To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/ThreatInteractive . You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. PLEASE READ FOR UPDATES & RESPONSES: 1. Watch this video in 4K (as in streaming settings) as any lower compression will hide the visual details discussed. 2. We would really appreciate it if viewers could share on giant game related subreddits. These prevent self promotion but *these can really push our channel's success by the thousands.* 3. Some clarification on what was mentioned at 1:46. Sometimes when starting the game, CPU issues cause the frame rate to stay around 35-38 FPS, even though the GPU has room to perform better regardless of V-Sync. Other times, after reopening the game, the CPU issue goes away, and we can use the full GPU to reach the V-Sync limit of 60 FPS. We’ve even hit 72 FPS with full GPU usage when V-Sync is off. We have a few methods to avoid this CPU bug like making sure V-Sync is off in the save file, restarting the computer, and launching the game as the first application after booting up (other than Steam or related apps). Once the game is running in this better scenario, V-Sync can be toggled without problems, as long as it’s off before closing or saving. However, when using Intel GPA, we can’t seem to get this "good" CPU performance, even with those tricks. This could be due to the complexity of Jedi Survivor, the profiling overhead or vendor application interference. Because of the 35-38 FPS limit caused by the CPU, we use the command r.MaxFPS 30 to make performance comparisons easier, especially when comparing with NFS 2015. 4. Here are the commands both UE4 developers and gamers can use with many UE4 titles. r.TemporalAA.Algorithm 0 r.TemporalAA.HistoryScreenPercentage 200 r.TemporalAA.Upsampling 1 r.TemporalAACatmullRom 0 r.TemporalAAFilterSize 0.09 r.TemporalAASamples 2 (MSAA x2) r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight 0.6 5. Why is using them in UE5 a bad idea? Because r.TemporalAA.Upsampling 1 in UE5's source code forces a higher value than r.TemporalAASamples 2 which means a higher r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight will display lots more jitter. Now if you can V-sync around 120hz, you might be able to get away with it. You can try these commands in UE5 without r.TemporalAA.Upsampling 1 but the reason thats enabled in the first place is for higher quality pixel placement. *6. At 6:51, while the depth buffer is the only render target that didn't have a render target clear, our software still shows us that it's being written to. Please take this into consideration when referencing the performance shown. * 7. We see some people complain about shimmer in the modified TAA. But people saying this are also the ones who are okay with massive amounts of ghosting and blur in the stock TAA. This portion is not accounting for the neglected content underneath TAA. As we stated in out FIRST video, clear TAA cannot fix broken effects and shaders that rely on smear. DLAA is an absolute joke in motion and the unique footage we showed shook Nvidia so much that they released a "fact or fiction" or in other words *damage control video* in just 14 hours after we made this video to relive non-blur biased views this video will generate from consumers. *8. Some good news regarding UE5.5, you can use our TAA commands as long as the newly introduced r.TemporalAAScaleSamples is set to 0! *9.Stay Tuned.
I've tried r.TemporalAA.HistoryScreenPercentage 200 in Assetto Cosra Competizione and while it looked incredible, it absolutely destroyed my performance, if I understand correctly it's the equal of 200% supersampling, so you are rendering in 4K and downsampling to 1080p. Am I correct? But these are still very helpful, only r.TemporalAASamples 2 and r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight 0.6 alone does wonders to any UE4 TAA.
Why do you recommend using Vsync and an FPS over 50 for the tweaked TAA to work best? I almost always rely on Freesync/VRR over Vsync nowadays, usually with an FPS cap which can reduce input lag if it’s ingame/engine.
The video analyzes GPU time, not CPU time. 5ms means nothing, "poorly optimized" games from a decade will run like that on modern hardware. If you shipped a game on a console, that outputs 4k 120FPS, and it runs its frames at 5ms, you still left 3.2ms on the table that could've been used to improve the visuals or image quality. What matters is not some arbitrary frame time, it matters what the cost for the resulting visuals is, and yes, for many titles, that's underwhelming.
