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@@ThreatInteractive Hey, a TA/RE with 10+ years of experience in mobile gamedev here. 7:50 One thing I need to note is that light probes are indeed a much cheaper alternative to LMs in some cases... but they're still not free. They still cost memory and, unlike LMs which after being loaded can reside in VRAM only, LPs in some implementations can eat up BOTH regular RAM and VRAM. So the LP density you've shown here is QUITE high for such a scene. Obviously, it would look nice with a per-fragment LP sampling. But in mobile gamedev this could be EASILY a LP budget for an entire scene (the whole level). Yep, it's for mobile, and PC/consoles have some headroom, but if you compare actual hardware of modern flagship phones to past-gen PS4 (still being the primary platform for most PS players), you'll see they're not that different anymore. So even LPs aren't a silver bullet and you still need to use them "the smart way" and not just fill the space with them uniformely (which unfortunately contradicts with the "single click" culture you mentioned earlier). And even when used properly, LPs don't compete with LMs but complement them. The sad reality is that you still need to use each tool where it suits the most. Whether you develop for mobiles or PS5 or PC with 4090 onboard, I still believe the best visuals can ONLY be achieved via a balanced combinations of all the lighting techniques, which include LPs, LMs, SHs/SGs and yes, some form of realtime GI (if your platform allows it) with post-processing AO and stuff. So disregarding/alienating one of them is equally as bad as it fully relying only on it. And don’t even get me started on optimization at content level, which seems to be fully forgotten nowadays. MOST if not all lighting-related artifacts you mentioned (like light leaking) can easily be beaten with thoughtful content preparation. Like not relying on auto-unwrapping for LM UV-set and instead unwrapping it in such a way that there's a seam at such potentially problematic areas. ... But with all that being said, there's clearly a trend to light EVERYTHING fully dynamicaly by default (Starfield, anyone?). I can't tell if I agree with it, but it's the direction the industry seem to be going in rn. And if we keep going this direction, ALL of the mentioned techniques no longer apply, and Unreal's approach starts making sense. But I don't think our current hardware is ready for that. It seems more of a wishful thinking to me... and Fortnite-specific case extrapolated to the engine as a whole (I fully agree with you on that).
@@lex_darlog_fun The density was high but it was done that way to show the probes better. As for checkmark workflow, the target would be automatically placed probes/environment information just sparse enough around static objects(as we stated is usually 70% of the scene) for dynamic indirect radiance calculations to work fast enough. The slide mentioned ray tracing dynamic objects (for occlusion or new bounce light info) but we might be able to use something a little faster like DF based occlusion/int based color injection.
Genuinely crazy how we have this unimaginable graphics power by standards from a decade ago, and yet consoles (even pcs in some cases) still struggle to produce a clear image at 60fps. Optimization is dead
im using unreal engine and i have so many problems to optimize. its a bloated mess while im also very good with UE and i can not imagine that the AAA studios, which are going to use UE soon are going to have a better performance than me.
It's not dead, it's just on life-support. Don't worry, as we approach the hard limits of silicon developers will have to start being more creative, and exercise more ingenuity, to do what the hardware won't be able to for them anymore... at least until we get off silicon and start using something like borophene or graphene or cupric oxide for semiconductors, but that's at least a decade off as far as I'm concerned. We'll see a sort of optimization renaissance in the meantime.
@@CharlesVanNoland silicon or graphene, this isn't a hardware problem we've seen 10 times weaker hardware do better, this is a developer/engine problem
And even if top-end PCs might be able to brute force through these shitty practices (except when they can't), it's insane that people now are so accepting of the idea that optimization isn't relevant to PCs because they can simply pay more money until they don't notice the problems. Even though they too would benefit from better optimization, gaining better performance and lower power draw. All the cost is passed on to the consumer, and they'll continue to do it as long as idiots with more money than sense continue to eat it up and defend this behavior.
@@XenonG please stop with the wild unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, the engines suck, it's that simple, you don't have to make it more dramatic by it being a grand conspiracy. edit: oh wow i didn't know i was in loony town, jesus you guys need medication.
@@ChristopherGray00 These are not "conspiracy" theories. Just use your two braincells for 5 minutes. These are economical advantages. And money making entities will absolutely abuse these advantages.
@@ChristopherGray00 I 'member UT2003/UT2004 with the NVIDIA "the way it's meant to be played" and the various press release of them announcing they are working together to "better integration and building the future" bull crap along the years.
@@ChristopherGray00 Though the relationship had soured a little a few years ago, as UE devs deprecated RTX style RT in their main branch in favor of their in house Lumen and NVIDIA offering their own fork of UE.
It's incredible to me how game developers manage to find ways to use up all of those cores, VRAM and RAM in new hardware to produce games that look worse or at best the same as offerings from 6 years ago while also running infinitely worse. All in the name of chasing the photorealism pony that gets further and further away as diminishing returns only continue to mount.
We are now so 'photorealistic' that puddles of water in games have a perfect mirror finish reflection, I'm still looking IRL but still haven't found one that does that...I'm glad it runs the game at slideshow speed so I can enjoy it fully tho
@@CalgarGTX I actually am someone that is pretty wowed by RTGI and Ray Tracing effects in general, but you're point about ultra-reflective water is spot on. I hate how a lot of games implement ray tracing then just make EVERYTHING(let alone water) absurdly reflective. Hogwarts Legacy made every floor have a mirror level of reflection if you enabled RT, it looked so much worse than without RT... Also, water does not always reflect! Most lakes/ponds/oceans have too much movement on the surface to reflect, but enable RT reflections and you'd never know that in most games... It's not really so much an issue with the technology as it is art design, and developers wanting to really show off tech by turning it up to insane degrees...
And there were many other fast methods for GI that weren't used yet, such as Voxel GI, screen space GI combined with off-screen probes, panorama space GI, ...
bruh, I have a 4080 and I complain about performance I paid a high-end price and this is what I'm getting? 1440p60fps, sometimes, maybe? In games that look worse than 5 years ago? Thank but no, thanks, I'll stick to older games that look great and run great, polar opposite to the modern ones
we spent 20+ year optimising lighting techniques to achieve a realistic and optimised look in our video games. Then we promptly threw it all away because we started having gpus capable of simulated the actual proccess of light.
@@AlphaGarg its a fun gimmick but right now that's all it is: a gimmick if it becomes affordable and runs good in like 10 years, THEN i'll be happy to say it's not a gimmick, but right now it's JUST a gimmick.
@@NebulatheZorua Not to mention that the only reason it's even remotely possible performance-wise is because physical parts of the newer GPUs were dedicted JUST to this tech. What world would we be in if instead of RT cores we got, say, 10x more compute cores, or more raster cores, or something actually useful like hardware acceleration for generating different types of noise. Probably a better one. Problem is, those wouldn't have sold as well, so we're stuck in the worst timeline :(
Valve's HL2 dev commentary made me appreciate their crazy dedication to optimization and supporting hardware. "Yes this game will run on DX7-DX9 and we're going to precompute billions of shader combos. We will distribute the computation of lighmaps across all office computers. We will design and fine tune each and every gameplay scenario to fit into our strict performance budget". And back then it was obvious that a frame would be rendered within 1 frame
To be fair the lightmap stuff was required - HL2 had a direct lineage from quake 2's map format and compilers, so with the scale of maps in Source they had to hack together the distributed compilation system. And because HLSL didn't have conditional operations they had to compile all the different varieties of shaders for it to even work back then
Even today in Deadlock where it's deferred and almost all lights on the main map are dynamic,it has lightmapping solely for baked indirects And it runs pretty good today after optimizations that reduced the intensity of Distance Field stuff...
Black Mesa devs also made some miracles they have damn impressive dynamic lights and shadows on DX9 and source 1, Blue Shift mod for BM only made it even more cool looking shame that it runs way worse than the base game but once you add DXVK you get amazing performance with great and sharp visuals that none of new games can achieve without sacrificing image clarity. Titanfall 1 and 2 were also made on Source 1.
I swear MSGV's Fox engine was a gift from god itself. It runs with a buttery smooth 60fps in a fat PS4 and even a PS3 was able to run it at 30 frames. I'll never forgive konami for ditching it.
Playing that game in base PS4 at launch was a blessing. People say that the 30fps target is not that bad, but having 60fps made the game much more inmersive and enjoyable for me. A shame that it was not finished because it is still one of my favourite games (fuck Konami)
that's the upside of custom Engines. Kojima Games alsways look and run flawlesly. Death Stranding was also very well optimized and they made sure to properly use the Decima Engine and it runs much better then Horizon on PC. Still if I even see MGS3 I'm baffled how well the graphics and style holds up. It's timeless and so will be MGSV.
fox engine also was great for the Pro Evolution Soccer Games too. too bad it was really time consuming to make a game on it to the point where konami just decided to hop on the unreal engine train
@@Coconut-219 that's because they don't incentivize frivolous spending. Granted devs also get paid trash as a result but it keeps them realistic about the scope of their games which makes it really easy to optimize for. It's common sense that comes at the cost of very jaded workforce that only works there because of their honor culture that's still extremely prevalent today
I've often found myself puzzled by the increasing difficulty of running video games each year, despite the graphics not improving very much. Now I finally understand why this is happening.
@@saricubra2867 CPU isn't really the issue right now or GPU hardware, its down to developer's optimization. Threadripper CPU product line are for workstation workload not gaming. Its too slow in clockspeed to help with gaming performance and lacks L3 cache for higher IPC. Best CPU for gaming right now is X3D vertical stacked L3 Cache with X3D product line with 8 fast cores. As long as more X3D CPU gets develop the more improvement we can see in game performance. Large amount of L3 cache allows the CPU to skip long length it needs to travel to loading up and storing data on the system RAM and instead load it up on the L3 cache thats connected right next to the CPU cores. That way CPU can handle off the instruction to the GPU to render the next frame. Most games that are cpu bias (cpu heavy games) like MMORPG, Simluator games, openworld sandbox games, racing games, and some FPS takes really good advantage of L3 cache on X3D CPU giving massive amount of performance increase with the same GPU.
You have to check which game engine the games are being run on, like UE5 or Snowdrop engine are known to be super high end hardware requirement. most games are being made in UE5 right now so gaming performance will be bad unless its game engine issues are fixed and game developers spend more time optimizing for performance over visuals (slapping on effects and passing on to consumer to brute force performance hit with high end hardware).
@@sparda9060 Nanite is pointless, why add trillions of polygons to a rock that will look like a pixel on our monitors? UE5 is extremely bad for gaming. Source 2 is overlooked, CryEngine 5 is also amazing (the Nintendo Switch can run all Crysis games with ok perfomance and SVOGI lighting, similar lighting to path tracing).
@@saricubra2867 nanite is decent if they actually used it for objects and items that matter in the game. using it for dirt, rocks, and terrain textures is a wasted performance like you said.
I genuinely enjoy playing older games more and more. They're optimized, sharp, and smooth. And while the graphics aren't as advanced as today, i'll always prefer a sharp clean image quality with high smooth framerate over smeary stuttery unstable "modern" game image. It's impressive how it kind of feels like the gaming industry is actually regressing backwards in some aspects. I don't understand every single thing in your videos, but I think they're great and more people should see them. Great video
Exactly, same thing here. I can run older games at native 1440p +240fps high settings on my 360hz 1440p OLED and the image quality is superb compared to almost any modern games using TAA garbage and where you need frame generation to achieve anywhere near 240fps.
I'm playing Black Mesa Blue shift mod and they use dynamic lights and shadows on ancient source engine using dx9! they use them very often and they look great Stalker trilogy is also a great example every object and npc can cast shadows when using your flashlight or environment lights. Modern lazy devs keep lying to our ears that it can't be achieved since they are too damn spoiled and incompetent, one dev even said to me that they want more easy to use tools to make everything easier (automation) and create better graphics, but what kind of graphics will you get without optimization (they hate work) and smudged by muddy temporal AA? It's a shame that practically all vets have retired or got chased out of the industry and now we are in a huge competency crisis, nvidia for sure love that idea since people now are forced to buy more expensive gpus to have playable framerate at native 1080p and above.
@@superior96 6 is total garbage avoid it at all cost it doesn't even feel like a FC game, FC4 and 5 are both great games but i felt like FC5 felt like a dlc not a mainline game i expected something more
I've been saying it for a long time. Gaming Graphics/Optimization peaked at around 2016. After that the bad optimized titles started to be more and more! As for cascade lighting, I had already seen it before and in the case it was applied (like PoE) it looks exceptionally well
Definitely around 2014-2016 yeah. 2016's Battlefield 1 was probably peak. You go play that right now and it looks and runs better than anything released this year. Its actually absurd. I get 300 FPS in Battlefield 1 on my 4070 Super, 7800x3D build with no DLSS, then I hop onto Stalker 2 or Starfield or Last of Us Part 1 or Star Wars Jedi Survive or Dragon's Dogma 2 and I get between 40 and 80 FPS, with DLSS on. Its depressing. These games will never be fixed. Ironically in an era of remasters and remakes, we need demasters and demakes. I'd LOVE if they took Stalker 2 and demastered it into a 2010s engine with lower fidelity. These games are simply unplayable as is. They make you ill looking at them.
Assetto Corsa with SOL still runs at like 100fps on a 1060 and honestly looks better than most modern games. It's actually impressive how everything just looks movie levels of overly colour corrected blurry noisy mess now.
@@stuntvist oh yes, people wont belive you but we who know what you are talking about totally agree :D there are videos of assetto corsa on youtube that could easily pass as real life footage
Exactly For me Wolfenstein The New Collosus and Ghost Recon Wildlands was the moment i thought "okay, graphics improvement is definitely possible after that level of fidelity, but it's not necessary". I've not changed my mind still
5:19 This is extremely important for the conversation, thanks you for visualizing it. Huge chunk of large studios’ “next big title” games have this oddly specific unnatural look to them due to lazy development lighting solution shortcuts. My casual gamer friends (who got into gaming only recently), had no idea what I meant when I was ranting about “glowy” look of many big titles, especially when you don’t set the graphics quality to the ultra or whatever. I hate that look of them and I hate that even with those sacrifices many of those games still end up running like crap. It’s obvious to me that it’s never just a stylistic design choice but it seems way too normalized these days.
a few weeks ago i watched a 3 hour siggraph talk about how a studio took like 3 years to develop the clouds they wanted. midway in the talk he says "and finally we can reach our target fps of 30 on a 9th gen console" and i stopped the video and was just like what in the fuck is this. these studios are satisfied with 30 fps in 2024 i almost lost my shit
I thought you were about to say "3 hour siggraph talk about how a studio took like 3 years to develop the clouds they wanted" just to say "and with TAA(a smeary variant) acts as the final resolve step" as I find this to be the most common lol.
