibly my favorite RT feature. These my posts in the previous page:
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Herr Edgy
Member
Because none of the gifs you posted are area lights. Hope that helps!
Better than keeping it hidden for God knows how long.Look, I don't know if they compare on technical level but the first impression I have is this
Good for gaming's future either way that we move away from baked lights.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Spider-Man 2 is fully featured game with quests, enemy ai and a lot of shit going on vs. tech demo where there is nothing like that - just pretty graphics. CDPR said that current UE5 won't work with open world game like CP so they decided to improve it:
DF discussion about this:
Currently UE5 is bad for open world games but this will probably change.
In the Matrix Awakens demo on PS5, I was able to get a steady 30 fps by turning off traffic, parked cars, and NPCs completely. It was obvious back then that the framerate issues were a CPU bottleneck thanks to their insane CPU simualation for the city which featured around 50k cars and 25k pedestrians all being governed by the CPU. It was an actual simulation, not just something they faked. You could even get stable framerates by dropping the traffic and NPC density to 50%. They pushed the CPUs too hard and back then the engine was very single threaded even on PCs so it just kind of made everyone think that UE5 couldnt handle big CPU driven cities. Now it can. The engine has since been properly multithreaded and while im sure devs will still have to make some cutbacks on consoles, it should no longer be bottleneck like it was three years ago.
The engine can also handle very fast traversal. i installed the superman demo and moved just as fast as spiderman 2 on PS5. Wukong's open world level also has incredibly fast flying speeds.
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RodriGames40
Member
No idea why they said it can't handle fast traversal... What? You can literally find videos of the Superman demo everywhere, and the speeds are literally faster considering how much more dense this city is. Keep up the good work.In the Matrix Awakens demo on PS5, I was able to get a steady 30 fps by turning off traffic, parked cars, and NPCs completely. It was obvious back then that the framerate issues were a CPU bottleneck thanks to their insane CPU simualation for the city which featured around 50k cars and 25k pedestrians all being governed by the CPU. It was an actual simulation, not just something they faked. You could even get stable framerates by dropping the traffic and NPC density to 50%. They pushed the CPUs too hard and back then the engine was very single threaded even on PCs so it just kind of made everyone think that UE5 couldnt handle big CPU driven cities. Now it can. The engine has since been properly multithreaded and while im sure devs will still have to make some cutbacks on consoles, it should no longer be bottleneck like it was three years ago.
The engine can also handle very fast traversal. i installed the superman demo and moved just as fast as spiderman 2 on PS5. Wukong's open world level also has incredibly fast flying speeds.
Buggy Loop
Gold Member
Audiophile
Member
I wish they'd release this for PS5 alongside the Lumen In The Land Of Nanite demo. Re-release The Matrix demo too and update all of them with each new version with more features and optimisations so we can see the progress.
Epic could even have their own little tech demo launcher with it all together.
Epic could even have their own little tech demo launcher with it all together.
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Bojji
Member
In the Matrix Awakens demo on PS5, I was able to get a steady 30 fps by turning off traffic, parked cars, and NPCs completely. It was obvious back then that the framerate issues were a CPU bottleneck thanks to their insane CPU simualation for the city which featured around 50k cars and 25k pedestrians all being governed by the CPU. It was an actual simulation, not just something they faked. You could even get stable framerates by dropping the traffic and NPC density to 50%. They pushed the CPUs too hard and back then the engine was very single threaded even on PCs so it just kind of made everyone think that UE5 couldnt handle big CPU driven cities. Now it can. The engine has since been properly multithreaded and while im sure devs will still have to make some cutbacks on consoles, it should no longer be bottleneck like it was three years ago.
The engine can also handle very fast traversal. i installed the superman demo and moved just as fast as spiderman 2 on PS5. Wukong's open world level also has incredibly fast flying speeds.
Again, tech demos without games mechanics. Show me any open world UE4/UE5 game without traversal stutters. That's why some devs want to combat it.
Nvidia's tech has always been in gibberish cause there aren't real life examples from them.
RodriGames40
Member
Except it has literally more traffic and pedestrians than five Spiderman 2s? Yeah... No, Insomniac has to take the L on this one.
RJMacready73
Simps for Amouranth
Why can't they release this and the other Tomb raider demo on PS5 and let us have a wee play about with the future ffs, you give us Matrix why can't thess all be compiled into a single demo
saintjules
Member
Until games like this are playable and of the norm, devs will continue to push on graphical fidelity. There's a lot here we don't see on Consoles yet.
Vick
Member
How is it achieved?
I don't recall ND ever discosing it, but remember Square Enix doing so about an old, cheaper method of them using two virtual area lights to get similar results.
Still, my message was more on a conceptual level. I didn't find this aspect of the demo as impressive as others because similar and especially fully dynamic tech have already been featured on Console for more than a decade, that amount of shadows from that amount of fully dynamic light sources, definitely not.
And not just by ND by the way, Creative Assembly had a similar effect on their flashlight bouce in Alien: Isolation, Days Gone (UE4) also, although much simpler and definitely not as impressive.
It unfortunately stops there as far as I know, Dead Space Remake made an attempted but the end result looked much less refined than even the ND PS3 implementation.
Rogue City on the other hand, UE5, had the most impressive overall implementation I've seen since bouce light in the game was able to cast indirect shadows, and that was a first.