Game dev here. It totally depends on what type of game we're talking about and what graphical settings. A game like this couldn't possibly hope to get an entire CPU frame down to 5ms on modern hardware. Around 3-5ms CPU alone would likely have to be devoted to just rendering-related tasks such as culling, submission to the GPU, read-backs, UI updates, etc. And that's none of the gameplay itself, or any other underlying systems like scheduling, audio, etc., which you'd be looking at probably at least another 5ms+ for that. General optimization only gets you so far, especially when we're talking about something that's multi-platform and running on a bulky 3rd-party engine. Maybe, just maybe, they could've spent another year or two doing nothing but optimizing the hell out of it to get it running as perfectly as possible on all platforms, but that's rarely economically viable, and it still wouldn't hit 5ms, especially not if they're using UE Blueprints. All this is to say, yes, the game is poorly optimized, and should be better, but saying a large game like this could have ever possibly hit 5ms CPU time on modern hardware is completely unrealistic. And even if it was, it wouldn't matter, because the GPU time would still easily eclipse that. In principle, yes, there's usually a way to get it done, but it's rarely feasible.
@@Frisbie147 RE: he doesnt even realise that the game already has the rtao that he recommended It's not RTAO, it's GTAO and mentioning unreal's implementation isn't worth our viewers time because it's a slow and poor implementation.
@@Aidiakapi but the point is that it's 5ms that's almost entirely wasted/needless, in this case, a _third_ of the total render time and anyways, ideally there is some headroom so particularly intensive scenes/moments don't stutter
low level API's don't help, we've traded the security of a stable foundation made by a select group of experts for the vague promise of potentially higher performance if everything is made right everytime by an unrealistically competent dev
I would state it this way: tech influencers usually benchmark hardware, not software. They always answer the question how well a GPU runs a given piece of software, and never do it vice versa. Threatinteractive is finally someone who flips it, and benchmarks software on a given piece of hardware.
i like dijkstras view on this "when computers were small there were no problems when computers became big problems became gigantic it is indeed hard to make performant quality software nowadays
I was about to post a comment mocking Respawn devs for saying that but then I looked at the Jedi: FO release date, and they did very well with around 3 years of development time through covid (so not even a proper 3 years) even tho the game's performance is fucked. Shades of 7th gen era but they fell short. Sure bragging is out of touch but not sure what this comment is waffling about
LMAO, reading this right after saying that the devs were probably rushed is hilarious. Who brags about making a game in record time? Brag about how happy and comfortable the devs were while making the goddamn video game, it's hard mental work.
TAA is indeed being butchered - Hell Let Loose has multiple TAA presets, but none provide good AA. The community found a good preset that produce better results than the presets provided by the developer. Fortunately, the developer listened to the feedback and included the community preset along side the other presets (unfortunately not enabled by default). For a PvP shooter where every moving pixel is important, this is extremely valuable.
I luckily found the "Community TAA" option by chance. I was using the standard TAA and it looked... odd especially when aiming near windows. Searched around and found the Community TAA tried it and it did way better.
Anti-aliasing ghosting must be garbage when you're trying to determine the exact shape to aim at in a competitive shooting game. And I'm annoyed at it without playing shooters.
So most of the optimization techniques are things that already exist in many older engines, such as the legendary CryEngine tessellation? Engines and devs really are developing backwards...
First of all. The old toy is not as interesting as a new one. Second. Modern development is artist driven, so basically engineers are trying shove in ridiculous models and gorillions of autogenerated shaders and choose the most bruteforce and foolproof methods.
@@SuperXzm Pretty on point. We used to talk a lot about TECHNOLOGY, nowadays it's just needlessly high-poly models shoved into everything, and everything else took a nosedive.
It's important to also be aware of that old tech which seemed good at that point actually had many limitations and didn't actually scale well. Tessellation is one such thing. It actually worked very poorly in most cases. There is a reason that a lot of terrain solutions does their own tessellation, and why we got the mesh shaders instead. But neither tessellation nor mesh shaders work well with ray tracing and they need speciall pre processed data. There are many things left to figure out. Modern rendering can do a lot of cool things, but it's also very complex to combine and use all of it together.