the problem is that nowdays a new figure has emerged, i call it the tutorial bro, until about 5 years ago, all the people who made tutorials for game development had at least some type of experience actually making games, but now the market is so saturated that there are people who only make tutorials as their job, but have never actually worked on a real project, i watched unreal sensei on 5.5 the other day, and he said that with megalights and nanite we have bypassed all the major limitations of computer graphics, and then stalker 2 cannot even run at 30 fps
@@ThreatInteractive I had to onboard my partner and finding tutorials was a nightmare of "what the heck?" and the two times I thought I'd found something decent, a few hours later I'd hear "Uh.. I don't quite understand what's going on here, mind having a look?" and I'd be looking at the most backwards amalgam of half-eaten gluesticks - by design - and just thinking "oh no.." .-. Wound up taking 2 hours to just do an impromptu seminar of sorts. It's incredible just how badly the people handling the first experiences that many have with a feature or software understand what they're doing and how poorly they understand how to teach. The UE6 proposed vision of "Just publish your game to Fortnite" ala Roblox has me very concerned about the odds of Unreal Engine ever getting anything optimized for static scenes added, let alone optimized for today's hardware. I looked at hardware trends and based on what I saw next gen should perform roughly on par with what would have been the cancelled 4090 Ti and if that's true Unreal will have no reason to optimize anything - my 3090 handles Unreal much better than your 3060 does - the image looks gorgeous at native 1440P but runs at a cruel 30 frames per second. The 4090 is roughly 44.279% faster than my 3090 and your 3060 is roughly 63.901% the speed of my 3090 and is roughly on par with the PS5 / XSX. I'm uncertain as to what the 4090 Ti's performance would have looked like compared to the 4090, but suffice to say that if we're looking at even a 10% uplift over the 4090 for the 4090 Ti that would have been 1.1x the 4090 performance which comes out to be 1.587x the performance of my 3090, and if it was an uplift of 15% that's 1.6592, an uplift of 20% would be 1.7313x For reference, the 1080 v 1080 Ti was 19.51% and the 3090 v 3090 Ti was 11%, 4090 Ti was rumored to be 10 - 20% faster and use the full chip - even the 4090 wasn't using the entire chip - but rumors aren't stats. That would take my scene from 30FPS to: 10%: 47.61 FPS 15%: 49.776 FPS 20%: 51.939 FPS And mind you, this is my "Ultra" preset - it's not "let's just troll the hardware for 2% better quality at a 30% performance regression" or terrible optimization.. it's the most reasonable choices for the best image quality, even if my current hardware can't run it. It's also from tests in a development build so that's worth mentioning as well. I can increase performance to about 120fps on my hardware at native res by disabling things that really make no reasonable sense to have enabled outside of a screenshot / replay system on my hardware, and achieving 180 - 200 fps with lumen still enabled has thus far been possible but required some pretty specific settings and tradeoffs to arrive to an image that isn't too dissimilar from the standard expected experience that I'd like for players to have. For me personally, the problem is actually Chaos Physics performance more than anything - I get why they're doing it, but replacing PhysX this early was a bit extreme imo - it really hurts performance for moving characters, even with Mover 2.0 which is a bit of an improvement over CMC already. I have no real expectation that players will have any specific quality of CPU due to the "CPU doesn't affect FPS" advice that still gets thrown around a bit. For moving characters the difference between Unity w/ ECMS (a character movement asset) seems to be 31.57% or 62.3157% (CMC / Mover) - I didn't do a comparison between UE5 5.5 and UE4 for the CMC, so a direct PhysX vs Chaos wasn't done. But to be clear, ECMS is 3.1667 times or 1.6 times faster than CMC or Mover 2.0 respectively, and while that may be due to differences that would reduce the quality of CMC if implemented, I honestly don't see it based on my usage of the three. And yes, this is moving characters, but physics applies to projectiles, cloth, animation, destruction, and so on - and leaving performance on the table to this extent is something that should be a tradeoff presented to the public, not axed with the launch of UE5. They have a lot of work to do, and while I'm making my game in Unreal Engine, I will not hesitate to port to Unity once my game is in a solid state prior to launch - I'm using Unreal because I want HDRP levels of quality with the ability to potentially port to mobile and with the production tools that UE provides. But with the content already produced and the systems all hooked up, porting a working system and set of assets isn't nearly as difficult as optimizing Unreal and I'd much rather have to port to HDRP to launch on standard hardware and then have to port to URP to launch on mobile.. when compared to the joy of optimizing for Unreal's shortcomings. But for now I'm looking ahead and it seems highly likely that next gen consoles can run my game at 1080P with the ultra preset and 1440P upscaled at the ultra preset and honestly I'm not unaffected by the sight of many games which sold extremely well in spite of the performance issues - UE inflicted or otherwise. If Unity 7 were here this would be a different conversation. If Unity were half the engine Unreal is when it comes to production tools provided by the engine then this would be a different conversation. But today? Today Unity has a lot of cleanup to do and no genuine ETA for when Unity 7 happens. I have more faith that you'll release stuff to fix up UE5 than I do faith that Unity will release Unity 7 before next gen launches, and once next gen launches they'll be much harder pressed to compete against Unreal given the better hardware making up for everything. That was always Epic's bet. The hardware this gen was expected to be better from their perspective and so they just buckled down and decided to optimize and let next gen's consoles sort it out. But from my experience that's how UE4 went - it never felt ready until it suddenly seemed pretty ready and then they threw it out for UE5. :/ We'll see how it all goes. Many of us, myself included, would happy to give you a capped rev share or flat $ in exchange for work that results in substantial performance improvements at similar image quality. I don't want to write the kind of blank check that an uncapped rev share is, but many of us also aren't at all aware as to what sales will look like so a flat $ amount might undervalue your work out of concerns / "oh but it's $150 that's a lot to spend right now" or whatever. One major thing for me is that Lumen with Hit Tracing and the bounces turned up can, with few visible and recognizable "wait that's not right" 's during gameplay, accurately show many translucent and refractive objects overlapping one another in the scene - basically, I'm aware that it isn't what I'd get out of an offline pathtracer, but it puts a big smile on my face because it's close enough. The unfortunate thing is the noise that I can't seem to get rid of with any settings changes - or even reduce - but thankfully it just kind of looks like sparkles / glitter so I get to just sort of go "welp, it's a feature" for now :x
fucking hate them guys... because unreal is free they can do whatever as a "TH-cam EXPERT" the wrong way. most just like the sound of there own voice and forget to give information not that it's any good anyway. It's one of the main reasons I switched to Houdini for development, as more of the community know there shit. and your problems get solved much quicker.
I remember years ago following a tutorial for baked lighting in Unity. After going through it I couldn't figure out why my lighting would either take hours to bake or not at all until a dev friend of mine pointed out that my texels shouldn't be 200 to 400 as shown in the tutorial but in the 10 to 30 range
Crysis 3 and BF1 run on the modern equivalent of a hot potato, and yet they completely stomp 99% of modern games in both visuals and tech department. Modern gaming is a joke.
I'd like to add also Witcher 3 and Talos Principle 1 to that, While not the best at optimisation, it did run well and look good Meanwhile TP2 used and just announced Witcher 4 is to use UE5
I've been playing battlefield V and crysis 3 on my laptop, plugged into an external 4k 160hz HDR monitor. Its GPU is "only" an RX 7700S. Yet the games run buttery smooth with excellent visual fidelity.
As someone who studied UE5 for a year through a gaming 3D artist course, the engine has great stuff, but it feels like it prioritizes looks over any form of optimization. Many of what they taught us were visibly very heavy to perform, but were quickly dismissed with "doesn't matter, Lumen/Nanite will take care of that". We once had to make a forest environment we downloaded assets from quixel bridge. They were beautiful, but... 10GB for a dozen trees? 30GB for a pack of bushes and grass? Yes, there were several quality stages, but even then, no wonder games nowadays occupy 100GB. It felt to me like development convenience nowadays is making many games being developed with the idea that the hardware will just bruteforce the horrendously unoptimized scene. Which unfortunately you can often see with lots of games making use of asset flipping. Nothing wrong with buying assets to speed up development, but can you at least make sure your game doesn't require a 3080 to run at 30FPS...?
"It runs well on my 4090" Bro I just managed to get a 1660s this year (gifted by someone) and unreal appears again with even worse performance games, but ooh look how good they look 😇 I can pretty much appreciate any game unless it's made on unreal, seriously.
What's crazy is that GPUs have not been improving much recently, you can't exploit overly powerful hardware IF IT DOESN'T EXIST. Right now it's mostly Nvidia that makes the most powerful consumer GPUs and it's a monopoly, they can use abusive pricing, and the performance per dollar metric is just not improving, the only reason you can get a powerful Nvidia GPU is because you payed way too much for it. Not everybody is rich, even in first world countries. And that lowers how many copies you sell. Games for idiots, made by idiots.
I like the way you present numbers and data in big letters, much cleaner than loads of benchmark graphs with convoluted extensive naming schemes and small numbers with the actual data. One can tell that you are knowledgeable about important details in the dev pipeline, nothing feels forced or out of frame - and instead it teaches you some new thing.
i remember playing battlefield 1 on a 1050ti with no issues and that game looked great. at this point it is obvious to me that all the mainstream games/engines are intentionally bloated to sell new hardware.
It's unbelievable that game was released 8 years ago...AND IT RAN SO WELL on hardware of that time. Still looks amazing apart from some low res textures.
@@Dregomz02 As silly as that sounds, it's actually true. Even though things like path traced lighting itself looks excellent, it's spoiled by the blurry, smeary TAA mess that encompasses all of AAA gaming today.
I've got enthusiast level hardware (Ryzen 9800X3D and an RTX4080). I've also got the self-awareness to acknowledge that this level of hardware should not be the current baseline in 2024.
Running Blender on my gaming laptop (RTX 4060) absolutely blows me away. Compared to what I had a decade ago, I’ve got a literal supercomputer that I casually toss in my backpack. And it’s not even high end hardware today.
I was literally still running an archaic i7-2600K + GTX 1060 6GB desktop PC roughly 6 months ago. Most video games and apps, and I mean an overwhelming majority, ran just fine at 1080p 60fps, without any sort of upscalers, framegen, or other post-Corona era UE5 smoke and mirrors. Only the very recent, overpriced Unreal 5 slop have given me trouble, even after upgrading my entire PC to a 5th gen Ryzen 7 3D + 12GB RTX card.
With optimizations like these, games can look way better. It's not just about the graphical techniques looking better, but when they run faster, you can play at higher FPS and resolutions, vastly increasing image quality even in high-end hardware. What's crazy is that GPUs have not been improving much recently, you can't exploit overly powerful hardware if it doesn't exist. Right now it's mostly Nvidia that makes the most powerful consumer GPUs and it's a monopoly, they can use abusive pricing, and the performance per dollar metric is just not improving, the only reason you can get a powerful Nvidia GPU is because you payed way too much for it. Not everybody is rich, even in first world countries.
There was also Star wars battlefront which ran at a perfectly stable 60 on high on my 970 and looks about the same or better than every AAA game released since
It all started in Unreal 4, when became a easy engine to individuals make some good looking scam games. Most game companies seen how easy it is to use Unreal, are now going in the same path fast. Next The witcher and Cyberpunk will be made with Unreal, they said it already.
The UE engine might be part of the issue, but all this bullshit started thanks to Nvidia, and their raytracing implementations. Ever since then ghosting effects, blurry presentations are even more present then before, and all of that for the modest price of half of your frames, what a joke.
Game Studios are helping NVIDIA line their pockets by continuing to push "more advanced" content to require consumers to purchase GPUs more frequently. That's NVIDIAs new business model.
@@funkyskunk8122Yeah, the Nvidia conspiracy starts to fall apart when you factor in the console space. While PC-exclusive developers stand to gain from being biased towards Nvidia’s hardware, developers who focus target the AMD-powered consoles only stand to lose from their games performing poorly on those platforms. And then there’s Nintendo developers with their underpowered Nvidia-based hardware, who also only stand to lose from Nvidia’s performance chewing habit.
They were supposed to make raytracing possible. Instead, they are used by Devs who have absolutely no idea how to write code at all. Guys like Carmack would be embarrassed by what game devs have devolved into.
They were developed to have good performance when using high resolutions like 8K or ray tracing + a better alternative than TAA, they were never meant to be mandatory at anything less than 4K/8K or Ray tracing
Not to mention severe ghosting on foliage/grass, i really hate that this is gonna be the industry standard when we have cleaner image quality from Ps4 era.
@@tomthomas3499 i agree. i think epic makes UE5 like this because it brings the max money from 3 different areas: fortnite, film&TV industry and architecture&interior design. every UE5 game demo looks like a film trailer with heavy color-grading preset. but human eyes have much better luminosity range (kind of HDR) than any current camera.
@@tomthomas3499 It's cause the devs use only the old UE 5.1 version that doesn't have among other things Nanite foliage. If the game was made in 5.4 with Nanite landscapes and all other things that are missing in the old 5.1 version Stalker 2 would look and run way better.
I`m happy im not the only one who noticed that game graphics kinda peaked a little while back, The Division 1 was in my opinion the pinnacle of clarity and graphics details...
This is weird timing, because last week I was talking about Unity's adaptive light probes & how UE needs another realistic lighting system than just Lumen, because right now its sort of all or nothing which forces developers to use full dynamic RTGI even when they don't need it just because the alternatives aren't competent enough. Epic Games infuriates me at times. What are they doing? I know their engineers are intelligent, but they also make really bad decisions at times which I'm struggling with understanding.
No market incentive is the problem(for Epic & especially not Nvidia). It's already the most voted feedback but there is not monetary gain. 3rd parties like CDPR that could have influenced a better direction don't recognize the issue either.
@@ThreatInteractive CDPR didn't care that their last major title released in a sorry state on unfitting hardware running like a total slog, and they won't care again next time. By the time the next game is ready, the next generation of hardware will be around the corner to rescue them and make things at least vaguely palatable.
@@ThreatInteractive This isn't directly to do with the topic of this video (btw excellent, watching video multiple times i can learn a lot) but what are you feelings on the path traced projects that Nvidia and some developers collaborate on? Do you like them being around as a sort of niche/tech demo and high end option? Or do you think that they have an adverse affect on the mindset of developers and consumes in regards to what should be the ultimate focus of lighting techniques (more likely to want a fully dynamic system like Lumen, even when not needed etc), Also what do you think of the approach that Rockstar seems to betaking with GTA 6 (we don't know in depth, but a ray traced GI, ray traced reflections with ssr overlay, and shadow maps)?
Because their main focus is Fortnite, UnrealEngine for others is less important for them, thus features they make are mainly focused for Fortnite usecases. Thats why it SO cheap. Ue4 before fortnite were more generic and fitted more projects, now because of reasons a lot of developers when choosing engine they just go with UE5, even if it dont fit their needs or they cant make it fit their needs (eg writing Your own lightning solution). I mean, why? If UE5 dont fit You need you can go proprietary, or other engine (unfortunately for us there is not many good options, but that's mostly not Epic`s fault).
I can't wait for the RTX 5000 series to come out and for all these problems to continue to get worse. Any complaints about performance or image quality will be drowned out by people mindlessly spouting "JuSt BuY a NeW gPu".
I've heard it so many times: "What are you poor?" "3rd worlders like you should buy consoles" it's almost like Nvidia are hiring those shills to make people ashamed and guilty trip them to buy new overly expensive GPUs. I didn't expect for gaming to became as expensive as some luxurious brands of the clothing or accessories, you need maintream audience to buy your games once they are gone since they can't afford anything but the mid end you as the dev team may go bankrupt from lack of sales to cover your budget and you always want to double your money not to barely break even.
What's crazy is that GPUs have not been improving much recently, you can't exploit overly powerful hardware if it doesn't exist. Right now it's mostly Nvidia that makes the most powerful consumer GPUs and it's a monopoly, they can use abusive pricing, and the performance per dollar metric is just not improving, the only reason you can get a powerful Nvidia GPU is because you payed way too much for it. Not everybody is rich, even in first world countries.
Plus the GPU’s are gonna be way more expensive. Not only is nvidia guaranteed to make them more expensive like they did with the 40 series, Trump’s tariffs are going to make them even more expensive than nvidia’s base price hike.
It's shocking how few games use their own engine, but the ones that do always seem to run way better. The industry needs to do better, it's all about fleecing us for cash and doing it again and again at this point instead of creating games for them to be enjoyed.
I wish Guerrilla Games could license out their superb engine, I hate how every big dev studio is deciding to use Unreal, the market is starting to become a duopoly
Honestly it would probably end up like CryEngine. Decima is not a generalized engine like Unreal. Supporting an engine for your own studio is different than supporting an engine for the public.
We just have to treasure the few in-house engines that're still decent. Too bad Rockstar lost all their good personel, because Rage is a genuine good engine for open world games. 🫤
@MichaelPohoreski Pretty much all the talented people we know from GTA V & before quit. So GTA VI might actually be the dystopian Rockstar game with no soul at all to make money first and foremost instead of being a good game. We'll see I suppose, but I've got low expectations.
@@MLWJ1993 Talented people get replaced with talented people, especially at a studio like Rockstar, btw there's still a bunch of OG's there, its still the same Art director from all the previous games, Sam Houser is still the president of Rockstar and the people responsible for the engine have nothing to do with the people that left. Most of the people that worked on Red Dead 2 would be working on GTA6. Studios don't just die because people leave, they die because of bad practises and policies.
This state of Unreal is an absolute heartbreak... I love working in this engine, the amount of tools it provides for it's users in compare to competition engines but the way it is developed around Fortnite needs it's mindboggling... It's soo inefficient in how it works... Kind of reminds me that Epic always pushed for dynamic lighting since UE3 as first iteration of it didn't had Lightmass. I hope this initiative and many studios that switched to Unreal will develop better solutions or implement alternatives that are at least hybrid ones and it somehow pushes Epic to merge them to main release so all smaller studios that do not have resources to do that on their own can benefit from it.
It’s kind of crazy because nowadays it’s actually hard to run Fortnite. It wasn’t too easy before, but since these “technological advances” you actually have to tweak the graphics a good bit to squeeze performance. A game like Fortnite should run perfectly, especially since it’s not graphically intense. Kinda sad how unoptimized the engine is because people consider it industry standard now.
in source 2 you can preview your scene with real-time ray tracing in the editor before baking the lighmaps, this makes the baking process far less tedious and still allows for static lighting
@@gibsson They planed to license it, but tools were rushed for HL:A, which resulted in a lot of spaghetti... S&box devs manage to get this version and are doing their own overlay. Nowadays there are some hints that tools are way more efficient to work with, so I guess that they are going to license Source 2 after "HL3". Also ID Tech is going to be more open for modding, by giving all tools used during Doom development.Idk if they are going to license it too.
A someone who has obsessed over animation and rendering techniques since I was a child, I gotta say, this channel is AMAZING. You're putting the spotlight in all the right places, and I love it! 👏
Oh wow very cool to see you here, I've been watching your Zelda videos for probably a decade now. Awesome to see people actually caring about the engine they use!
I don't understand how. I don't understand why. But whenever I put on a 2009-2013 game, which only has FXAA, the game just looks so sharp and nice. Nowadays TAA just makes games look like liquid diarrhea.
@@neilranson4185 I don't know I just put on GR Future Soldier and the AA is remarkably sharp at native 1080p. The only issue I see is the lower res textures. And yes, the lighting is visibly simpler but honestly it still looks good. Future Soldier was released in 2012, and btw I'm running the dx9 version rather than the dx11.