What's missing? Outside of Ray tracing and the exact same fidelity with regards to some effects,the PS5 version is the same as the PC minus IQ on the PS5.
Did anyone notice the mega light demo included bits from other UE demos? The texture lights are a through back to UE3 and those bots flying up is referencing the infiltrator demo
Reizo Ryuu
Gold Member
You're discussing something else entirely, none of your examples are about textured area lights, they are just regular static lights.
Marketing probably or,the idea might be if this demo can run on a console then it can run on comparable hardware on PC with minimal effort.
Herr Edgy
Member
I don't know how they achieved it. I work on tooling, not rendering.
Flash light light sources are based on cone shapes. Area lights are rectangles (possibly other convex polygon shapes too but I'm not familiar with the details).
For one reason or another, area lights are a lot more difficult to achieve. Basically, the typical light shapes such as spheres, cones, or directional lights (not really a shape) are easy to calculate.
For example, for a given point P a certain distance away from a point light, whether the point P is within the sphere is very easy to calculate. So is the light falloff, a point that's further away from the center gets less lit up.
These shapes are relatively easy to integrate. Area lights are harder. But again, I don't speak from experience in rendering, just game dev trivia I have gathered over my time.
Buggy Loop
Gold Member
? Their ReSTIR solution is implemented in Cyberpunk 2077 overdrive and a couple of games since then. Star wars outlaws, and upcoming Retrieval? Just off the top of my head. Plugin and branch of it is already in UE5.
Its what allowed all those lights in cyberpunk 2077 to be path traced to begin with, going from 2019 Quake 2 RTX which is super simplified to a complex open world full of dymanic lights like Cyberpunk just 4 years later.
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Vick
Member
To fully understand, were you referring to how insanely impressive this portion of the video, time-stamped, is?
Because if so, I simply stated I didn't find that to be the most impressive aspect from the Demo since, from a visual perspective, dynamic solutions visually similar were already implemented on PS3.
To get your point better though, would the flashlight source being changed to a TV monitor, o still a flashlight but intermittently switching between a whole range of colors, would that make a difference in regards to your point?
I see, thanks for the explanation.
Xtib81
Member
Very inconsistent textures, shadow pop in, and IQ on top of my head.
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
Black Myth also utilizes path tracing.
So it's cyberpunk, star wars outlaws and black myth so far. No one thought path tracing was feasible on rtx cards that were struggling to run RTX games in 2020.
There are path tracing mods for Dragons Dogma and all the latest RE remakes that had RT added to them. Capcom is just being lazy. Maybe waiting for nvidia to throw some cash their way.
KaiserBecks
Member
Remember this? That was 4 years ago. Would be nice to get some games instead of more tech demos.
Soodanim
Member
This is pretty and all, but it's skin deep.
Depending on the sort of game it is that's not going to be particularly relevant to anything important, and something like a typical boss arena for example is going to be well lit up because complex lighting is often going to get in the way of gameplay - the only thing that actually matters when playing (unless it's designed with lighting in mind).
But there are exceptions. I would like to see a stealth game that makes full use of dynamic lighting, for example. I know we have had plenty of lighting based stealth for decades, but it's something that could potentially evolve with the tech in interesting ways.
Depending on the sort of game it is that's not going to be particularly relevant to anything important, and something like a typical boss arena for example is going to be well lit up because complex lighting is often going to get in the way of gameplay - the only thing that actually matters when playing (unless it's designed with lighting in mind).
But there are exceptions. I would like to see a stealth game that makes full use of dynamic lighting, for example. I know we have had plenty of lighting based stealth for decades, but it's something that could potentially evolve with the tech in interesting ways.
Reizo Ryuu
Gold Member
"change into a tv monitor" wouldn't change anything, because what you are suggesting would just be a texture on top of a light source, which has existed for at least 30 years, again the point not the light source itself, the point is it being a textured light, this means the light is still a single light source, but it can act like hundreds of individual light sources based on the texture information and on top of that this texture can move so it can mimic screens just like the one you are reading this on now; nothing like what's been shown in this demo has been done before in real-time, as mentioned Alan Wake 2 has something similar with it's texture projection based light sources, but there's nothing else.
Herr Edgy
Member
It would change something and that's it being an area light instead of a cone light. Although yes I do get that your point is it's about the area light being a textured area light, not just an area light. But the two are very different, textured or not.
Go_Ly_Dow
Member
Making 20-50 hour games looking like this is a big risk, as you're probably looking at $200-300mil budgets and 5yr+ dev, if not more.
These demo's are impressive but they are short finely crafted hallway walking simulators without any other characters or gameplay systems.
If an IP is strong enough to comfortably sell 10mil+ or 20mil+ units then those specific games can see these kind of visual features. But then they'll also sell just as well even without pushing this tech.
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Vick
Member
Yeah, that's when I went:
I figured this would be usefully showcased in real gaming instances of destructive environments for instance, drastically altering how the scene is lit based on your actions.
Still, I see all this really coming into fruition Next-Gen. Hopefully we'll have great games then.
I'm sorry man.. but how is this different than my examples?
I'm just trying to understand. If textures/shaders in U4 for example can physically manifest an infinite amount of variations of intensities and color based on dynamic player input, shouldn't they theoretically be able to fully react to moving, multiple colored sources as well?
Could you please post an example of the Alan Wake 2 texture projection based light sources?