They used Unreal Engine. Which is to say, they used someone else's general purpose off-the-shelf engine. Which is to say, they're not in the same league with the sorts of developers who have in-house engines. Is this an oversimplification? Yes. But it's a youtube comment, so who cares.
@@RADkate I mean, PC Gamer doesn't review PC port quality anymore and they only spit out an article about it when a game gets reviewbombed and they want to spin the "consoles good, pc gamers are pathetic gamergaters" crap.
Need more of such content. UE5 being more widely adopted is a disaster. People are made to believe that snake oil solutions like upscaling and frame gen is the way forward and I'm glad there are at least a few of us who can see through this BS.
I remember in 2019 when 'Upscalling' is a premium feature that only the latest gpu (rtx 20 series back then) can only achieve. But nowaday games looks absolutely dogshit in performance if we disable upscalling. The latency in Frame Generation is also laughable in the current state. I don't know why nvidia & amd pushing these feature, as it is still premature in reaching the desirable graphical videlity... It even makes the whole debacle of Stagnation in current console generation.
@@nickochioneantony9288 AMD does it because nvidia did it, and people stopped buying AMD GPUs because they didn't have those features. Also upscaling is a great way to get more fps without throwing more hardware at it, the problem is that game devs now assume that it will be used so they put even less effort into optimizations hoping that upscaling will pick up the slack.
0:45 - LOL Redditors are bootlickers, they'll tell you the FOX engine looks terrible and only runs well because MGSV is a desert, while under the same breath giving Epic Games the glaze constantly. Two PS3 rhythm games (The Project DIVA F games) locked itself to 30FPS compared to the 60FPS in previous entries, and was one of the first games to be emulated on RPCS3 with high framerates, and it didn't use any of the SPU cores that the PS3 had. I don't buy the "Just because it's on consoles, that means it's magically optimized" narrative.
This full depth pre-pass is illegal. There are so many established ways to cull most objects being rendered to the depth buffer: PVS, Hierarchical z-buffer occlusion culling, Coverage buffer, etc. For crying out loud there already generate a depth hierarchy; Hierarchical z-buffer culling would have been the most logical thing to implement.
Ok mr youtbe commentator. All rendering engineers using depth prepasses for decades were just stupid, should've listened to you - a person who never created anything but watched a youtube video.
@Genebriss You wouldn't know this but I am working on my game engine so knowing things like this is important for me. Who said that a depth pre-pass is bad? Of course many games have used a depth pre-pass. But they don't draw everything like is done here but only objects that cover most of the screen space. That's how other games have done their depth pre-pass.
There has to be other reasons they didn't do that, like making the game seem impressive, just generating buzz, good or bad, over how hard it is to run, or creating an incentive to sell more hardware.
1700 drawcalls , That’s pretty well optimized! Culling by layer and size is an option but with hundreds of people adding assets until the last moment , breaking optimization techniques is pretty common. Everybody project start with really good documentation until dead line 😢
I have to point out a few things regarding the TAA. - r.TemporalAA.Algorithm ; this setting controls whether the game uses TAA Gen4 (0) or Gen5(1). Gen 5 is a newer form of TAA that has better coverage, less pixel shimmering and better image clarity. But it costs more. Depending on the GPU, it can drop performance by around 10%. - r.TemporalAA.HistoryScreenPercentage ; from my experience, this setting does nothing in most UE4 games. UE5 has a similar setting, that actually works and improves image quality. A value of 200 has become the default value since UE5.2 - r.TemporalAA.Upsampling 1 ; This is already the default value for UE4. But considering that you are using native resolution, it does nothing. Should be used with r.ScreenPercentage to define the percentage of base screen resolution. - r.TemporalAASamples ; This is not MSAA. This is the number of jittered positions for TAA. Default is 8 in UE4. From my experience, higher values result in a sharper, more detailed image, but with more pixel shimmering. Lower values result in less pixel shimmering, but a blurrier image. I prefer a value of 4. Best regards
r.TemporalAA.Algorithm is the TSR prototype and has significantly blurred motion. HistoryScreenPercentage 200 and Upsampling 1 is why we end up with 4k buffer. It absolutely has impact on quality, it's even stated in the TAA paper by Brian Karis. These two benefit motion, not still camera scenes. r.TemporalAA.Samples 2 and 4 uses the same sample positions as standard MSAAx4 or x2. For instance Decima's TAA alternates between two sample positions like r.TemporalAA.Samples 2 but doesn't use the standard MSAAx2 sample positions.