Someone let me know you mentioned my MXAO shader =) Great video and well researched. There are several things you might find interesting about my new MXAO versions. The version on the forums are really outdated. I'm not using Bayer specifically anymore, but the new pattern is very similar and has a few other properties I require. MXAO now uses visibility bitmasks, which is absolute state-of-the-art for SSAO and improves upon GTAO.
I'm constantly reminded that people like you, tirelessly slaving away are the reason we can enjoy this hobby at all. I gotta get my arse in gear and finish my own game engine.
People just see your run of the mill "Unreal engine graphics tech demo" and see it as a one stop shop for amazing looking games and the only engine worth using. It's massively frustrating hearing people tell certain companies should just switch to unreal engine because it'll somehow result in massively better games.
its nice to know I'm not crazy, and hear an actual dev explain this, it has seemed to me for a few years that lighting in games has not been getting better but still getting more noticeably demanding for years. i am a firm believer that good lighting can make or break a game, regardless of the texture or model quality.
When I said games run and look worse in recent years, people just told me to buy a new GPU. Turns out it's just sheer laziness and incompetence of developers.
Yup. Also sometimes when I play games then it noticably lags at certain area/condition, sometimes I just investigate and thought "Did they use X/Y/Z to optimize this problem?" when found the problem's consistent
You’re wrong they look better and run better over all. If you choose to focus on the negatives you will distort the truth. More games run at 60fps now than ever and have better image quality overall
@@neilranson4185 Wrong. Battlefield 1 from 2016 objectively looks better than 2042 from 2021. And it runs way better. I made a video on my channel showing Metro 2033 OG from 2010 that looks better than Stalker 2 that just came out.
The more i've read into these topics, and the more dumbfucks i've seen defending these decisions, the angrier i've gotten. So i don't blame him at all.
What we really need is for Godot to become more fleshed out for 3d. There are some cool upcoming realistic 3d games made in Godot, but you gotta put more work in to get those graphics out of the engine unlike unreal.
@@lucio-ohs8828I mean sure, but we need more capable 3D game engine that well optimize to fill the gap in the market Source 2 could be candidate for that, since the engine is less feature bloat than unreal and cater towards game making and not glorified CGI movie productions
@@lucio-ohs8828 I seriously doubt Godot will ever become mainstream in the AA and AAA space because its developers are obsessed with the engine being "minimalist". They believe if something can be a plugin it should be which means it lacks tons of necessary 3D features like a terrain system, level streaming, level design tools, vertex paint, complex animation systems, and the list goes on. Some of these exist as community made plugins but relying on third parties to fix gaping holes in your game engine is a pretty shoddy solution at best...
lol, i wish i was smart enough to understand all these techniques and the math behind them. for awhile when i played new modern games i thought i was just being the old man yelling at a cloud, and that the only reason i liked the graphics from 10ish years ago was because of nostalgia. it's nice to see there are good arguments behind my preference even if i personally can't articulate them
I'm a long UE user. I come from an Animation Background where UE and realtime methods is such a blessing for a rendering. but the first problem that we faced is ghosting. we can't have this blurry ghosting for renders. guess how UE handles that ? they give us Mult Accumulation Render. they basically just said "F U guys, just render your frames 32 or 64times more to get rid of the ghosting". Although its still cheaper compared to the traditional renderer this got offseted again by the amount of work that we need to do to just get traditional animation to get rendered in UE. Your Channel can give us hope that these ghosting and blurryness shouldn't exist in the first place. Thanks and I'm Subscribed 🔥🔥🔥
I've always wondered how Epic fixed the ghosting for renders, since they seem to be pushing for movies and other CG stuff. Turns out, they didn't, from what you're saying. And i'm not surprised, thay's the most Epic Games "solution" possible.
@@anonymouseovermouse1960 yes, a quick "movie render queue temporal sample count" would show it all. theres also a youtuber called 'William Faucher' that shows how it works th-cam.com/video/FxvF3zncClA/w-d-xo.html . almost all movies and vfx features used on UE relies heavily on temporals 😂
I only plan to use UE for some of my work. If I do a full CGI animation, I think I will refuse to use UE. The rendering problem of UE is still a problem. Although it will look gorgeous.
@@GeometryEX-hp9zs UE graphic wise was very good for CGI. its faster than any renderer today (of course with its hacks and cheats). but to set it up you actually have to dedicate more time to make compatible assets from models to rigging to animation that runs good on ue. the rendering is really fast but that fastness is got offset back by how tedious it is to setup the assets(context : fbx pipeline, coz abc is too heavy. and usd is a halfbaked mess). I am now already use UE4 n 5 to make animations for these past 4 years. more and more i can say we better off with blender 😂
@@AdamTechTips27 I plan to use Maya to make CGI animations. Unless I need to do some physical calculations or particle calculations, I will consider using UE. I still regard UE as a game development platform rather than a renderer. Blender is good in many aspects, but blender is not very convenient in some places. However, the effect of the cycle renderer is really realistic.
This is the first video, as far as I can remember that I had to pause to digest the information mentally as I kept running back all the technological progress made years ago and yet we're in this messy state - at the rate it was going I was thinking back then (almost a decade ago)we'd be at least True 8K by now. Well delivered in a clear and concise manner.
Same with CD Projekt. They had an amazing engine, but they switched to UE5 for future games... I guess the CEOs and managers ignorantly said "why spend money developing our own engine when EU5 exists". Can't wait for it to backfire when they release their next game looking worse and running worse than Cyberpunk 🤣
To be fair the engine already wasn't amazing in SS4. I think their main tech wizard had left and so the engine in SS4 was pretty undercooked and had serious (heh) performance problems. For them UE5 might have actually been an improvement... Though I still love SS4 and think it has some very pretty views.
Thinking about it now The Division is still one of the most visually impressive games I've played, crazy to think how terribly it would run if it was developed today
Fox engine internally was a mess and really hard to develop on afaik, but it also looked beautiful and had great performance, still I understand why they dropped it especially after losing most of the people who created it
@@Graceksteam I had a look and was unable to find anything, I guess those were just rumors I had heard then-- still upgrading would have been difficult and switching to ue5 especially during pre-launch hype would have seemed like the better decision for them at the time so it's "understandable"
@@sinelacico Yeah, sounds like you got 1-guy'd, my bro. One of the first things Kojima demonstrated pre-MGSV's release was how quickly and easily they could cook up an interactive scene with the FOX engine. It was also so darn well optized, that it ran at 720p/30fps on the 7th gen consoles (PS3 and X360), which translated to silky smooth 60fps at 1080p on early-2010s' mid-tier gaming PC, like my old i7 2600K + GTX 560ti 1GB.
Watching your videos I begin to understand quite a few things. Some weeks ago I played Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) for the very first time on my old OG Xbox One which lives in my girlfriend's living room. I was blown away how good it looks on a 1080p TV running on that old console. It looks even better than any AAA title I play on my Series X in 4K. It's pretty much a shame how the whole gaming industry went downhill in terms of graphics implementations and renderings.
Seriously, people who buy 1000$ GPUs somehow aren't able to understand that they are not the ones who will suffer from limitations. It's literally rich people telling the poor that they are not starving.
@@Unordinary-lg4yt Yep, and how many supportive comments are actually from developers and those working with the tools or in the industry? It seems to be mostly those that aren't actually all that well-informed about the technology and the realities of using it. And how often do Threat or these commenters actually offer solutions or alternatives that are viable? It's easy to say "this is bad," and harder to say "and here's why," and even harder still to evaluate things like "and here's how to fix it." Rage bait sells.
That's an appeal to authority. You don't have to be a chef to know if food taste like shit. He also has support from extremely respected and experienced members of the dev community. He is gaining support because he PROVES his point and is working to create solutions!
@@NeverIsALongTimeThat is not an appeal to authority. It's simply, a viewerbase of fake gamers with the intelligence of a rock who blame DEI on everything. A viewerbase with conspiracy theories about "big tech" communicating with Devs to make their games I optimized so GPUs can sell. Literally the dumbest thing I have heard tbh. People complaining that an 8 y/o GPU is struggling to run AAA games that sell by utilising technology which wasn't designed to run on OLD HARDWARE. It's like people forgot all about Crysis and how tesselation was useless on older hardware. All failures who couldn't make it in the industry are just crying.
reddit has gone downhill since 3 years ago, now it's full of retards in an echo chamber, you can't discuss, if you don't agree they delete and shadowban your posts
Seriously bro, you cant imagine how excited i am to see your videos. Ive been seeing these issues, ESPECIALLY the TAA issues, growing worse and it's baffling. Makes me feel crazy pointing it out and having everyone disagree with me, honestly felt defeated and like i just had to accept it. I have renewed hope, i really hope this leads to change cause it's night and day going to older games
I work in game dev. Since realtime dynamic global illumination became a regular thing (there were lots of flavours back in the day from approximate hybrid raytracing to nvidia's VXGI) I've said that we became so proficient at faking lighting that sometimes it can look better than raytraced or realtime GI solutions. It's all about the artists and what space they are given to develop a scene. There is a lot of lazy lighting around now because you can just enable a checkbox and it works without the hassle of baking. But out of the box solutions will always have issues with specific edge cases.
Yes... I watched those raytraced Doom videos and they.... suck. It just don't work if there is game designed to certain type of visualization and that is then raytraced. Artists need to take care how well things are visible. Purpose of graphics is that how game communicates to player, it is communication language. Maximum realism easily fails.
@@gruntaxeman3740 Basically all of these "old game but with raytracing" projects show complete lack of artistic vision and understanding of how to create atmosphere with lighting.
@@ThomasShatter Yeap... I think if someone want to remaster Doom with original assets, it should closely follow original how things get darker in distance and using sector light values as ambient value. Perhaps lightmapping to add _some_ low frequency detail to planar surfaces. Also, lightmaps can have color, some color tint light from slime etc. and assets can read color tint from lightmap. Textures may have slight parallel effect. Water/slime can be replaced with shaders that can use _some_ screen space reflection (because Doom camera has fixed tilt!) but just not overdo effect, underdoing instead. It can still move low fps like original. Oh, and one thing. Remastered version likely works best using 4:3 aspect ratio and 640x480 resolution. Why I like it to be work as this is that when Doom was released, screen sizes where 15" and scaling 320x200 to 55" looks like Tetris and is harder to human see other than boxes moving on screen so some details could be added and planar surfaces could look bald. Not too much, because it can break immersion, because details should be same time hidden and original art style should be respected. Increasing resolution from 320x200 to 960x720 is way much harder. It just can break immersion. There should not be too much contrast with high resolution rendering to low resolution assets, but if asset resolution is increased they can not reveal details too much. Increased fidelity can make them to look as moving cards. But raytracing and HD rendering... no way.
@@deadturret4049 you can still bake if you have a day/night cycle also if you have access to the lighting and shadow information from the shader pipeline and you store information with a base value you can interpolate to simulate it. But that's the point where it gets complicated and dynamic lighting fixes a lot of issues and solves some performance cost vs design time cost.
[Edit: It being less efficient than all other techniques in worldspace may not be entirely accurate. See my replies.] One thing to note about PoE 2's lighting solution. The paper states that the screenspace lighting solution is great for a game with a mostly static perspective such as isometric, however, you would need to use a world space method for something like a first-person shooter, which is much less efficient than current techniques and other techniques that were mentioned. I think its a great system but limited to only games that are side-scrolling or top-down.
I'm interested in real world test how it performs and its tradeoffs in worldspace. There are no direct comparisons sadly, as it might be better in some scenarios
@@damianabregba7476 I believe Sannikov did some real world tests but I could be wrong. You can see the paper for yourself and maybe try to implement the technique. th-cam.com/video/vlF1CX8X5Bc/w-d-xo.html I plan on trying to implement the screenspace solution for a project idea I have in the future, but not any time soon.
Wanted to post about POE2 myself. The shader talks are wonderful, and they optimize so well around the camera restraint and I hope to see it run well come Friday. So glad they have their own engine
@@Personaless Yeah, as a game dev who isn't really into that type of game, I'm considering trying it out just to see all of the neat tricks they use to make such an innovative game. It should run extremely well based on everything I've seen and read, it's basically free GI lol. Looking forward to it myself! Enjoy it when you do get to play!
There's a talk by the graphics guy who came up with that method, where he said that he made fully working prototype of a non-screenspace variant of that method and it worked great.
I mean, yeah. The modern generation is trading computer work for developer work and production budget rather than increased graphical quality and this is not a secret? Nanite and similar meshlet based rendering techniques are usually slower than meshes carefully modeled in multiple manual LODs to achieve proper polygon size at all distances. The existing fixed function pipelines are _insanely_ optimized... and actually if you're looking up "how do I use mesh shaders" that's exactly what all the developer talks will tell you - it's probably going to be slower except in specific scenarios. I lump nanite in with mesh shaders bcuz that's basically what it is, Epic's diy software mesh shader pipeline in software with a compute shader software renderer with some fancy automatic LOD spice. but... Raytracing and similar like lumen are _significantly_ slower than the previous methods like GI probes, baked lightmaps, etc, and while they can show improvements in light behavior and effects that are difficult to impossible to achieve otherwise, they exhibit obvious rendering artifacts. But... Motion capture and related technologies like motion matching show very realistic, natural motion, but lack the oomph and charm of animations made by skilled artists, being captured straight from life they fail to really make use of the twelve principles of animation for example. Real like life, but not _prettier_ than life like an artist can achieve, right? Look up videos of flight sim 2020 side by side with real pilots doing the exact same thing IRL - flight sim actually looks better. Reality is ugly, y'know? But... Node shader editors run by artists produce way, way inferior shader code to having real programmers write shader programs. Look at Doom 2016, five shaders for the entire game, runs like a dream, looks incredible? Letting artists make shaders with nodes produces very _literal_ spaghetti code, causes incurable shader compilation stutter (an Unreal staple!), and leads to crazy heavy millesecond killing fragment shaders. BUT... TBH it's largely a function of the current economic climate. For several years, we have been hearing repeatedly "such and such studio was completely shutdown" and "X studio layed off 5,000 developers" and "megacorp B purchased struggling game studio for cheap" at least a few dozen times. The entire game industry right now is primarily focused on one question: "how can we continue producing AAA games but spend less money and not fire everybody/sell out/go out of business" These are the answers, man. Nanite is slower than normal rendering with quality art assets... but when your art assets are absolute dogshit polygon soup, it performs relatively fantastically and not _that_ much slower than the good stuff. Which means companies can now use way cheaper models, trash meshes exported straight out of Z-brush or 3d scanned from real life and probably in a year or two prompted from 3D stable diffusion (eww) and tbh probably purchased from Epic themselves on Quixel. But Lumen and raytracing "just works" and doesn't take hours and a distributed computing cluster to rebake the lightmaps every time you move an object in the scene - that's orders of magnitude faster iteration times and that means less time and less money. You don't have to pay artists to place GI probes and reflection probes and tune parameters and test and retest the scene to make sure it looks right. But paying a stunt guy to run around in circles on a mocap stage for an hour is very, very fast, and very very, cheap, for very very "acceptable" results. But programmers are extremely expensive, and usually have to have a back and forth with the artists to understand what they're looking for... letting artists splat spaghetti nodes straight to player's screens themselves means the artists get what they want faster... and you only have to pay a starving artist's salary instead of a programmer. When they say UE5 is "better" what they actually mean is UE5 is _cheaper._ In fact, this is how Unreal has been going since long before UE5, nodes are very much a UE4 thing, right? Friggin blueprint scripting... ugh. Notice how one of the other headliner features is their huge scale procedural placement tech...? Unreal advertises itself as the best engine but everyone who actually knows knows that Unreal's main feature is actually that it's cheap. Every AAA studio on the planet has or had a way more advanced in house engine. If they're using Unreal, it's not because it's better, it's because the development effort to build and maintain the in house engine is extremely expensive. Unreal's real tagline is "good enough, cheap enough, and relatively less bugs" Case in point - CDPR. Cyberpunk, red engine - gorgeous, most advanced game of the decade, - buggy disaster, PC melter, almost put them out of business... next game is in Unreal. 343. Halo Infinite, "Slipspace" engine (actually rebranded bang! but don't mention it), beautiful, tech demo for Xbox Series... buggy mess, performance hog, keeps putting every Halo game in development hell - they're switching to Unreal too. Ubisoft - dude, everything in UE5 is something Ubisoft's engine did in 2014. Assassin's Creed Unity had meshlet culling before they were called meshlets, Ubisoft called them clusters. What does everyone know Ubisoft for? Gorgeous games, that are performance hogs and a buggy mess... Unreal has never been and will never be the most advanced engine. It is the good enough, cheap, ol' reliable, "idiot proof" option _pretending_ to be the most advanced engine. When given two options - "this produces vastly superior results but requires the user to be skilled" vs "the results are only ok but actually kind of suck... but even an absolute moron couldn't POSSIBLY mess it up", Unreal will always pick option 2. Because that is what they're selling, Unreal is AAA companies "get out of incompetence free card"
Since I have experience with shaders. I have to say that Unity and Unreal are definitely not the best shaders. Independently developed shaders are the best. Both Unity and Unreal have some uncontrollable error issues. This is obviously an optimization problem of the game engine itself. I only think that these two free game engines are only suitable for some jobs. But now game studios have stopped their independent game engine development. This is a very sad thing.
