The Unreal Engine is going from version 4 to 5, and it won’t be a small change either.
Epic Games announced and showcased Unreal Engine 5 with a real-time tech demo called Lumen in the Land of Nanite. „It’s a fully playable demo. We plugged a recorder into the back of a PlayStation 5 dev kit and recorded the signal that came out of the HDMI. So it’s a live demo, it’s replayable, and it’s a little bit different every time you play it,” Epic Games chief technology officer Kim Libreri told Geoff Keighley in a Summer Game Fest 2020 live stream.
The two main new components of Unreal Engine 5 are Nanite and Lumen: „Nanite virtualized micro polygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real-time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs, and there is no loss in quality.
Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometres to millimetres. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for the time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author lightmap UVs—huge time savings when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on a console.
Numerous teams and technologies have come together to enable this leap in quality. To build large scenes with Nanite geometry technology, the team made heavy use of the Quixel Megascans library, which provides film-quality objects up to hundreds of millions of polygons. To support vastly larger and more detailed scenes than previous generations, PlayStation 5 provides a dramatic increase in storage bandwidth. The demo also showcases existing engine systems such as Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering,” Epic Games says.
There’s a timeline for the Unreal Engine 4 and 5: „Unreal Engine 4.25 already supports next-generation console platforms from Sony and Microsoft, and Epic is working closely with console manufacturers and dozens of game developers and publishers using Unreal Engine 4 to build next-gen games. Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and in a full release late in 2021, supporting next-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. We’re designing for forward compatibility, so you can get started with next-gen development now in Unreal Engine 4 and move your projects to Unreal Engine 5 when ready. We will release Fortnite, built with Unreal Engine 4, on next-gen consoles at launch and, in keeping with our commitment to prove out industry-leading features through internal production, migrate the game to Unreal Engine 5 in mid-2021.”
There are also some developer-friendly moves by Epic Games, supporting both indie devs and multiplatform projects: „Starting today, you can download and use Unreal Engine to build games for free as you always have, except now royalties are waived on your first $1 million in gross revenue. The new Unreal Engine license terms, which are retroactive to January 1, 2020, give game developers an unprecedented advantage over other engine license models.
Friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, leaderboards, and accounts: we built these services for Fortnite, we launched them across seven major platforms—PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Now we’re opening up Epic Online Services to all developers FOR FREE in a simple multiplatform SDK! Mix and match these services together with your account services, platform accounts, or Epic Games accounts, which reach the world’s largest cross-platform social graph with over 350 million players and their 2.2 billion friend connections across half a billion devices.”
Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic Games, was interviewed by DigitalFoundry. On this site, Nick Penwarden, the vice president of engineering at Epic, revealed that the tech demo ran at 1440p resolution „most of the time:” „Interestingly, it does work very well with our dynamic resolution technique as well. So, when GPU load gets high we can lower the screen resolution a bit, and then we can adapt to that. In the Unreal Engine 5 demo, we did use dynamic resolution, although it ends up rendering at about 1440p most of the time.”
Libreri told PCGamer that even an RTX 2070 Super could run the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo at „pretty good performance,” although Nvidia’s GPU has lower TFLOPS computing performance than the PlayStation 6 (9 vs. 10.28). Sweeney expanded on this comment, saying what is required for the Unreal Engine 5: „Several different components are required to render this level of detail, right? One is the GPU performance and GPU architecture to draw an incredible amount of geometry that you’re talking about – a very large number of teraflops being required for this. The other is the ability to load and stream it efficiently. One of the big efforts that have been done and are ongoing in Unreal Engine 5 now is optimising for next-generation storage to make loading faster by multiples of current performance. Not just a little bit faster but a lot faster, so that you can bring in this geometry and display it, despite it not all fitting and memory, you know, taking advantage of next-generation SSD architectures and everything else… Sony is pioneering here with the PlayStation 5 architecture. It’s got a God-tier storage system which is pretty far ahead of PCs. On a high-end PC with an SSD and especially with NVMe, you get awesome performance too.” He just praised the PS5 there.
Sweeney explained that the philosophy of the new engine can be traced back to the 1980s: „You know, the philosophy behind it goes back to the 1980s with the idea of REYES: Render Everything Your Eye Sees. It’s a funny acronym which means that given essentially infinite detail available, it’s the engine’s job to determine exactly what pixels need to be drawn to display it. It doesn’t mean drawing all 10 billion polygons every frame because some of them are much, much smaller than the pixel. It means being able to render and an approximation of it which misses none of the detail that you’re able to perceive and once you get to that point, you’re done with geometry. There’s nothing more you can do. And if you rendered more polygons, you wouldn’t notice it because they just contribute infinitesimally to each pixel on the screen.” „I suppose the secret is that what Nanite aims to do is render effectively one triangle for pixel, so once you get down to that level of detail, the sort of ongoing changes in LOD is imperceptible,” Penwarden added.
Libreri also mentioned one more detail: temporal accumulation, which is also essential in the leap that the new engine showcases: „Temporal accumulation, you know – more than just normal temporal anti-aliasing – it’s is a huge part of how we’re able to make things look as good as this. The global illumination, without a temporal intelligence, there’s no way you could do it on hardware yet. We’re doubling down on the understanding of how temporal can help us, and there have been so many huge improvements in quality because of having a temporal component. It’s the way that we get close to movie rendering – without those samples (and they’re not just necessarily pure screen-space samples, there’s loads of things you can do to temporally accumulate), the GI would not work anywhere near as well as it does without it.” However, the tech demo seen on the PlayStation 5 dev kit did not use ray tracing, even though the Unreal Engine 5 supports hardware ray tracing.
Time for the images and the videos.
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