@@ThreatInteractive I found that TAA Gen5 has much cleaner image and fewer ghosting artifacts. Mind you, I always disable motion blur. Always. I have never seen a UE4 game benefiting in image quality from HistoryScreenPercentage 200. Of course, I have not tested all games. MSAA samples the edges of polygons at a higher rate. TAA samples neighboring pixels. This why MSAA has a significant cost to performance, while TAA is close to being free.
@@winj3ryou didn't understand what he was trying to say based on your MSAA comments. He's not saying the sample setting is MSAA. Also history screen percentage makes motion clearer, I've tested it, it's an objective benefit. You need to do motion tests.
Some notes: depth prepass cannot be a different resolution use different geometry, because this woild cause black artifacts. The prepass is also used for fragment culling afaik. Gtao is on unreal, but has smearing issues and does not wprk well with dithering and depth blending - and depth blended materials would render as dark blobs. There is also a bug in ue4 that causes gtao to essentially not work, that the fix needs to be backported from ue5. Temporal aa upsampling is unnecessary for most uses and imo is too expensive to be worth it, unless you are rendering to a lower resolution (which ue5 uses by default, thanks to its superior upsampler) You can implement a technique similar to the face culling you described, it cam help with the reliability of hardware occlusion and precompited visibility, but because you cannot prioritize certain objects in the prepass over others. You could use unreal's software culling set to only use those objects, but really the cheapest solution is to use smartly llaced distance culling volumes calibrated based on the distance. For some features, the full depth prepass cannot be disabled as it is used for other things.
Presumably doing a full depth pre pass allows them to render the material pass with the depth test set to equals, ensuring that every pixel only has expensive material logic applied once.
@@jonathanlebon9705 the idea is that once you have a depth prepass you can draw your objects with depth testing set to equal. Only fragments that get rasterized at the exact depths as the fragments were during the depth prepass can be allowed to render by the rasterizer. This means that you negate all overdraw, you can skip doing fragment discards (because it can be done in depth prepass) (this saves you shader permutations and ensures that EarlyZ stays working on most hardware) and alleviates you from drawing objects strictly front-to-back (so you can batch them by PSOs and not switch them constantly).
I a web developer so I have little knowledge about these topics. But I research them after watching and more and more i Understand why games have been so heavy lately, especially UE games. Thank you!
Make badly optimize games. Have big corporations sponsor your AAAA games. Encourage consumers to buy the latest hardware. Profit. Money flows in a cycle, with big engine companies like Epic being in bed with many industry leaders, to gain wealth and power. You can't gain power through humble interactions and niceties.
@@dra6o0n i mean, its not a mystery to me why epic is pushing this stuff. its easier to sell and market stuff like lumen and nanite than actual performance optimizations. its easier to show to investors, etc. theyre taking the safe route by updating the engine with flashy shit.
@@alexsoundstuff You should actually look into how lumen and nanite work rather than dismissing them as not real optimizations. Nanite is not super optimized for lower polygon counts, but rather to make performance relatively constant regardless of polygon count, and that means that despite tons of hardcore optimization work going into it, there is a nonzero baseline cost, which can be more than an optimized renderer for lower polygon counts. Lumen is similar, but I haven't read the paper in quite a while so I can't say much about it. It may seem dismissive to say this, but the fact that you just listened to these videos rather than reading the actual in-depth nanite paper shows you don't really have the skill or knowledge to make any kind of judgment on what is a "real optimization".