"Real like life, but not prettier than life like an artist can achieve, right?" This applies in general at the moment. Too much modelling, not enough hands-on crafting.
if you do a small tech demo with all the techniques you are aware and pitch that im sure you would gather even more attention this topic needs so much in modern game development
Best advice for developers - always have a low end machine for testing! And honestly, using low end hardware for development also helps. If unity or unreal lags while developing, nag them about it!
THIS. I once had an "honor" of working on a mobile game project, which absolutely lacked directing. They were developing it on Unity, but you know something was wrong when this game meant to run on PHONES lagged like a mofo on their high-end gaming/ development PCs! Just a quick peek under the hood explained why. Insanely high-poly 3D models, for characters and backdrops, clearly sculpted in Blender, all coated in 4K PBR textures!
@@GugureSux PBR is actually cheap, if it is done using one S3TC compressed diffusemap + one RGBA texture that hold 2 channel normal map and two other textures. And there is still two other textures to use on shadows, projected lighting, environment map, lightmap etc. because 4 textures don't seem to strain shader. But never draw triangle less than 10 screen pixels, never use higher than 2k textures on mobile. And 2k textures should hold everything on draw call, and repeating data in draw call should fit on GPU cache. Just calculating amount of bandwidth budget there is per frame, developer can make Raspberry Pi 5 running easily 720p@60fps.
Your channel provides objectivity on an unmatched level. Long-form journalism is dead, but you’re doing your damn best to keep the spirit of it alive! I will always watch your videos and support your mission.
Bro speaks out loud, what I felt for a long time. "Optimizations" that Devs do nowadays is just enabling Upscaling and call it a day, because "Muh modern games require modern Hardware".
Another thing to think about is, because everything tried to transition to differed-rendering pretty much ALL rendering techniques and shader APIs had to be completely remade from scratch to use differed-rendering. The "modern developer" is barely capable of making the most basic own code work, let alone the sheer herculean task of trying to re-create years of prior technological advances. The new generations of game engine developers don't have any "John Carmacks" to call their own...
This is the central issue. It's almost like the industry has gotten too large, too decentralized, and there isn't enough propper engineering talent to go around, and all these medium sized companies just don't bother trying anymore, and hedge their bets on UE5 thinking they don't need any software engineering expertise.
To be honest, its a bit of an universal engine. A century ago you could literally start an aircraft manufacturing company in your shed and make a competitive design on a napkin basically. Nowadays you have two gigantic companies and one of them was no longer even able to design a new plane from scratch anymore. It's almost impossible for any single studio to actually make a full blown game engine from scratch anymore, especially for some of the larger projects - it would take years of work for hundreds of developers. Of course...an argument could be made for a truly open source engine shared by all
I am incredibly happy to hear that you've acknowledged and gave light to Alexander Sannikov's breakthrough on cascade radiance lights. This technology really has to be considered due to incredibly cheap computational formula that makes GI result look objectively better to use than all the RT solutions within Unreal 5. I always adored the concept and the idea to use traditional dynamic lighting with probe manipulation technique in mind to avoid horrendous costs at default settings. Although I think Valve's Source 2, on which Half Life Alyx was made, needs to be introduced more to people from their GDC conferences demonstrating tech on lighting solutions, especially on weaker hardware that isn't a RTX 30 series minimum. Source 2's user experience with setting up indexed lights of many kinds, and bake all the dim lights, GI and fills to simulate that quality that everybody is trying to achieve via "computational power", when disk size is the answer, so long as you don't overcomplicate your scenes with Nanite meshes that rely on Lumen to light properly - optimization of assets really needs to come back with proper topologies, height and normal map bakes in both spaces.
I don't even care that much about TAA and its artefacts visually, but I do care that it's used as universal cover for sloppy unonoptimized techniques, and it's a real shame that there ARE solutions to most or all of the problems that it's trying to smear over, but it's ignored in favour of industry standard GPU abuse, in an extortionate GPU market no less. Keep up the great work, I hope what you guys do can make a difference
I care about it but mainly because it's on by default in UE5. A clean install of the engine, opening up the official Content Sample pack, and navigating to a map with a rotating coin is enough to see ghosting in action. It is unfortunate those settings are the default for an aspiring game developer using Unreal Engine, especially since it's not immediately obvious how to fix the problem.
Thank you so much that you are talking about the optimization issue in videogames. I am astoninshed that nowadays every videogame needs a NASA computer to even run. Even if you have the NASA computer some AAA title will run like shit. Players need to talk more about the optimization of games.
@@ORLY911far cry 2 didn’t have global illumination, it was forward rendered and only had basic lighting and CSM (maybe some bumpmaps and normal maps too?)
Thank you for bringing light to this. As a software developer it has become very clear that optimisation has take a backseat over the last few years. It almost feels like game devs benefit I'm some way by NOT doing optimisation passes (outside of time). An analysis of other engines (like bevy) in the future would be awesome. Cheers!
"It almost feels like game devs benefit in some way" It is not game devs, but game companies. It always comes from management, and the devs have no choice on the matter. Truth is there is little incentive to optimize, players continue buying unoptimized games, so why waste developer hours in optimization when you can just release early and start your next project?
@@nullvoid3545 It starts from modelling. It doesn't work that way that you model first and then optimize. Model your assets directly correct way. Godot do have indeed very fast renderer.
Thanks for bringing this to light. It needs to be talked about more. I always hated how bad and flat new games' lighting are compared to some older games. I hope these conversations can steer developers striving for better quality
While the UE5.5 volumetric clouds do have bad default settings that raise the performance cost, the clouds can be tweaked in 5.5 to run ~ .7 ms with minimal visual quality loss. So the point you make isn't entirely fair, I just think Epic needs to have more conservative cloud quality by default.
When I got my 5800X3D and 6950 XT I imagined I'd be playing elder scrolls 6 on these but seeing how starfield and UE5 games have turned out I'm not so optimistic lol
@@PaintsAreOpWait, I can't use a gtx 1080 to run starfield on max settings or cyberpunk with a ray tracing mod at 60+FPS? Time to blame DEI hires since I'm not smart at all.
@@Munshin I don't care about max settings or raytracing, what I'm most worried about is the atrociously bad CPU utilization and stuttering we're headed for. If you're fine paying $2k for a mid-tier experience GPU then be so but you're looking like an idiot here defending bad corporate practices.
Optimization is an essential area to focus for consumer happiness, but as usual, thats a small % of what goes into production, there are many constraints, especially time/budget, often the call is made for the faster/cheaper solution out of pressure/necessity. IMHO there has to be ways for optimization to be both praised by consumers to embolden devs to demand more budget, but also from the other end, ways that optimization can be easier to implement, so its more universally known & has more people working to streamline/standardize it. There's so many factors at play I fear the only real push will be some studios making the effort & snagging the early rewards, mainly because more hardware will get the best possible fidelity, thus will get far more sales & hype. Sometimes industry has to get a spanking like that before higher-up's will bother to adjust focus.
You mean DEI hires who couldn’t code in C++ to save their life and get labeled as the title “games developer” when they couldn’t develop their way out of a wet paper bag. They only know how to use UE5
Releasing flashy Unreal updates with major issues seems to be their new strategy. It is a little saddening honestly, because I genuinely enjoy the workflow of the engine.
While I do agree with some of the points in the video I also find it a bit funny and even ironic that while you are shitting on developers who want to just check a box to enable an effect you are simultaneously asking for this checkbox yourself. If you know simple solutions to all these problems, why not just develop an extension to Unreal that solves all of this and make it available on the market. I'm sure it would be very popular. The reality is that it is just not that simple. All solutions are approximations and have their upsides and downsides. Some games use flat shading successfully even today. That does not mean it is a good solution for eveyone. Ultimately it is up to the developer to pick the appropriate engine and tools for the project. If Nanite or Lumen is too resource intensive for your project then just dont use them. Nanite and Lumen are more geared toward the film and streaming media industry where they have been used very successfully. The problem with Anti-Aliasing is that we are not rendering things like we used to. We are no longer rendering every pixel as one stream of operations. Instead many different passes of depth, light and shadows, ambient occlusion, smoke and dust, material properties are rendered separately, sometimes even at different resolutions and then finally combined into a final rendered image. Using Anti-Aliasing on all those rendering passes would cause lots of artefacts because of the data they represent is not compatible with anti-aliasing. That is why Anti-Aliasing is primarily done as a post process (after combining the rendering passes into a final image) these days, like FXAA or TAA.
@@ThreatInteractive When you blame developers for poor choises in rendering tech I absolutely agree with you. I do not however agree that this can be blamed on Unreal, Unity or any other game engine for offering convenient ways of enabling tech that our computers can't handle. You need to gain a deeper understanding of rendering and where we came from to understand why we have our current problems. We used to not be able to have streetlights in games until deferred rendering was invented because before that we could have 8-16 light sources in total in any scene. This was because every light was processed for every pixel. With deferred rendering there was a separate light pass that rendered light as small geometries (small cones for street lights for example). This saved on light processing and pixel fill rate which was severly limited back then. But it also started the trend of poor anti-aliasing solutions. Before that Matrox had a card called Parhelia that could to 16x anti-aliasing which looked amazing. But alas, it was not compatible with modern rendering technologies and so it quickly became obsolete. Sometimes one technology is not compatible with another one and so we have to choose the most important one. Advanced lighting tech has killed anti-aliasing and sharp images.
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3. Message From Founder: November was a tough month due to losing a close loved one. These videos are extremely detailed and require a lot of work and this video was actually supposed to be much longer. At min 6:12 you can probably tell I’m speaking a lot slower than the rest of the video. This is because I had done around 6 hours of recording and it was probably far past 4AM. I actually have footage of myself passing out in front of the camera. At that point I decided to continue recording the script the following day. We also tried a different mic and we didn't like it. The next video which contains the cut content will have mixed audio quality. Thank you to our current supporters and I hope you learned something new from this video.
*4. We apologize for the typo at 2:06 reading "RND2" instead of "RDNA2" and the typo 5:32 reading "GTX 790" instead of "GTX 970".
Hopefully we won't have too many issues like that again for this video.
*5. Another typo was found at 4:28 reading "base 8th gen" instead of "base 9th gen".
*6. 9:33 Rough specular and radiance can look similar but they are different phenomenons. DDGI still lacks both.
*7. To clarify the math used here at 3:30. It's generalized math. Sometimes you only need 2x the power but you can find individual portions of recent pipelines that can scale exactly as described.
Either way, having both is impossible. 60fps is archivable without slime-like visuals and we've barely tapped into resolution upscaling potential.
*8. At 6:46 from left to right: OFF, SSAO, HBAO
It was supposed to have the name above each one.
*9. 0:09 Taraflop was written instead of "Teraflop" .
*10. Stay tuned
Yes, the audio quality has improved quite a bit. Sorry to hear about your loss. Also I see "RNDA2" is in the text around 2:06. Keep up the work!
@@ElectricNippleTorture Thank you for the support. Noting the typo now on the pinned comment.
@@ThreatInteractive Hey, a TA/RE with 10+ years of experience in mobile gamedev here.
7:50 One thing I need to note is that light probes are indeed a much cheaper alternative to LMs in some cases... but they're still not free. They still cost memory and, unlike LMs which after being loaded can reside in VRAM only, LPs in some implementations can eat up BOTH regular RAM and VRAM. So the LP density you've shown here is QUITE high for such a scene. Obviously, it would look nice with a per-fragment LP sampling. But in mobile gamedev this could be EASILY a LP budget for an entire scene (the whole level). Yep, it's for mobile, and PC/consoles have some headroom, but if you compare actual hardware of modern flagship phones to past-gen PS4 (still being the primary platform for most PS players), you'll see they're not that different anymore.
So even LPs aren't a silver bullet and you still need to use them "the smart way" and not just fill the space with them uniformely (which unfortunately contradicts with the "single click" culture you mentioned earlier). And even when used properly, LPs don't compete with LMs but complement them.
The sad reality is that you still need to use each tool where it suits the most. Whether you develop for mobiles or PS5 or PC with 4090 onboard, I still believe the best visuals can ONLY be achieved via a balanced combinations of all the lighting techniques, which include LPs, LMs, SHs/SGs and yes, some form of realtime GI (if your platform allows it) with post-processing AO and stuff. So disregarding/alienating one of them is equally as bad as it fully relying only on it.
And don’t even get me started on optimization at content level, which seems to be fully forgotten nowadays. MOST if not all lighting-related artifacts you mentioned (like light leaking) can easily be beaten with thoughtful content preparation. Like not relying on auto-unwrapping for LM UV-set and instead unwrapping it in such a way that there's a seam at such potentially problematic areas.
... But with all that being said, there's clearly a trend to light EVERYTHING fully dynamicaly by default (Starfield, anyone?). I can't tell if I agree with it, but it's the direction the industry seem to be going in rn. And if we keep going this direction, ALL of the mentioned techniques no longer apply, and Unreal's approach starts making sense. But I don't think our current hardware is ready for that. It seems more of a wishful thinking to me... and Fortnite-specific case extrapolated to the engine as a whole (I fully agree with you on that).
@@lex_darlog_fun The density was high but it was done that way to show the probes better.
As for checkmark workflow, the target would be automatically placed probes/environment information just sparse enough around static objects(as we stated is usually 70% of the scene) for dynamic indirect radiance calculations to work fast enough. The slide mentioned ray tracing dynamic objects (for occlusion or new bounce light info) but we might be able to use something a little faster like DF based occlusion/int based color injection.
@@ThreatInteractive 05:32 GTX 970 not GTX 790
Genuinely crazy how we have this unimaginable graphics power by standards from a decade ago, and yet consoles (even pcs in some cases) still struggle to produce a clear image at 60fps. Optimization is dead
im using unreal engine and i have so many problems to optimize. its a bloated mess while im also very good with UE and i can not imagine that the AAA studios, which are going to use UE soon are going to have a better performance than me.
Unreal Engine killed it?
It's not dead, it's just on life-support. Don't worry, as we approach the hard limits of silicon developers will have to start being more creative, and exercise more ingenuity, to do what the hardware won't be able to for them anymore... at least until we get off silicon and start using something like borophene or graphene or cupric oxide for semiconductors, but that's at least a decade off as far as I'm concerned. We'll see a sort of optimization renaissance in the meantime.
@@CharlesVanNoland silicon or graphene, this isn't a hardware problem we've seen 10 times weaker hardware do better, this is a developer/engine problem
And even if top-end PCs might be able to brute force through these shitty practices (except when they can't), it's insane that people now are so accepting of the idea that optimization isn't relevant to PCs because they can simply pay more money until they don't notice the problems. Even though they too would benefit from better optimization, gaining better performance and lower power draw.
All the cost is passed on to the consumer, and they'll continue to do it as long as idiots with more money than sense continue to eat it up and defend this behavior.
Less optimization = less money spend on developers
Less optimization = hotter hardware market
NVIDIA has always been in close partnership with Epic Games.
@@XenonG please stop with the wild unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, the engines suck, it's that simple, you don't have to make it more dramatic by it being a grand conspiracy.
edit: oh wow i didn't know i was in loony town, jesus you guys need medication.
@@ChristopherGray00 These are not "conspiracy" theories. Just use your two braincells for 5 minutes. These are economical advantages. And money making entities will absolutely abuse these advantages.
@@ChristopherGray00 I 'member UT2003/UT2004 with the NVIDIA "the way it's meant to be played" and the various press release of them announcing they are working together to "better integration and building the future" bull crap along the years.
@@ChristopherGray00 Though the relationship had soured a little a few years ago, as UE devs deprecated RTX style RT in their main branch in favor of their in house Lumen and NVIDIA offering their own fork of UE.
It's incredible to me how game developers manage to find ways to use up all of those cores, VRAM and RAM in new hardware to produce games that look worse or at best the same as offerings from 6 years ago while also running infinitely worse. All in the name of chasing the photorealism pony that gets further and further away as diminishing returns only continue to mount.
Youre spiting facts🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
We are now so 'photorealistic' that puddles of water in games have a perfect mirror finish reflection, I'm still looking IRL but still haven't found one that does that...I'm glad it runs the game at slideshow speed so I can enjoy it fully tho
@@CalgarGTX I actually am someone that is pretty wowed by RTGI and Ray Tracing effects in general, but you're point about ultra-reflective water is spot on. I hate how a lot of games implement ray tracing then just make EVERYTHING(let alone water) absurdly reflective. Hogwarts Legacy made every floor have a mirror level of reflection if you enabled RT, it looked so much worse than without RT...
Also, water does not always reflect! Most lakes/ponds/oceans have too much movement on the surface to reflect, but enable RT reflections and you'd never know that in most games...
It's not really so much an issue with the technology as it is art design, and developers wanting to really show off tech by turning it up to insane degrees...