Jedi Survivor is actually a very good sequel.... It is such a shame that the performance sucks. As a person who enjoyed Fallen Order, I find Jedi Survivor content actually an improvement (like proper sequel should have), so the quality of the content is good. But alas, overall score also require it to perform tolerably, it deserve the roasting.
@@jose131991 Game still isn't optimized on console very well, at least the PS5 and Xbox Series versions. That still has issues and the GPU related issues he discusses here are still present on the consoles
@@jose131991 Bullshit you don't know anything. On a console you're stuck with stutters unless the developer updates the game on PC there are ways around it mods can help fix performance issues. Jedi Survivor will run better on a PC given the right hardware.
I like the idea of an "occlusion potential" for determining whether meshes should be included in the depth pre-pass. The volume of the mesh might be useful (assuming all meshes are "airtight" without any missing faces - or a heuristic approach could be used to guesstimate virtual faces when calculating mesh volume) which would be stored in a table on the GPU. Then the omission of the occluder from the depth pre-pass would be dependent on the mesh's volume divided by the distance from the camera (and scaled by the tangent of half the camera FOV angle, etc). However, if there are a lot of open meshes used for things like wall pieces and whatnot, that are just a bunch of front-facing triangles and not a closed airtight surface manifold, perhaps the mesh's total surface area would be better instead? Surely there's a combination of mesh size, volume, and surface area that would be a good heuristic for which meshes should actually be used for calculating the occlusion potential. Just using the AABB of a mesh, or the spherical size of a mesh (i.e. center of min/max AABB and distance to farthest vertex) doesn't account for meshes with a lot of holes/cracks/gaps and would still include them in the depth pre-pass. This is something I'll be thinking about for a while. For cylindrical object rendering it seems like some kind of "beam particle" representation could be used instead, where you're literally just passing points along the axis of the geometry to the GPU and it's generating a screenspace triangle strip that has the proper cylindrical worldspace coordinates and texture coordinates calculated for each fragment to create the illusion of a cylindrical object conformed along the polyline. This would require some maths to accommodate for perspective projection so that the illusion doesn't fall apart as the camera moves closer to such geometry, but I believe it's something worth looking at. At the end of the day though, it's really the lighting compute that is the meat of this game's frame time and it would be a lot of fine-tuning all of the other phases of rendering a frame just to squeeze out a few more fractions of a millisecond per frame. These guys didn't write UE's renderer, they just made a game with it - and likely didn't respect hardware limitations and performance as much as they should've. I also wanted to say that it's important to distinguish between frustum culling and occlusion culling. Coarse occlusion culling on the CPU can go a long way when there is a lot of individual geometry in a large scene, and it's something that a lot of modern engines completely forego - instead relying on the GPU just having thousands upon thousands of individual meshes thrown at it for it to contend with. The Godot game engine, for instance, had zero occlusion culling for a long time (after it had gained 3D rendering capability) and relied exclusively on frustum culling. Back in my day, you didn't have a game engine unless you had an occlusion culling algorithm. Heck, if all you had was an occlusion culling algorithm then you had the central core foundation of a game engine upon which the rest of its bells and whistles could be built. I couldn't believe Godot was a 3D game engine with zero occlusion culling whatsoever, and calling itself a "game engine". Anyway, I digress... I think it would've been useful for the curious newbies out there if it had been made clear that the "depth mipmap" and "HZB" are one-and-the-same. HZB = Hierarchical Z-Buffer, where a max() miptree is generated from the depth buffer by taking the largest value (i.e. the closest Z value, because depth is stored inverted, as 1/Z) out of each 2x2-pixel area of one mip level to be used as the depth value for the next higher mip level's pixels, rather than averaging them together like a regular mipmap. I don't think you need to explain all the ins-and-outs of graphics rendering, but it's my opinion that people who are still learning would get more value out of your content if you pointed out the non-obvious. Instead of saying "HZB" just say "hierarchical Z-buffer", for instance. I think that this more informative content could be made more accessible, in terms of its informational content, to the audience that existing tech tubers have. I, for one, am tired of just seeing framerates, but then again I've been a graphics coder for 25+ years :P I look forward to more videos like this :D
No it does not? The image is incredibly aliased, you cannot call it anti-aliasing and have no actual anti-aliasing visible. There is so much jagged edges and shimmering, it is a huge step down from DLSS's clarity. Even if the MOTION clarity is better with his tweak, who cares if it isn't anti-aliasing at all? Am I living in bizarro world why are people saying this anti-aliasing is good IT IS NOT ANTI-ALIASING.
@@Rukushin even if is not antialiasing, for me and other ppl looks bad I just can't stand TAA recently in every game is just a blurry mess in my eyes, there are so many many effects and graphics now days in general that it impacts motion clarity, and you say that "even if it is better in motion, who cares" dude you're always in motion in game or anything you're not standing there doing nothing (excuse fishing maybe)
I think unless you’re using a CRT, motion clarity is far less important for most people than clarity in stills. I honestly don’t understand how you people claim to be able to see these losses in clarity on as low as 30 FPS on a sample and hold monitor, because at that FPS, past a certain (not very high) speed, all I see is sample and hold blur and, if we have an “almost no AA” solution for AA as this one, shimmer. Are you sure you don’t just like the detail aliasing incurs? That’s a perfectly fine thing to like. Have you seen a downsampled photo with nearest neighbor vs averaging, for instance? Averaging is more correct, but nearest neighbor will look the sharpest, as it will have the kind of aliasing games usually have.
Sometimes it's hard to understand Epic engineers. Unity added APV(Adaptive Probe Volumes) for baked lighting and rightly so. Unreal is actively going to mobile, but does not offer the same technologies. All that remains are unfinished Volumetric Lightmaps, which are mainly for moving objects and cannot replace lightmaps for illuminating the entire scene. It's funny but Unreal has Lumen and it works great and it already has spherical harmonics and information about the color and reflections of the scene, but for some reason Epic don’t want to add a static-baked mode for Lumen, especially since UE already has virtual texture technology. This would be a great replacement for Volumetric Lighttmaps for all the lighting in a scene.
@@aoqia Did you see something there similar to what I wrote about? Megaliths is mainly for video cards with DXR support. Also, if the game is corridor or you need several dozen lights, they are of no use, turning them on can even eat up more productivity than regular lights.
Because it will optimize lumen and make it cheaper to run. If its "too cheap" then people are less likely to need to upgrade. Corporate CEOs and shareholders are interconnected in their network of wealth, they like to maintain that power and wealth, not to dilute it by making everything easier and better for consumers... Elon Musk had his text message leak years ago, you could see how his ultra rich friends throwing money making ideas at a wall to see what stick, some of those ideas are essentially anti-competitive and unethical. So do not assume CEOs and corporate business owners or the likes to be of the same mindset as consumers.
@@dra6o0nPeople with weaker recent cards will just throw upscaling and frame gen at the problem until the game becomes playable, not go out and buy a better GPU.
@@marcelosoares7148 Because the issue is that games that barely have higher fidelity than last gen doesn't need to be upgraded with newer hardware. It's a lot of bad optimizations and computing thrown in to automate and speed up development.
19:41 Holy crap, I’ve wanted something like this the moment I turned on per-pixel lighting in Dolphin. It has always bothered me how we’ve basically solved the smoothness of a model’s surface but we have nothing when it comes to the paltry few edges, as usual this issue was solved in 2008 and nobody ever heard about it because of the chaos of information.
Tessellation is pretty well known, but good use cases are rare, it's difficult to configure well, and also difficult to avoid bottlenecks. Support is pretty patchy as well, likely due to lack of widespread use.
great observations and explanations , these are fantastic ! lots to think about . at 17:39 the idea of using blockers for early cheap culling reminds me of how "portals" were used in BSP engines , and other very controlled methods of occlusion optimization like precomputed "Potential Visibility Sets" . it does seem like there is potential to revisit these concepts from an automated approach like how Hierarchical LODs distance is calculated , a simulation of the gameplay and possible view angles could generate the PVS along with help from level artists placing "occluder" objects like the walls you mention . the distaste for temporal AA is understandable , mainly because of how intertwined now it is with other systems and how every vfx / shader is tuned under those conditions , that to change away from the blurry softening temporal AA has to fix the look of the environment can often then make the vfx and shaders that were tuned UNDER TAA look incorrectly intense and deepfried as the artists were making adjustments to try and overcome the TAA blur .