@@CalgarGTX I have seen it, and it's amazing, but the way it happens in every puddle in game is unrealistic
And there were many other fast methods for GI that weren't used yet, such as Voxel GI, screen space GI combined with off-screen probes, panorama space GI, ...
Dang, you will not sleep until this industry cancer is cured. Mad props for the dedication, and I hope your team won't give up.
Thank you ElectricNippleTorture, very cool
👍
This guys is the only one where I turn my adblock off.
He won't sleep then. You'll keep buying new stuff
@@1lapmagic I only buy old stuff on GOG and Steam. Pirated STALKER 2 and it refuses to run on Windows 10 LTSC 2019, sadly.
"Runs fine on my rig" - Person with 4090 and standing order for the AIRTX5100 48GB 700W (as yet unrealeased)
Tbh, if you don't at LEAST have an RTX3090 your specs are outdated these days.
@@johnnyguitar8067 Just don't buy AAA garbage, problem solved
Don’t be poor
@@johnnyguitar8067 bait of excellent quality👍
bruh, I have a 4080 and I complain about performance
I paid a high-end price and this is what I'm getting? 1440p60fps, sometimes, maybe? In games that look worse than 5 years ago? Thank but no, thanks, I'll stick to older games that look great and run great, polar opposite to the modern ones
we spent 20+ year optimising lighting techniques to achieve a realistic and optimised look in our video games. Then we promptly threw it all away because we started having gpus capable of simulated the actual proccess of light.
This is exactly why I hate RT. Sure, it's neat, but it's just not worth the loss in framerate considering what's possible without it.
@@AlphaGarg its a fun gimmick but right now that's all it is: a gimmick
if it becomes affordable and runs good in like 10 years, THEN i'll be happy to say it's not a gimmick, but right now it's JUST a gimmick.
@@NebulatheZorua Not to mention that the only reason it's even remotely possible performance-wise is because physical parts of the newer GPUs were dedicted JUST to this tech. What world would we be in if instead of RT cores we got, say, 10x more compute cores, or more raster cores, or something actually useful like hardware acceleration for generating different types of noise. Probably a better one. Problem is, those wouldn't have sold as well, so we're stuck in the worst timeline :(
@@NebulatheZorua
A overpriced, and power consuming gimmick.
I swear these people are more the problem.
Partial simulated ray tracing. If you did full ray tracing like in blender... you'd get a frame every 20 seconds at 1080p
Valve's HL2 dev commentary made me appreciate their crazy dedication to optimization and supporting hardware. "Yes this game will run on DX7-DX9 and we're going to precompute billions of shader combos. We will distribute the computation of lighmaps across all office computers. We will design and fine tune each and every gameplay scenario to fit into our strict performance budget". And back then it was obvious that a frame would be rendered within 1 frame
To be fair the lightmap stuff was required - HL2 had a direct lineage from quake 2's map format and compilers, so with the scale of maps in Source they had to hack together the distributed compilation system. And because HLSL didn't have conditional operations they had to compile all the different varieties of shaders for it to even work back then
Even today in Deadlock where it's deferred and almost all lights on the main map are dynamic,it has lightmapping solely for baked indirects
And it runs pretty good today after optimizations that reduced the intensity of Distance Field stuff...
Black Mesa devs also made some miracles they have damn impressive dynamic lights and shadows on DX9 and source 1, Blue Shift mod for BM only made it even more cool looking shame that it runs way worse than the base game but once you add DXVK you get amazing performance with great and sharp visuals that none of new games can achieve without sacrificing image clarity. Titanfall 1 and 2 were also made on Source 1.
Really nice to meet you on this video
I have a great time with portal revolution
I remember a similar comment in HLA as well. They limited many of the flashlight missions because of perf and precomputed everything they could.
I swear MSGV's Fox engine was a gift from god itself. It runs with a buttery smooth 60fps in a fat PS4 and even a PS3 was able to run it at 30 frames. I'll never forgive konami for ditching it.
Playing that game in base PS4 at launch was a blessing. People say that the 30fps target is not that bad, but having 60fps made the game much more inmersive and enjoyable for me. A shame that it was not finished because it is still one of my favourite games (fuck Konami)
that's the upside of custom Engines. Kojima Games alsways look and run flawlesly. Death Stranding was also very well optimized and they made sure to properly use the Decima Engine and it runs much better then Horizon on PC.
Still if I even see MGS3 I'm baffled how well the graphics and style holds up. It's timeless and so will be MGSV.
fox engine also was great for the Pro Evolution Soccer Games too. too bad it was really time consuming to make a game on it to the point where konami just decided to hop on the unreal engine train
Japan has always had that magical ability to squeeze absurd amounts of program optimization out of relatively modest hardware.
@@Coconut-219 that's because they don't incentivize frivolous spending. Granted devs also get paid trash as a result but it keeps them realistic about the scope of their games which makes it really easy to optimize for. It's common sense that comes at the cost of very jaded workforce that only works there because of their honor culture that's still extremely prevalent today
I've often found myself puzzled by the increasing difficulty of running video games each year, despite the graphics not improving very much. Now I finally understand why this is happening.
The issue is crappy CPU perfomance when we have insanely fast mini gaming threadripper chips now.
@@saricubra2867 CPU isn't really the issue right now or GPU hardware, its down to developer's optimization. Threadripper CPU product line are for workstation workload not gaming. Its too slow in clockspeed to help with gaming performance and lacks L3 cache for higher IPC. Best CPU for gaming right now is X3D vertical stacked L3 Cache with X3D product line with 8 fast cores. As long as more X3D CPU gets develop the more improvement we can see in game performance.
Large amount of L3 cache allows the CPU to skip long length it needs to travel to loading up and storing data on the system RAM and instead load it up on the L3 cache thats connected right next to the CPU cores. That way CPU can handle off the instruction to the GPU to render the next frame. Most games that are cpu bias (cpu heavy games) like MMORPG, Simluator games, openworld sandbox games, racing games, and some FPS takes really good advantage of L3 cache on X3D CPU giving massive amount of performance increase with the same GPU.
You have to check which game engine the games are being run on, like UE5 or Snowdrop engine are known to be super high end hardware requirement. most games are being made in UE5 right now so gaming performance will be bad unless its game engine issues are fixed and game developers spend more time optimizing for performance over visuals (slapping on effects and passing on to consumer to brute force performance hit with high end hardware).
@@sparda9060 Nanite is pointless, why add trillions of polygons to a rock that will look like a pixel on our monitors?
UE5 is extremely bad for gaming. Source 2 is overlooked, CryEngine 5 is also amazing (the Nintendo Switch can run all Crysis games with ok perfomance and SVOGI lighting, similar lighting to path tracing).
@@saricubra2867 nanite is decent if they actually used it for objects and items that matter in the game. using it for dirt, rocks, and terrain textures is a wasted performance like you said.
I genuinely enjoy playing older games more and more. They're optimized, sharp, and smooth. And while the graphics aren't as advanced as today, i'll always prefer a sharp clean image quality with high smooth framerate over smeary stuttery unstable "modern" game image. It's impressive how it kind of feels like the gaming industry is actually regressing backwards in some aspects. I don't understand every single thing in your videos, but I think they're great and more people should see them. Great video
I recently started replaying Far Cry 4. It still looks stunning and I am able to do SMAA and downscale. Image looks crisp.
Exactly, same thing here. I can run older games at native 1440p +240fps high settings on my 360hz 1440p OLED and the image quality is superb compared to almost any modern games using TAA garbage and where you need frame generation to achieve anywhere near 240fps.
@@OzzianmanI loved FC3 back in the day. Am I better off playing FC4, 5 or 6 now? Which one is the better game?
I'm playing Black Mesa Blue shift mod and they use dynamic lights and shadows on ancient source engine using dx9! they use them very often and they look great Stalker trilogy is also a great example every object and npc can cast shadows when using your flashlight or environment lights.
Modern lazy devs keep lying to our ears that it can't be achieved since they are too damn spoiled and incompetent, one dev even said to me that they want more easy to use tools to make everything easier (automation) and create better graphics, but what kind of graphics will you get without optimization (they hate work) and smudged by muddy temporal AA?
It's a shame that practically all vets have retired or got chased out of the industry and now we are in a huge competency crisis, nvidia for sure love that idea since people now are forced to buy more expensive gpus to have playable framerate at native 1080p and above.
@@superior96 6 is total garbage avoid it at all cost it doesn't even feel like a FC game, FC4 and 5 are both great games but i felt like FC5 felt like a dlc not a mainline game i expected something more
I've been saying it for a long time. Gaming Graphics/Optimization peaked at around 2016. After that the bad optimized titles started to be more and more!
As for cascade lighting, I had already seen it before and in the case it was applied (like PoE) it looks exceptionally well
Definitely around 2014-2016 yeah. 2016's Battlefield 1 was probably peak. You go play that right now and it looks and runs better than anything released this year. Its actually absurd. I get 300 FPS in Battlefield 1 on my 4070 Super, 7800x3D build with no DLSS, then I hop onto Stalker 2 or Starfield or Last of Us Part 1 or Star Wars Jedi Survive or Dragon's Dogma 2 and I get between 40 and 80 FPS, with DLSS on. Its depressing. These games will never be fixed.
Ironically in an era of remasters and remakes, we need demasters and demakes. I'd LOVE if they took Stalker 2 and demastered it into a 2010s engine with lower fidelity. These games are simply unplayable as is. They make you ill looking at them.
@Leeches- yet the new titles just look alot better, but you are blind to it
Assetto Corsa with SOL still runs at like 100fps on a 1060 and honestly looks better than most modern games. It's actually impressive how everything just looks movie levels of overly colour corrected blurry noisy mess now.
@@stuntvist oh yes, people wont belive you but we who know what you are talking about totally agree :D there are videos of assetto corsa on youtube that could easily pass as real life footage
Exactly
For me Wolfenstein The New Collosus and Ghost Recon Wildlands was the moment i thought "okay, graphics improvement is definitely possible after that level of fidelity, but it's not necessary".
I've not changed my mind still
5:19 This is extremely important for the conversation, thanks you for visualizing it.
Huge chunk of large studios’ “next big title” games have this oddly specific unnatural look to them due to lazy development lighting solution shortcuts.
My casual gamer friends (who got into gaming only recently), had no idea what I meant when I was ranting about “glowy” look of many big titles, especially when you don’t set the graphics quality to the ultra or whatever.
I hate that look of them and I hate that even with those sacrifices many of those games still end up running like crap. It’s obvious to me that it’s never just a stylistic design choice but it seems way too normalized these days.
Surprisingly not a lot of likes for such a known creator
And goated comment too
Huh? Jameskii?! You also care about graphics development?!
hi james
a few weeks ago i watched a 3 hour siggraph talk about how a studio took like 3 years to develop the clouds they wanted. midway in the talk he says "and finally we can reach our target fps of 30 on a 9th gen console" and i stopped the video and was just like what in the fuck is this. these studios are satisfied with 30 fps in 2024 i almost lost my shit
I thought you were about to say "3 hour siggraph talk about how a studio took like 3 years to develop the clouds they wanted"
just to say
"and with TAA(a smeary variant) acts as the final resolve step" as I find this to be the most common lol.
Shouldn't it be 60FPS or 120FPS? 30FPS is just the basis.
@@GeometryEX-hp9zs30fps is no basis. 60fps is the basis. 30fps is the bare minimum.
@@fr0ntb0t 30 fps should be the target performance on an OLDER console not current gen
30 fps is easily playable, sometimes i'm happy with even 15-20 fps
the problem is that nowdays a new figure has emerged, i call it the tutorial bro, until about 5 years ago, all the people who made tutorials for game development had at least some type of experience actually making games, but now the market is so saturated that there are people who only make tutorials as their job, but have never actually worked on a real project, i watched unreal sensei on 5.5 the other day, and he said that with megalights and nanite we have bypassed all the major limitations of computer graphics, and then stalker 2 cannot even run at 30 fps
100% agree the tutorial scene.
@@ThreatInteractive I had to onboard my partner and finding tutorials was a nightmare of "what the heck?" and the two times I thought I'd found something decent, a few hours later I'd hear "Uh.. I don't quite understand what's going on here, mind having a look?" and I'd be looking at the most backwards amalgam of half-eaten gluesticks - by design - and just thinking "oh no.."
.-. Wound up taking 2 hours to just do an impromptu seminar of sorts. It's incredible just how badly the people handling the first experiences that many have with a feature or software understand what they're doing and how poorly they understand how to teach.
The UE6 proposed vision of "Just publish your game to Fortnite" ala Roblox has me very concerned about the odds of Unreal Engine ever getting anything optimized for static scenes added, let alone optimized for today's hardware.
I looked at hardware trends and based on what I saw next gen should perform roughly on par with what would have been the cancelled 4090 Ti and if that's true Unreal will have no reason to optimize anything - my 3090 handles Unreal much better than your 3060 does - the image looks gorgeous at native 1440P but runs at a cruel 30 frames per second. The 4090 is roughly 44.279% faster than my 3090 and your 3060 is roughly 63.901% the speed of my 3090 and is roughly on par with the PS5 / XSX. I'm uncertain as to what the 4090 Ti's performance would have looked like compared to the 4090, but suffice to say that if we're looking at even a 10% uplift over the 4090 for the 4090 Ti that would have been 1.1x the 4090 performance which comes out to be 1.587x the performance of my 3090, and if it was an uplift of 15% that's 1.6592, an uplift of 20% would be 1.7313x
For reference, the 1080 v 1080 Ti was 19.51% and the 3090 v 3090 Ti was 11%, 4090 Ti was rumored to be 10 - 20% faster and use the full chip - even the 4090 wasn't using the entire chip - but rumors aren't stats.
That would take my scene from 30FPS to:
10%: 47.61 FPS
15%: 49.776 FPS
20%: 51.939 FPS
And mind you, this is my "Ultra" preset - it's not "let's just troll the hardware for 2% better quality at a 30% performance regression" or terrible optimization.. it's the most reasonable choices for the best image quality, even if my current hardware can't run it. It's also from tests in a development build so that's worth mentioning as well. I can increase performance to about 120fps on my hardware at native res by disabling things that really make no reasonable sense to have enabled outside of a screenshot / replay system on my hardware, and achieving 180 - 200 fps with lumen still enabled has thus far been possible but required some pretty specific settings and tradeoffs to arrive to an image that isn't too dissimilar from the standard expected experience that I'd like for players to have.
For me personally, the problem is actually Chaos Physics performance more than anything - I get why they're doing it, but replacing PhysX this early was a bit extreme imo - it really hurts performance for moving characters, even with Mover 2.0 which is a bit of an improvement over CMC already. I have no real expectation that players will have any specific quality of CPU due to the "CPU doesn't affect FPS" advice that still gets thrown around a bit. For moving characters the difference between Unity w/ ECMS (a character movement asset) seems to be 31.57% or 62.3157% (CMC / Mover) - I didn't do a comparison between UE5 5.5 and UE4 for the CMC, so a direct PhysX vs Chaos wasn't done. But to be clear, ECMS is 3.1667 times or 1.6 times faster than CMC or Mover 2.0 respectively, and while that may be due to differences that would reduce the quality of CMC if implemented, I honestly don't see it based on my usage of the three.
And yes, this is moving characters, but physics applies to projectiles, cloth, animation, destruction, and so on - and leaving performance on the table to this extent is something that should be a tradeoff presented to the public, not axed with the launch of UE5. They have a lot of work to do, and while I'm making my game in Unreal Engine, I will not hesitate to port to Unity once my game is in a solid state prior to launch - I'm using Unreal because I want HDRP levels of quality with the ability to potentially port to mobile and with the production tools that UE provides. But with the content already produced and the systems all hooked up, porting a working system and set of assets isn't nearly as difficult as optimizing Unreal and I'd much rather have to port to HDRP to launch on standard hardware and then have to port to URP to launch on mobile.. when compared to the joy of optimizing for Unreal's shortcomings.
But for now I'm looking ahead and it seems highly likely that next gen consoles can run my game at 1080P with the ultra preset and 1440P upscaled at the ultra preset and honestly I'm not unaffected by the sight of many games which sold extremely well in spite of the performance issues - UE inflicted or otherwise. If Unity 7 were here this would be a different conversation. If Unity were half the engine Unreal is when it comes to production tools provided by the engine then this would be a different conversation.
But today? Today Unity has a lot of cleanup to do and no genuine ETA for when Unity 7 happens.
I have more faith that you'll release stuff to fix up UE5 than I do faith that Unity will release Unity 7 before next gen launches, and once next gen launches they'll be much harder pressed to compete against Unreal given the better hardware making up for everything. That was always Epic's bet. The hardware this gen was expected to be better from their perspective and so they just buckled down and decided to optimize and let next gen's consoles sort it out. But from my experience that's how UE4 went - it never felt ready until it suddenly seemed pretty ready and then they threw it out for UE5. :/
We'll see how it all goes. Many of us, myself included, would happy to give you a capped rev share or flat $ in exchange for work that results in substantial performance improvements at similar image quality. I don't want to write the kind of blank check that an uncapped rev share is, but many of us also aren't at all aware as to what sales will look like so a flat $ amount might undervalue your work out of concerns / "oh but it's $150 that's a lot to spend right now" or whatever.