The more I watch these videos, the more I respect people who work on graphics for AAA games. Each of the mechanisms you mention almost seem to have a world of complexity, and then there's devs that combine all (probably most) of them perfectly.
How many of the optimizations would work for this specific scene but would actually be worse for different scenes? Is it possible that these optimizations aren't present because in other parts of the game, the optimizations would actually lead to worse image quality/issues?Personally, I really don't like all of the shimmering and flickering present in your modified TAA scenes. I agree that the option to completely turn off TAA should always be an option. However, I'm not convinced that I would actually like the look of many games without TAA. Great video! I really enjoyed it.
Doom use ID tech in-house engine, which is why it passes the nature of blurry image of UE. The RT feature of Doom Eternal is also smoke & mirror.... it literally only works on mirror reflection & metal based weapon, other aspect as lightning is not affected. But other than that, it was well optimized, it was pre-2020 so I guess the proper devs were not laid-off yet at that moment.
Basically the devs of Doom are actual engineers who knows their stuff. Some game studios and built in engines like Bethesda are mostly artists. Epic, are more like... Consultants. They have engineers but technical know-how isn't needed to sell their product. Their engine is developed to be spread and garner profit, while Bethesda and ID tech doesn't sell license for the engine.
@@nickochioneantony9288 Id tech engines have always been the gold standard for optimization its how they were able to exist to make commander keen doom and quake and they keep that as a priority for their company epic does what they have since unreal in 1998 prioritize graphical fidelity above all else
@@dra6o0nWell, proprietary engines like id Tech are made for a select few games, and their entire rendering pipeline can be built just for the needs of that game. For engines like Unreal or Unity, they need to support ANYTHING; it can run anything and look good, but when it comes to absolute top-of-the-line work, it won’t be as good as an engine that can tailor its work just for specific games. id Tech 7 is perfect for complex fps games like DOOM Eternal. But what if you tried to use it for GTA 6? Totally different format, different scope, different content scale, and different requirements. This problem was famously encountered by teams trying to adapt the Frostbite engine for racing games at the request of EA.
I am not sure what software they use but RenderDoc gets you basically the full breakdown of a frame. But I am assuming there are unreal specific tools that give more info.
Each hardware vendor also has their own software that hooks into their hardware's performance metrics. AMD has Radeon GPU Profiler, NVIDIA has Nsight Graphics and Intel has the Graphics Performance Analyzers suite, which is what he used in the video.
How to determine if you are qualified to judge if a game is optimized or not. 1 you must have eye 2 you must have game 3 you must have pc or any system that plays the game 4 you should be familiar with the settings menu and have a general understanding of what they do. 5 you can see fps (win+g, steam overlay, msi afterburner etc). 6 you can see if you reduce settings that degrade visual quality but made no difference to the framerate the game is running.
Proper implementations of TAA will typically employ a form of contrast adaptive sharpening (e.g. AMD has a quite good open source algorithm for this). Since TAA can soften the image somewhat doing this right can produce results that look closer to raw native but with much much better anti aliasing and all at a reasonable cost. UE4 games I’ve noticed don’t seem to do this out typically. DOOM Eternal is a title that actually does have great TAA and provides a sharpness slider as a separate example. TAA is an oddball because there really is a “correct” way to do it and an incorrect way and there is variance in implementation. Poor TAA solutions can be very rough but the good ones are far better and produce high quality anti aliasing with generally great coverage for a small fraction of the cost of older techniques.
You got my sub by 15 mins, this is the content Digital Foundry is missing. I look forward to more technical deep dives, get more and more deep on the subject!