One major thing for me is that Lumen with Hit Tracing and the bounces turned up can, with few visible and recognizable "wait that's not right" 's during gameplay, accurately show many translucent and refractive objects overlapping one another in the scene - basically, I'm aware that it isn't what I'd get out of an offline pathtracer, but it puts a big smile on my face because it's close enough. The unfortunate thing is the noise that I can't seem to get rid of with any settings changes - or even reduce - but thankfully it just kind of looks like sparkles / glitter so I get to just sort of go "welp, it's a feature" for now :x
@@ThreatInteractive Oh, forgot - the 3060 is about 38.51% the speed of the 15% uplift theoretical 4090 Ti
fucking hate them guys... because unreal is free they can do whatever as a "TH-cam EXPERT" the wrong way. most just like the sound of there own voice and forget to give information not that it's any good anyway. It's one of the main reasons I switched to Houdini for development, as more of the community know there shit. and your problems get solved much quicker.
I remember years ago following a tutorial for baked lighting in Unity. After going through it I couldn't figure out why my lighting would either take hours to bake or not at all until a dev friend of mine pointed out that my texels shouldn't be 200 to 400 as shown in the tutorial but in the 10 to 30 range
Crysis 3 and BF1 run on the modern equivalent of a hot potato, and yet they completely stomp 99% of modern games in both visuals and tech department. Modern gaming is a joke.
I'd like to add also Witcher 3 and Talos Principle 1 to that,
While not the best at optimisation, it did run well and look good
Meanwhile TP2 used and just announced Witcher 4 is to use UE5
Agreed, Battlefield 1 looks WAY better than Stalker 2 but can run 1000% faster?
and battlefront 1 on ps4 looks awesome and have better graphics than a actual games and is a 9 years old game wtf
You guys are literally blind
I've been playing battlefield V and crysis 3 on my laptop, plugged into an external 4k 160hz HDR monitor. Its GPU is "only" an RX 7700S. Yet the games run buttery smooth with excellent visual fidelity.
As a computer engineer this is the shit I wanna see in my feed
As a god of the universe i agree
@@Atomic-toons00 no you arent lol
@@Atomic-toons00 As a professional thingimajigger I agree
You have proof of he isn't?
As someone who studied UE5 for a year through a gaming 3D artist course, the engine has great stuff, but it feels like it prioritizes looks over any form of optimization. Many of what they taught us were visibly very heavy to perform, but were quickly dismissed with "doesn't matter, Lumen/Nanite will take care of that".
We once had to make a forest environment we downloaded assets from quixel bridge. They were beautiful, but... 10GB for a dozen trees? 30GB for a pack of bushes and grass? Yes, there were several quality stages, but even then, no wonder games nowadays occupy 100GB.
It felt to me like development convenience nowadays is making many games being developed with the idea that the hardware will just bruteforce the horrendously unoptimized scene. Which unfortunately you can often see with lots of games making use of asset flipping. Nothing wrong with buying assets to speed up development, but can you at least make sure your game doesn't require a 3080 to run at 30FPS...?
"It runs well on my 4090"
Bro I just managed to get a 1660s this year (gifted by someone) and unreal appears again with even worse performance games, but ooh look how good they look 😇
I can pretty much appreciate any game unless it's made on unreal, seriously.
The crazy part is that Lumen and Nanite are contributing to performance issues and don't actually fix anything.
What's crazy is that GPUs have not been improving much recently, you can't exploit overly powerful hardware IF IT DOESN'T EXIST. Right now it's mostly Nvidia that makes the most powerful consumer GPUs and it's a monopoly, they can use abusive pricing, and the performance per dollar metric is just not improving, the only reason you can get a powerful Nvidia GPU is because you payed way too much for it. Not everybody is rich, even in first world countries. And that lowers how many copies you sell. Games for idiots, made by idiots.
@@ShuckleII paid
50 dollars they're in cahoots with graphics card manufacturers
I like the way you present numbers and data in big letters, much cleaner than loads of benchmark graphs with convoluted extensive naming schemes and small numbers with the actual data. One can tell that you are knowledgeable about important details in the dev pipeline, nothing feels forced or out of frame - and instead it teaches you some new thing.
I love this guy, fuck TAA and never stop calling this shit out
A-fkn-men!
I mean, TAA is already in GTAV on PS3.
It's just modern TAA written completely different from PS3 and PS4 generation
@@ClayWheeler pure TAA was added only on enhanced PS5/XSX edition, PS3/PS4 are using FXAA
@@sebastianx708pl TAA means Temporal Anti Aliasing which already existed since 2008 but it went through countless changes
is TAA really the problem? because the way i see it unreal engine is the real problem
i remember playing battlefield 1 on a 1050ti with no issues and that game looked great. at this point it is obvious to me that all the mainstream games/engines are intentionally bloated to sell new hardware.
It's unbelievable that game was released 8 years ago...AND IT RAN SO WELL on hardware of that time.
Still looks amazing apart from some low res textures.
Graphics peaked in 2015-2017 after that everything went downhill fast.
@@Dregomz02 As silly as that sounds, it's actually true. Even though things like path traced lighting itself looks excellent, it's spoiled by the blurry, smeary TAA mess that encompasses all of AAA gaming today.
BF1 looks better than BF2042 while running in much older hardware.
I have a strong feeling that Nvidia has a finger on this. But of course fanboys will deny it.
This man is fighting the war I've been serving in for years! Keep it up man, this needs to be common knowledge for consumers.
I've got enthusiast level hardware (Ryzen 9800X3D and an RTX4080). I've also got the self-awareness to acknowledge that this level of hardware should not be the current baseline in 2024.
wait you mean a 9800x3d shouldn't be struggling on stalker 2? (jokes)
Running Blender on my gaming laptop (RTX 4060) absolutely blows me away. Compared to what I had a decade ago, I’ve got a literal supercomputer that I casually toss in my backpack. And it’s not even high end hardware today.
@@Lauren_C I have an RTX 4060 Ti and it's simply amazing
Then I look at UE5 games... lowest settings use 4gb VRAM, not even funny, really?
I was literally still running an archaic i7-2600K + GTX 1060 6GB desktop PC roughly 6 months ago.
Most video games and apps, and I mean an overwhelming majority, ran just fine at 1080p 60fps, without any sort of upscalers, framegen, or other post-Corona era UE5 smoke and mirrors. Only the very recent, overpriced Unreal 5 slop have given me trouble, even after upgrading my entire PC to a 5th gen Ryzen 7 3D + 12GB RTX card.
With optimizations like these, games can look way better. It's not just about the graphical techniques looking better, but when they run faster, you can play at higher FPS and resolutions, vastly increasing image quality even in high-end hardware.
What's crazy is that GPUs have not been improving much recently, you can't exploit overly powerful hardware if it doesn't exist. Right now it's mostly Nvidia that makes the most powerful consumer GPUs and it's a monopoly, they can use abusive pricing, and the performance per dollar metric is just not improving, the only reason you can get a powerful Nvidia GPU is because you payed way too much for it. Not everybody is rich, even in first world countries.
UE5 = unoptimized engine 5
Stutter Engine 5
UE 5 FPS
@@dingickso4098 b-b-b-but my framegen+dlss+nvidia reflex!!!
UE5 = Unreal that this Engine can barely reach 5 fps on the lowest settings.
Unoptimized, because it is.
When the word "based" comes to mind, I think of Threat Interactive.
it does feel to me sometimes that a balance between good graphics and smoothness hit its peak in doom 2016 and eternal
Pretty much every Id Software game is known for being well optimized
Bout 2014 to 2018 was the peak.
There was also Star wars battlefront which ran at a perfectly stable 60 on high on my 970 and looks about the same or better than every AAA game released since
@@Nate_M_PCMR except Rage
Any idtech based game engine (almost) ran perfectly on last gen hardware too. Source 1 and 2 or I.W engine are well known one.
UE5 has done unimaginable damage to the gaming industry within few short years.
It all started in Unreal 4, when became a easy engine to individuals make some good looking scam games. Most game companies seen how easy it is to use Unreal, are now going in the same path fast. Next The witcher and Cyberpunk will be made with Unreal, they said it already.
It's doing us a favor by being a AAA quarantine zone, making it easy to spot bad games!
The UE engine might be part of the issue, but all this bullshit started thanks to Nvidia, and their raytracing implementations. Ever since then ghosting effects, blurry presentations are even more present then before, and all of that for the modest price of half of your frames, what a joke.
it all started with the buzzword "next-gen" graphics marketing
@@SL4PSH0CK the tv watchers are the problem.
Game Studios are helping NVIDIA line their pockets by continuing to push "more advanced" content to require consumers to purchase GPUs more frequently. That's NVIDIAs new business model.
Yeah that how tech works. Old thing gets old new thing does new stuff.
You do realise that NVIDIA aren't the only GPU manufacturers I mean U console guys should know lol haha
@@funkyskunk8122 yeah their market share is only 88%, like no way they are main profiteers here
@@funkyskunk8122no u dumb bot he meant they're the ones pushing stuff like RT which in turn ruins everything, it wasnt AMD that did it
@@funkyskunk8122Yeah, the Nvidia conspiracy starts to fall apart when you factor in the console space. While PC-exclusive developers stand to gain from being biased towards Nvidia’s hardware, developers who focus target the AMD-powered consoles only stand to lose from their games performing poorly on those platforms. And then there’s Nintendo developers with their underpowered Nvidia-based hardware, who also only stand to lose from Nvidia’s performance chewing habit.
Dude, we were screwed as soon as DLSS and FSR came out.
Upscalers have been the biggest mistake in gaming history
They were supposed to make raytracing possible. Instead, they are used by Devs who have absolutely no idea how to write code at all. Guys like Carmack would be embarrassed by what game devs have devolved into.
@@HappyChap8 DEI induced competency crisis
They were developed to have good performance when using high resolutions like 8K or ray tracing + a better alternative than TAA, they were never meant to be mandatory at anything less than 4K/8K or Ray tracing
@@Skazzy3YT They were supposed to be a plus, not a need
The UE5 shadow in STALKER2 is hurting my eyes.
Not to mention severe ghosting on foliage/grass, i really hate that this is gonna be the industry standard when we have cleaner image quality from Ps4 era.
@@tomthomas3499 i agree. i think epic makes UE5 like this because it brings the max money from 3 different areas: fortnite, film&TV industry and architecture&interior design. every UE5 game demo looks like a film trailer with heavy color-grading preset. but human eyes have much better luminosity range (kind of HDR) than any current camera.
@@tomthomas3499 It's cause the devs use only the old UE 5.1 version that doesn't have among other things Nanite foliage. If the game was made in 5.4 with Nanite landscapes and all other things that are missing in the old 5.1 version Stalker 2 would look and run way better.
@@parker4447 Look better perhaps, run better i really doubt that since nanites itself add more cost on gpu performance.
Same thing in Wukong, i was shocked how bad shadows are.
I`m happy im not the only one who noticed that game graphics kinda peaked a little while back, The Division 1 was in my opinion the pinnacle of clarity and graphics details...
Good times😢 I miss that game
This is weird timing, because last week I was talking about Unity's adaptive light probes & how UE needs another realistic lighting system than just Lumen, because right now its sort of all or nothing which forces developers to use full dynamic RTGI even when they don't need it just because the alternatives aren't competent enough.
Epic Games infuriates me at times. What are they doing? I know their engineers are intelligent, but they also make really bad decisions at times which I'm struggling with understanding.
No market incentive is the problem(for Epic & especially not Nvidia).
It's already the most voted feedback but there is not monetary gain.
3rd parties like CDPR that could have influenced a better direction don't recognize the issue either.
@@ThreatInteractive CDPR didn't care that their last major title released in a sorry state on unfitting hardware running like a total slog, and they won't care again next time. By the time the next game is ready, the next generation of hardware will be around the corner to rescue them and make things at least vaguely palatable.
@@ThreatInteractive This isn't directly to do with the topic of this video (btw excellent, watching video multiple times i can learn a lot) but what are you feelings on the path traced projects that Nvidia and some developers collaborate on? Do you like them being around as a sort of niche/tech demo and high end option? Or do you think that they have an adverse affect on the mindset of developers and consumes in regards to what should be the ultimate focus of lighting techniques (more likely to want a fully dynamic system like Lumen, even when not needed etc), Also what do you think of the approach that Rockstar seems to betaking with GTA 6 (we don't know in depth, but a ray traced GI, ray traced reflections with ssr overlay, and shadow maps)?
Because their main focus is Fortnite, UnrealEngine for others is less important for them, thus features they make are mainly focused for Fortnite usecases. Thats why it SO cheap.
Ue4 before fortnite were more generic and fitted more projects, now because of reasons a lot of developers when choosing engine they just go with UE5, even if it dont fit their needs or they cant make it fit their needs (eg writing Your own lightning solution). I mean, why? If UE5 dont fit You need you can go proprietary, or other engine (unfortunately for us there is not many good options, but that's mostly not Epic`s fault).
@@Gorion103well Cry Engine and Id Tech And Source Engine is the last solution for diverse art style projects : )
I can't wait for the RTX 5000 series to come out and for all these problems to continue to get worse. Any complaints about performance or image quality will be drowned out by people mindlessly spouting "JuSt BuY a NeW gPu".
I will be a 5090, not to play new games, but to play 2014 to 2018 games at 4K 240fps 🤪
I've heard it so many times: "What are you poor?" "3rd worlders like you should buy consoles" it's almost like Nvidia are hiring those shills to make people ashamed and guilty trip them to buy new overly expensive GPUs.
I didn't expect for gaming to became as expensive as some luxurious brands of the clothing or accessories, you need maintream audience to buy your games once they are gone since they can't afford anything but the mid end you as the dev team may go bankrupt from lack of sales to cover your budget and you always want to double your money not to barely break even.
"just don't be poor"
What's crazy is that GPUs have not been improving much recently, you can't exploit overly powerful hardware if it doesn't exist. Right now it's mostly Nvidia that makes the most powerful consumer GPUs and it's a monopoly, they can use abusive pricing, and the performance per dollar metric is just not improving, the only reason you can get a powerful Nvidia GPU is because you payed way too much for it. Not everybody is rich, even in first world countries.
Plus the GPU’s are gonna be way more expensive. Not only is nvidia guaranteed to make them more expensive like they did with the 40 series, Trump’s tariffs are going to make them even more expensive than nvidia’s base price hike.
It's shocking how few games use their own engine, but the ones that do always seem to run way better. The industry needs to do better, it's all about fleecing us for cash and doing it again and again at this point instead of creating games for them to be enjoyed.
I wish Guerrilla Games could license out their superb engine, I hate how every big dev studio is deciding to use Unreal, the market is starting to become a duopoly
Honestly it would probably end up like CryEngine. Decima is not a generalized engine like Unreal. Supporting an engine for your own studio is different than supporting an engine for the public.
We just have to treasure the few in-house engines that're still decent. Too bad Rockstar lost all their good personel, because Rage is a genuine good engine for open world games. 🫤
@@MLWJ1993 What happened with Rockstar losing people? Isn't the RAGE team still around?
@MichaelPohoreski Pretty much all the talented people we know from GTA V & before quit. So GTA VI might actually be the dystopian Rockstar game with no soul at all to make money first and foremost instead of being a good game.
We'll see I suppose, but I've got low expectations.
@@MLWJ1993 Talented people get replaced with talented people, especially at a studio like Rockstar, btw there's still a bunch of OG's there, its still the same Art director from all the previous games, Sam Houser is still the president of Rockstar and the people responsible for the engine have nothing to do with the people that left. Most of the people that worked on Red Dead 2 would be working on GTA6. Studios don't just die because people leave, they die because of bad practises and policies.
This state of Unreal is an absolute heartbreak... I love working in this engine, the amount of tools it provides for it's users in compare to competition engines but the way it is developed around Fortnite needs it's mindboggling... It's soo inefficient in how it works... Kind of reminds me that Epic always pushed for dynamic lighting since UE3 as first iteration of it didn't had Lightmass.
I hope this initiative and many studios that switched to Unreal will develop better solutions or implement alternatives that are at least hybrid ones and it somehow pushes Epic to merge them to main release so all smaller studios that do not have resources to do that on their own can benefit from it.
It’s kind of crazy because nowadays it’s actually hard to run Fortnite. It wasn’t too easy before, but since these “technological advances” you actually have to tweak the graphics a good bit to squeeze performance. A game like Fortnite should run perfectly, especially since it’s not graphically intense. Kinda sad how unoptimized the engine is because people consider it industry standard now.
People still chasing Arkham Knight with it's modified UE3.
NFS 2015 also looks incredible. Burnout Paradise still looks incredible and that's good ol' Renderware!
@@JackFoxtrotEDM both those games look good because its dark at night game
@@erisium6988 BP is during the day.
in source 2 you can preview your scene with real-time ray tracing in the editor before baking the lighmaps, this makes the baking process far less tedious and still allows for static lighting
The point is to find a dynamic lighting solution. We already know baked lighting exist.
and majority of lights in Deadlock are dynamic,but indirect is baked
+ Distance Fields
I kinda hope that source 2 would be open license like unreal
Yeah, actually we need more competition in the engine space
@@gibsson They planed to license it, but tools were rushed for HL:A, which resulted in a lot of spaghetti... S&box devs manage to get this version and are doing their own overlay.
Nowadays there are some hints that tools are way more efficient to work with, so I guess that they are going to license Source 2 after "HL3".
Also ID Tech is going to be more open for modding, by giving all tools used during Doom development.Idk if they are going to license it too.
@@zbigniew2628 you forgot to mention that facepunch and valve are working to make it possible to publish s&box games on steam
A someone who has obsessed over animation and rendering techniques since I was a child, I gotta say, this channel is AMAZING. You're putting the spotlight in all the right places, and I love it! 👏
This man is exposing the big-GPU industry.
100%
i have actually good connection to dana cowley from epic games, maybe i can send her this video just to get some notice
Please do
Do it pls
Please do, wonder if they pour the resources to fix it.... or just call it a day to the investors..
Oh wow very cool to see you here, I've been watching your Zelda videos for probably a decade now. Awesome to see people actually caring about the engine they use!
Please do⁴
I don't understand how. I don't understand why. But whenever I put on a 2009-2013 game, which only has FXAA, the game just looks so sharp and nice. Nowadays TAA just makes games look like liquid diarrhea.
Less things to draw, more simplistic lighting.
Old games are terribly aliased and low res. Over all modern games are less aliased and higher res. These are objective facts
@@neilranson4185 I don't know I just put on GR Future Soldier and the AA is remarkably sharp at native 1080p. The only issue I see is the lower res textures. And yes, the lighting is visibly simpler but honestly it still looks good. Future Soldier was released in 2012, and btw I'm running the dx9 version rather than the dx11.
@ I’m not talking about 1 game my comment was games over all are sharper and less aliased now than they were many years ago
@ don’t mix up subjective taste with objective truth. My point as nothing to do with the what you personally find better or worse
You're literally the hero we need
Someone let me know you mentioned my MXAO shader =) Great video and well researched.
There are several things you might find interesting about my new MXAO versions. The version on the forums are really outdated. I'm not using Bayer specifically anymore, but the new pattern is very similar and has a few other properties I require. MXAO now uses visibility bitmasks, which is absolute state-of-the-art for SSAO and improves upon GTAO.
The man the myth the fucking LEGEND
Thank you! We are honored to have such a supportive comment from you!
How did you do your screen space GI system?
I'm constantly reminded that people like you, tirelessly slaving away are the reason we can enjoy this hobby at all.
I gotta get my arse in gear and finish my own game engine.
Unreal is just a "fortnite engine" at this point.
Sad but 100% true.
People just see your run of the mill "Unreal engine graphics tech demo" and see it as a one stop shop for amazing looking games and the only engine worth using.
It's massively frustrating hearing people tell certain companies should just switch to unreal engine because it'll somehow result in massively better games.
"Unreal Stutter 5 FPS"
And even Fortnight has shader compilation stutter.
@@George-um2vc Traversal and shader Stutter. Fortnite performance is far worse than it should be with Lumen. VSM and Nanite nail the coffin for it.
its nice to know I'm not crazy, and hear an actual dev explain this, it has seemed to me for a few years that lighting in games has not been getting better but still getting more noticeably demanding for years.
i am a firm believer that good lighting can make or break a game, regardless of the texture or model quality.
When I said games run and look worse in recent years, people just told me to buy a new GPU. Turns out it's just sheer laziness and incompetence of developers.
Yup. Also sometimes when I play games then it noticably lags at certain area/condition, sometimes I just investigate and thought "Did they use X/Y/Z to optimize this problem?" when found the problem's consistent
I mean.. many do not look worse, but the performance for those visuals its indeed way worse than it should
You’re wrong they look better and run better over all. If you choose to focus on the negatives you will distort the truth. More games run at 60fps now than ever and have better image quality overall
@@neilranson4185 Wrong. Battlefield 1 from 2016 objectively looks better than 2042 from 2021. And it runs way better. I made a video on my channel showing Metro 2033 OG from 2010 that looks better than Stalker 2 that just came out.
@@FordHoard wrong, you failed to understand my comment. Reread and then I maybe able to respond as you have no point as it stands
I love how you sound more and more upset at this XD.
i mean... it's completly understandable and justified. thx for the great videos!
The more i've read into these topics, and the more dumbfucks i've seen defending these decisions, the angrier i've gotten. So i don't blame him at all.
So impressed by how well informed these videos are! Great job!
Pray that valve would license source 2 like epic did with unreal
We need more competition in the engine space to be honest
What we really need is for Godot to become more fleshed out for 3d. There are some cool upcoming realistic 3d games made in Godot, but you gotta put more work in to get those graphics out of the engine unlike unreal.
@@lucio-ohs8828 godot 3d still sucks but at least its vulkan because fuck microsoft.
@@lucio-ohs8828I mean sure, but we need more capable 3D game engine that well optimize to fill the gap in the market
Source 2 could be candidate for that, since the engine is less feature bloat than unreal and cater towards game making and not glorified CGI movie productions
@@lucio-ohs8828 I seriously doubt Godot will ever become mainstream in the AA and AAA space because its developers are obsessed with the engine being "minimalist". They believe if something can be a plugin it should be which means it lacks tons of necessary 3D features like a terrain system, level streaming, level design tools, vertex paint, complex animation systems, and the list goes on.
Some of these exist as community made plugins but relying on third parties to fix gaping holes in your game engine is a pretty shoddy solution at best...
If Valve really wants to dominate the VR space they should license the engine
Forgot how gorgeous the division was for the time.
AC Unity also looks gorgeus and it's freaking 10 years old now.
And even back then it got criticized for being downgraded from their E3 previews, much like Watch Dogs.
@@Wasdniakand rightfully so
One of the last great games from Ubisoft imho.
lol, i wish i was smart enough to understand all these techniques and the math behind them. for awhile when i played new modern games i thought i was just being the old man yelling at a cloud, and that the only reason i liked the graphics from 10ish years ago was because of nostalgia. it's nice to see there are good arguments behind my preference even if i personally can't articulate them
I'm a long UE user. I come from an Animation Background where UE and realtime methods is such a blessing for a rendering. but the first problem that we faced is ghosting. we can't have this blurry ghosting for renders. guess how UE handles that ? they give us Mult Accumulation Render. they basically just said "F U guys, just render your frames 32 or 64times more to get rid of the ghosting".
Although its still cheaper compared to the traditional renderer this got offseted again by the amount of work that we need to do to just get traditional animation to get rendered in UE.
Your Channel can give us hope that these ghosting and blurryness shouldn't exist in the first place. Thanks and I'm Subscribed 🔥🔥🔥
I've always wondered how Epic fixed the ghosting for renders, since they seem to be pushing for movies and other CG stuff. Turns out, they didn't, from what you're saying. And i'm not surprised, thay's the most Epic Games "solution" possible.
@@anonymouseovermouse1960 yes, a quick "movie render queue temporal sample count" would show it all. theres also a youtuber called 'William Faucher' that shows how it works th-cam.com/video/FxvF3zncClA/w-d-xo.html . almost all movies and vfx features used on UE relies heavily on temporals 😂
I only plan to use UE for some of my work. If I do a full CGI animation, I think I will refuse to use UE. The rendering problem of UE is still a problem. Although it will look gorgeous.
@@GeometryEX-hp9zs UE graphic wise was very good for CGI. its faster than any renderer today (of course with its hacks and cheats). but to set it up you actually have to dedicate more time to make compatible assets from models to rigging to animation that runs good on ue. the rendering is really fast but that fastness is got offset back by how tedious it is to setup the assets(context : fbx pipeline, coz abc is too heavy. and usd is a halfbaked mess).
I am now already use UE4 n 5 to make animations for these past 4 years. more and more i can say we better off with blender 😂
@@AdamTechTips27 I plan to use Maya to make CGI animations. Unless I need to do some physical calculations or particle calculations, I will consider using UE. I still regard UE as a game development platform rather than a renderer. Blender is good in many aspects, but blender is not very convenient in some places. However, the effect of the cycle renderer is really realistic.
A threat interactive video? Im instantly clicking even though i dont understand 90% of what this guy is talking about
Lol
same actually
the anger fuels me
Sigh, me too 😂
Make games great again. Nevermind we need a better protest slogan.
This is the first video, as far as I can remember that I had to pause to digest the information mentally as I kept running back all the technological progress made years ago and yet we're in this messy state - at the rate it was going I was thinking back then (almost a decade ago)we'd be at least True 8K by now. Well delivered in a clear and concise manner.
That 3d radiance cascade demo is so satisfying to watch, i hope it works in full size worlds and catches on
I think its made by path of exile dev
It's such a cool technique. I really hope it's expanded upon and used more.
@@mirukuteea are you sure they use 3d radiance cascades or are you mixing it up with something else. I thought cascade fields are newer than DL2
@@cvarc3736 if that's the case, it's just win after win for them. :o
When Croteam retired the amazing Serious Engine in exchange for UE5 for Talos Principle 2, I cried.
Same with CD Projekt. They had an amazing engine, but they switched to UE5 for future games...
I guess the CEOs and managers ignorantly said "why spend money developing our own engine when EU5 exists". Can't wait for it to backfire when they release their next game looking worse and running worse than Cyberpunk 🤣
To be fair the engine already wasn't amazing in SS4. I think their main tech wizard had left and so the engine in SS4 was pretty undercooked and had serious (heh) performance problems. For them UE5 might have actually been an improvement... Though I still love SS4 and think it has some very pretty views.
@@markosz22 i bet also a bunch of the deves that actually understood their engine left after the cyberpunk 2077 debacle
Dammmm i almost forget serious sam you reminded dammmm nostalogia : )
@@markosz22 how can something run worse than first day cyberpunk
Thinking about it now The Division is still one of the most visually impressive games I've played, crazy to think how terribly it would run if it was developed today
Protect this man and spread his words. Complacency is Extinction.
100%!!!
Metal Gear Solid Delta not being in the Fox Engine is heartbreaking.
That's what you get when you fire all your engineers and spend the next 10 years making mobile games and pachinko machines
Fox engine internally was a mess and really hard to develop on afaik, but it also looked beautiful and had great performance, still I understand why they dropped it especially after losing most of the people who created it
@@sinelacico Source please? I'd like to learn more
@@Graceksteam I had a look and was unable to find anything, I guess those were just rumors I had heard then-- still upgrading would have been difficult and switching to ue5 especially during pre-launch hype would have seemed like the better decision for them at the time so it's "understandable"
@@sinelacico Yeah, sounds like you got 1-guy'd, my bro. One of the first things Kojima demonstrated pre-MGSV's release was how quickly and easily they could cook up an interactive scene with the FOX engine. It was also so darn well optized, that it ran at 720p/30fps on the 7th gen consoles (PS3 and X360), which translated to silky smooth 60fps at 1080p on early-2010s' mid-tier gaming PC, like my old i7 2600K + GTX 560ti 1GB.
Watching your videos I begin to understand quite a few things. Some weeks ago I played Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) for the very first time on my old OG Xbox One which lives in my girlfriend's living room. I was blown away how good it looks on a 1080p TV running on that old console. It looks even better than any AAA title I play on my Series X in 4K. It's pretty much a shame how the whole gaming industry went downhill in terms of graphics implementations and renderings.
the "you are incredibly irrelevant to this conversation" hit so hard lol
Seriously, people who buy 1000$ GPUs somehow aren't able to understand that they are not the ones who will suffer from limitations.
It's literally rich people telling the poor that they are not starving.
getting sick of nerd redditors claiming that "you don't know what you're talking about" while failing to explain how you are. great content!
In what sub? The UE sub? People that are actually developers/artists might give pushback because they’re actually involved in the process.
@@Unordinary-lg4yt Yep, and how many supportive comments are actually from developers and those working with the tools or in the industry? It seems to be mostly those that aren't actually all that well-informed about the technology and the realities of using it. And how often do Threat or these commenters actually offer solutions or alternatives that are viable? It's easy to say "this is bad," and harder to say "and here's why," and even harder still to evaluate things like "and here's how to fix it." Rage bait sells.
That's an appeal to authority. You don't have to be a chef to know if food taste like shit. He also has support from extremely respected and experienced members of the dev community. He is gaining support because he PROVES his point and is working to create solutions!
@@NeverIsALongTimeThat is not an appeal to authority. It's simply, a viewerbase of fake gamers with the intelligence of a rock who blame DEI on everything. A viewerbase with conspiracy theories about "big tech" communicating with Devs to make their games I optimized so GPUs can sell. Literally the dumbest thing I have heard tbh. People complaining that an 8 y/o GPU is struggling to run AAA games that sell by utilising technology which wasn't designed to run on OLD HARDWARE. It's like people forgot all about Crysis and how tesselation was useless on older hardware. All failures who couldn't make it in the industry are just crying.
reddit has gone downhill since 3 years ago, now it's full of retards in an echo chamber, you can't discuss, if you don't agree they delete and shadowban your posts
Seriously bro, you cant imagine how excited i am to see your videos. Ive been seeing these issues, ESPECIALLY the TAA issues, growing worse and it's baffling. Makes me feel crazy pointing it out and having everyone disagree with me, honestly felt defeated and like i just had to accept it. I have renewed hope, i really hope this leads to change cause it's night and day going to older games
Damn dude you should be going to conferences and raise awareness about these issues
lmao, you think senior engineers are not aware of that?
Well, they're not educating anyone about it or doing ANYTHING about it are they?! This channel is!
They don't care because they have a DEI list they hire off of instead of competence.
Superb video.
Gamers on PC are getting rinsed so hard for component upgrades.
I work in game dev. Since realtime dynamic global illumination became a regular thing (there were lots of flavours back in the day from approximate hybrid raytracing to nvidia's VXGI) I've said that we became so proficient at faking lighting that sometimes it can look better than raytraced or realtime GI solutions. It's all about the artists and what space they are given to develop a scene.
There is a lot of lazy lighting around now because you can just enable a checkbox and it works without the hassle of baking. But out of the box solutions will always have issues with specific edge cases.
Yes... I watched those raytraced Doom videos and they.... suck. It just don't work if there is game designed to certain type of visualization and that is then raytraced. Artists need to take care how well things are visible. Purpose of graphics is that how game communicates to player, it is communication language. Maximum realism easily fails.
@@gruntaxeman3740 Basically all of these "old game but with raytracing" projects show complete lack of artistic vision and understanding of how to create atmosphere with lighting.
@@ThomasShatter
Yeap... I think if someone want to remaster Doom with original assets, it should closely follow original how things get darker in distance and using sector light values as ambient value. Perhaps lightmapping to add _some_ low frequency detail to planar surfaces. Also, lightmaps can have color, some color tint light from slime etc. and assets can read color tint from lightmap. Textures may have slight parallel effect.
Water/slime can be replaced with shaders that can use _some_ screen space reflection (because Doom camera has fixed tilt!) but just not overdo effect, underdoing instead. It can still move low fps like original. Oh, and one thing. Remastered version likely works best using 4:3 aspect ratio and 640x480 resolution.
Why I like it to be work as this is that when Doom was released, screen sizes where 15" and scaling 320x200 to 55" looks like Tetris and is harder to human see other than boxes moving on screen so some details could be added and planar surfaces could look bald. Not too much, because it can break immersion, because details should be same time hidden and original art style should be respected.
Increasing resolution from 320x200 to 960x720 is way much harder. It just can break immersion. There should not be too much contrast with high resolution rendering to low resolution assets, but if asset resolution is increased they can not reveal details too much. Increased fidelity can make them to look as moving cards.
But raytracing and HD rendering... no way.
I get so annoyed by that. If you don't have a day night cycle, games should be baking their lights. It looks so much better.
@@deadturret4049 you can still bake if you have a day/night cycle also if you have access to the lighting and shadow information from the shader pipeline and you store information with a base value you can interpolate to simulate it. But that's the point where it gets complicated and dynamic lighting fixes a lot of issues and solves some performance cost vs design time cost.
[Edit: It being less efficient than all other techniques in worldspace may not be entirely accurate. See my replies.]
One thing to note about PoE 2's lighting solution. The paper states that the screenspace lighting solution is great for a game with a mostly static perspective such as isometric, however, you would need to use a world space method for something like a first-person shooter, which is much less efficient than current techniques and other techniques that were mentioned. I think its a great system but limited to only games that are side-scrolling or top-down.
I'm interested in real world test how it performs and its tradeoffs in worldspace.
There are no direct comparisons sadly, as it might be better in some scenarios
@@damianabregba7476 I believe Sannikov did some real world tests but I could be wrong. You can see the paper for yourself and maybe try to implement the technique. th-cam.com/video/vlF1CX8X5Bc/w-d-xo.html
I plan on trying to implement the screenspace solution for a project idea I have in the future, but not any time soon.
Wanted to post about POE2 myself. The shader talks are wonderful, and they optimize so well around the camera restraint and I hope to see it run well come Friday. So glad they have their own engine
@@Personaless Yeah, as a game dev who isn't really into that type of game, I'm considering trying it out just to see all of the neat tricks they use to make such an innovative game. It should run extremely well based on everything I've seen and read, it's basically free GI lol. Looking forward to it myself! Enjoy it when you do get to play!
There's a talk by the graphics guy who came up with that method, where he said that he made fully working prototype of a non-screenspace variant of that method and it worked great.
This boy will go far and I'm here for it! 👍
I mean, yeah. The modern generation is trading computer work for developer work and production budget rather than increased graphical quality and this is not a secret?
Nanite and similar meshlet based rendering techniques are usually slower than meshes carefully modeled in multiple manual LODs to achieve proper polygon size at all distances. The existing fixed function pipelines are _insanely_ optimized... and actually if you're looking up "how do I use mesh shaders" that's exactly what all the developer talks will tell you - it's probably going to be slower except in specific scenarios. I lump nanite in with mesh shaders bcuz that's basically what it is, Epic's diy software mesh shader pipeline in software with a compute shader software renderer with some fancy automatic LOD spice. but...
Raytracing and similar like lumen are _significantly_ slower than the previous methods like GI probes, baked lightmaps, etc, and while they can show improvements in light behavior and effects that are difficult to impossible to achieve otherwise, they exhibit obvious rendering artifacts. But...
Motion capture and related technologies like motion matching show very realistic, natural motion, but lack the oomph and charm of animations made by skilled artists, being captured straight from life they fail to really make use of the twelve principles of animation for example. Real like life, but not _prettier_ than life like an artist can achieve, right? Look up videos of flight sim 2020 side by side with real pilots doing the exact same thing IRL - flight sim actually looks better. Reality is ugly, y'know? But...
Node shader editors run by artists produce way, way inferior shader code to having real programmers write shader programs. Look at Doom 2016, five shaders for the entire game, runs like a dream, looks incredible? Letting artists make shaders with nodes produces very _literal_ spaghetti code, causes incurable shader compilation stutter (an Unreal staple!), and leads to crazy heavy millesecond killing fragment shaders. BUT...
TBH it's largely a function of the current economic climate. For several years, we have been hearing repeatedly "such and such studio was completely shutdown" and "X studio layed off 5,000 developers" and "megacorp B purchased struggling game studio for cheap" at least a few dozen times. The entire game industry right now is primarily focused on one question: "how can we continue producing AAA games but spend less money and not fire everybody/sell out/go out of business"
These are the answers, man. Nanite is slower than normal rendering with quality art assets... but when your art assets are absolute dogshit polygon soup, it performs relatively fantastically and not _that_ much slower than the good stuff. Which means companies can now use way cheaper models, trash meshes exported straight out of Z-brush or 3d scanned from real life and probably in a year or two prompted from 3D stable diffusion (eww) and tbh probably purchased from Epic themselves on Quixel.
But Lumen and raytracing "just works" and doesn't take hours and a distributed computing cluster to rebake the lightmaps every time you move an object in the scene - that's orders of magnitude faster iteration times and that means less time and less money. You don't have to pay artists to place GI probes and reflection probes and tune parameters and test and retest the scene to make sure it looks right.
But paying a stunt guy to run around in circles on a mocap stage for an hour is very, very fast, and very very, cheap, for very very "acceptable" results.
But programmers are extremely expensive, and usually have to have a back and forth with the artists to understand what they're looking for... letting artists splat spaghetti nodes straight to player's screens themselves means the artists get what they want faster... and you only have to pay a starving artist's salary instead of a programmer.
When they say UE5 is "better" what they actually mean is UE5 is _cheaper._ In fact, this is how Unreal has been going since long before UE5, nodes are very much a UE4 thing, right? Friggin blueprint scripting... ugh. Notice how one of the other headliner features is their huge scale procedural placement tech...?
Unreal advertises itself as the best engine but everyone who actually knows knows that Unreal's main feature is actually that it's cheap. Every AAA studio on the planet has or had a way more advanced in house engine. If they're using Unreal, it's not because it's better, it's because the development effort to build and maintain the in house engine is extremely expensive. Unreal's real tagline is "good enough, cheap enough, and relatively less bugs" Case in point - CDPR. Cyberpunk, red engine - gorgeous, most advanced game of the decade, - buggy disaster, PC melter, almost put them out of business... next game is in Unreal. 343. Halo Infinite, "Slipspace" engine (actually rebranded bang! but don't mention it), beautiful, tech demo for Xbox Series... buggy mess, performance hog, keeps putting every Halo game in development hell - they're switching to Unreal too. Ubisoft - dude, everything in UE5 is something Ubisoft's engine did in 2014. Assassin's Creed Unity had meshlet culling before they were called meshlets, Ubisoft called them clusters. What does everyone know Ubisoft for? Gorgeous games, that are performance hogs and a buggy mess...
Unreal has never been and will never be the most advanced engine. It is the good enough, cheap, ol' reliable, "idiot proof" option _pretending_ to be the most advanced engine. When given two options - "this produces vastly superior results but requires the user to be skilled" vs "the results are only ok but actually kind of suck... but even an absolute moron couldn't POSSIBLY mess it up", Unreal will always pick option 2. Because that is what they're selling, Unreal is AAA companies "get out of incompetence free card"
Since I have experience with shaders. I have to say that Unity and Unreal are definitely not the best shaders. Independently developed shaders are the best. Both Unity and Unreal have some uncontrollable error issues. This is obviously an optimization problem of the game engine itself. I only think that these two free game engines are only suitable for some jobs. But now game studios have stopped their independent game engine development. This is a very sad thing.
Amen to that. Less home made engines equals less innovations in the industry. UE5 being adopted by everyone hide a software extinction.
"Real like life, but not prettier than life like an artist can achieve, right?"
This applies in general at the moment. Too much modelling, not enough hands-on crafting.
if you do a small tech demo with all the techniques you are aware and pitch that im sure you would gather even more attention this topic needs so much in modern game development
512, 1GB ,2GB ,4GB VRAM requirement was the holy grail era of games for me
Best advice for developers - always have a low end machine for testing!
And honestly, using low end hardware for development also helps.
If unity or unreal lags while developing, nag them about it!
It also saves development costs in a way...😅😅
@@0rdyin time costs more than a couple of machines
@@simpson6700 It was just a pun...
THIS. I once had an "honor" of working on a mobile game project, which absolutely lacked directing.
They were developing it on Unity, but you know something was wrong when this game meant to run on PHONES lagged like a mofo on their high-end gaming/ development PCs!
Just a quick peek under the hood explained why. Insanely high-poly 3D models, for characters and backdrops, clearly sculpted in Blender, all coated in 4K PBR textures!
@@GugureSux
PBR is actually cheap, if it is done using one S3TC compressed diffusemap + one RGBA texture that hold 2 channel normal map and two other textures. And there is still two other textures to use on shadows, projected lighting, environment map, lightmap etc. because 4 textures don't seem to strain shader.
But never draw triangle less than 10 screen pixels, never use higher than 2k textures on mobile. And 2k textures should hold everything on draw call, and repeating data in draw call should fit on GPU cache.
Just calculating amount of bandwidth budget there is per frame, developer can make Raspberry Pi 5 running easily 720p@60fps.
Your channel provides objectivity on an unmatched level. Long-form journalism is dead, but you’re doing your damn best to keep the spirit of it alive! I will always watch your videos and support your mission.
Bro speaks out loud, what I felt for a long time.
"Optimizations" that Devs do nowadays is just enabling Upscaling and call it a day, because "Muh modern games require modern Hardware".
You've validated so many of my arguments online you have no idea. I knew shit didnt feel right in UE5 games but I didnt have the words for this.
Another thing to think about is, because everything tried to transition to differed-rendering pretty much ALL rendering techniques and shader APIs had to be completely remade from scratch to use differed-rendering.
The "modern developer" is barely capable of making the most basic own code work, let alone the sheer herculean task of trying to re-create years of prior technological advances. The new generations of game engine developers don't have any "John Carmacks" to call their own...
This is the central issue. It's almost like the industry has gotten too large, too decentralized, and there isn't enough propper engineering talent to go around, and all these medium sized companies just don't bother trying anymore, and hedge their bets on UE5 thinking they don't need any software engineering expertise.
To be honest, its a bit of an universal engine. A century ago you could literally start an aircraft manufacturing company in your shed and make a competitive design on a napkin basically. Nowadays you have two gigantic companies and one of them was no longer even able to design a new plane from scratch anymore. It's almost impossible for any single studio to actually make a full blown game engine from scratch anymore, especially for some of the larger projects - it would take years of work for hundreds of developers. Of course...an argument could be made for a truly open source engine shared by all
Well done video, Good explanation and good learning material .
I am incredibly happy to hear that you've acknowledged and gave light to Alexander Sannikov's breakthrough on cascade radiance lights. This technology really has to be considered due to incredibly cheap computational formula that makes GI result look objectively better to use than all the RT solutions within Unreal 5. I always adored the concept and the idea to use traditional dynamic lighting with probe manipulation technique in mind to avoid horrendous costs at default settings.
Although I think Valve's Source 2, on which Half Life Alyx was made, needs to be introduced more to people from their GDC conferences demonstrating tech on lighting solutions, especially on weaker hardware that isn't a RTX 30 series minimum. Source 2's user experience with setting up indexed lights of many kinds, and bake all the dim lights, GI and fills to simulate that quality that everybody is trying to achieve via "computational power", when disk size is the answer, so long as you don't overcomplicate your scenes with Nanite meshes that rely on Lumen to light properly - optimization of assets really needs to come back with proper topologies, height and normal map bakes in both spaces.
Get this guy to 1 Million subs already so the publishers and ceos get pressured into fixing their games
SHARE SHARE SHARE!
I love your vids man. You're a true nerd, no bullshit, just trying to put this stuff out there to get traction and some well needed change.
2:24 I'm starting to see why 1080p 60 with upscaling and frame-gen is a thing.
I don't even care that much about TAA and its artefacts visually, but I do care that it's used as universal cover for sloppy unonoptimized techniques, and it's a real shame that there ARE solutions to most or all of the problems that it's trying to smear over, but it's ignored in favour of industry standard GPU abuse, in an extortionate GPU market no less. Keep up the great work, I hope what you guys do can make a difference
I care about it but mainly because it's on by default in UE5. A clean install of the engine, opening up the official Content Sample pack, and navigating to a map with a rotating coin is enough to see ghosting in action. It is unfortunate those settings are the default for an aspiring game developer using Unreal Engine, especially since it's not immediately obvious how to fix the problem.
Thank you so much that you are talking about the optimization issue in videogames. I am astoninshed that nowadays every videogame needs a NASA computer to even run. Even if you have the NASA computer some AAA title will run like shit. Players need to talk more about the optimization of games.
Fun fact:
Division's baked global illumination method originated from Far Cry 3. It has been used in most Ubisoft Montreal titles since 2011.
Was it not in Far Cry 2/original Dunia? Since that game also had day/night cycle and some lighting tricks.
@@ORLY911far cry 2 didn’t have global illumination, it was forward rendered and only had basic lighting and CSM (maybe some bumpmaps and normal maps too?)
@@ORLY911 AFAIK it was from Far Cry 3. Far Cry 2 might(or might not) have an earlier version.
Thank you for bringing light to this. As a software developer it has become very clear that optimisation has take a backseat over the last few years. It almost feels like game devs benefit I'm some way by NOT doing optimisation passes (outside of time).
An analysis of other engines (like bevy) in the future would be awesome.
Cheers!
"It almost feels like game devs benefit in some way"
It is not game devs, but game companies. It always comes from management, and the devs have no choice on the matter.
Truth is there is little incentive to optimize, players continue buying unoptimized games, so why waste developer hours in optimization when you can just release early and start your next project?
@MarcusBuer that's who I was talking about...
@@nullvoid3545
It starts from modelling. It doesn't work that way that you model first and then optimize. Model your assets directly correct way.
Godot do have indeed very fast renderer.
Thanks for bringing this to light. It needs to be talked about more. I always hated how bad and flat new games' lighting are compared to some older games. I hope these conversations can steer developers striving for better quality
While the UE5.5 volumetric clouds do have bad default settings that raise the performance cost, the clouds can be tweaked in 5.5 to run ~ .7 ms with minimal visual quality loss. So the point you make isn't entirely fair, I just think Epic needs to have more conservative cloud quality by default.
When I got my 5800X3D and 6950 XT I imagined I'd be playing elder scrolls 6 on these but seeing how starfield and UE5 games have turned out I'm not so optimistic lol
I mean you want to use 2022 CPU and GPU to run 2035 game...
That's what happens when management only wants to hire mentally ill people and drive out anyone competent.
@@PaintsAreOp LOL, yeah, after starfield, i don't see a elder scrolls 6 coming out in the next 5 years
@@PaintsAreOpWait, I can't use a gtx 1080 to run starfield on max settings or cyberpunk with a ray tracing mod at 60+FPS? Time to blame DEI hires since I'm not smart at all.
@@Munshin I don't care about max settings or raytracing, what I'm most worried about is the atrociously bad CPU utilization and stuttering we're headed for.
If you're fine paying $2k for a mid-tier experience GPU then be so but you're looking like an idiot here defending bad corporate practices.
Not just lighting, but also physics interactions.
I'm glad there's someone exposing all this ugly technological bloat
Bloat that wasn't needed, CD Project Red's engine is kicking UE5's butt massively.
Optimization is an essential area to focus for consumer happiness, but as usual, thats a small % of what goes into production, there are many constraints, especially time/budget, often the call is made for the faster/cheaper solution out of pressure/necessity. IMHO there has to be ways for optimization to be both praised by consumers to embolden devs to demand more budget, but also from the other end, ways that optimization can be easier to implement, so its more universally known & has more people working to streamline/standardize it.
There's so many factors at play I fear the only real push will be some studios making the effort & snagging the early rewards, mainly because more hardware will get the best possible fidelity, thus will get far more sales & hype. Sometimes industry has to get a spanking like that before higher-up's will bother to adjust focus.
PC gaming market has become too big to tolerate with this bullshit.
As per usual, loving your new vid release.
Wanted to point out a typo to help, 9:52 chapter title.
this is also a side effect of veterans getting chased out of AAA and unskilled workers replacing them.
You mean DEI hires who couldn’t code in C++ to save their life and get labeled as the title “games developer” when they couldn’t develop their way out of a wet paper bag. They only know how to use UE5
Releasing flashy Unreal updates with major issues seems to be their new strategy. It is a little saddening honestly, because I genuinely enjoy the workflow of the engine.
Leaving my comment for support!
+1
Keep it up dude. You're voice is louder than others and you might end up being the one to fix this spiral.
this man must be protected at all costs...Hes calling out the code monkeys that call themselves game or graphic dev
Just pre-liking this video because this needs to resonate more in our industry!
While I do agree with some of the points in the video I also find it a bit funny and even ironic that while you are shitting on developers who want to just check a box to enable an effect you are simultaneously asking for this checkbox yourself.
If you know simple solutions to all these problems, why not just develop an extension to Unreal that solves all of this and make it available on the market. I'm sure it would be very popular.
The reality is that it is just not that simple. All solutions are approximations and have their upsides and downsides. Some games use flat shading successfully even today. That does not mean it is a good solution for eveyone.
Ultimately it is up to the developer to pick the appropriate engine and tools for the project. If Nanite or Lumen is too resource intensive for your project then just dont use them. Nanite and Lumen are more geared toward the film and streaming media industry where they have been used very successfully.
The problem with Anti-Aliasing is that we are not rendering things like we used to. We are no longer rendering every pixel as one stream of operations. Instead many different passes of depth, light and shadows, ambient occlusion, smoke and dust, material properties are rendered separately, sometimes even at different resolutions and then finally combined into a final rendered image. Using Anti-Aliasing on all those rendering passes would cause lots of artefacts because of the data they represent is not compatible with anti-aliasing. That is why Anti-Aliasing is primarily done as a post process (after combining the rendering passes into a final image) these days, like FXAA or TAA.
Checkmark culture is not the problem.
It's justifying the current issues just because a checkmark workflow is offered.
@@ThreatInteractive When you blame developers for poor choises in rendering tech I absolutely agree with you. I do not however agree that this can be blamed on Unreal, Unity or any other game engine for offering convenient ways of enabling tech that our computers can't handle.
You need to gain a deeper understanding of rendering and where we came from to understand why we have our current problems. We used to not be able to have streetlights in games until deferred rendering was invented because before that we could have 8-16 light sources in total in any scene. This was because every light was processed for every pixel.
With deferred rendering there was a separate light pass that rendered light as small geometries (small cones for street lights for example). This saved on light processing and pixel fill rate which was severly limited back then. But it also started the trend of poor anti-aliasing solutions. Before that Matrox had a card called Parhelia that could to 16x anti-aliasing which looked amazing. But alas, it was not compatible with modern rendering technologies and so it quickly became obsolete. Sometimes one technology is not compatible with another one and so we have to choose the most important one. Advanced lighting tech has killed anti-aliasing and sharp images.