Contains an ableist slur and misunderstands that the cause is most likely devs being rushed, not [ableist slur]. You wanna be harsh but fair? You could call the supervisors intellectually challenged for not letting their workers do their work, but that would be a stretch, because it's probably more accurately categorized as disregard for product (and thus life) quality and cannibalism in the shape of greed.
@@ShuckleII Maybe stop working for a company that sucks life out of you? But this is not really problem of the game, the guy described the problem pretty clearly. It is flaw in the engine heavily relying on antialiasing...
Thank you for your work. Your videos explain a lot. Can i suggest creating a course (or several) in unreal engine and/or unity optimization? Those two are among most popular engines not only in the big studio environment, but also for solo and indie developers. That is one of the least present topics on the tutorial sites and it shows by the state in which many games are released . More and more games are created by hobbyist and/or the hobby of creating games becomes a career path. Good habits from the start will be of benefit for the gaming scene.
At 14:33 it would be cool to see a vertical graph, with horizontal bars that appear at the same time as the text, their length proportionate to the listed milliseconds on each line. TBH I personally find it weird when you say "we" all the time but it seems like mostly your personal effort and script.
Man, I wanted a channel to do these kind of analysis for ages now, thank you bro for actually doing it, and explaining everything in detail. Do you accept suggestions? I'd suggest Source Engine, for example, I always wanted to check their render pipeline, specially compared to the new source engine 2 (see cs2 compared to cs:go, for example, where the image quality 'doesn't seem' to be a lot better, but the hit in performance is big)
This game is so ugly and washed out that I couldn't even tell it had subsurface scattering. They made it so inefficient that they couldn't shade it properly, assuming they even had anyone on the team competent in lighting and shader aesthetics.
Frostbite has been said to be quite a pest in other regards, that the engine didn't mould well to the tasks in wider range of genres for a very long time, especially with games and genres with particularly complex gameplay systems, heavy on animation, dialogue, etc, and that either DICE wasn't perfectly equipped to assist the game developers and adapt the engine, or there had been some sort of communication breakdown between DICE and the studios leading to engine adaptation troubles and low quality of implementation of critical gameplay systems at some of the studios. It is that much more likely that an engine shared between hundreds of studios will be better documented and less reliant on institutional hidden knowledge, will have its distant corners better ironed out, more adaptable, and more adapted to creator pipeline and less engine dev centric in design. I think it would be good to automatically mark a mesh at cook time for its occlusion quality by sampling test render coverage. AABB projection being relatively small alone doesn't account for kitbash level design where you attach say several interchangeable panels side to side which are individually nothing but together do form a quality occluder. If wires are distant enough and cannot be interacted with, and cannot be seen from all sides, there was honestly no reason for them to be fully modelled, they could just be a card, similar to hair cards. Today they could be much enhanced with normal maps, displacement maps, etc.
Why would it, it's not like the engine was nurtured and used widely among the industry so that maturation could flourish through wide adoptation. The fact it managed anything at all in the face of Unreal is already an achievement, especially since it still looks better than most unreal shipped products even today.
This probably one the best educational channels on youtube when it comes to graphics rendering. You guys deserve at least 10 times the amount of subscribers you currently have.
Outside of the TAA part, which is subjective, and in my opinion, the modified TAA looks much worse, as it reintroduces pixel shimmering without significantly improving image clarity. That said, the video is great, and the technical details were well explained. Great job!
please keep talking about this, not only is it interesting to hear its validating to see so many unspoken concerns and thoughts ive had explained in such detail.
I always felt that Destiny 2 was super optimzed game for my low spec hardware, would be cool a video about great optimazations in games or talk about if Destiny 2 is really optimized or not
i must be a bit fair and note that on DLSS 3.7+, Preset E should offer the best image quality results for modes other than UP or 'DLAA'. however i have no personal stake for or against advanced Upscalers like DLSS/XeSS, just making a footnote. anyways, cheers for the Frameview.
E is not the best, it's a rumor going around. We've seen some third party test along with our own testing in this game that shows significant ghosting over C on both DLSS and DLAA. But thank you for your support!
true, some games could still prefer another Preset, we always have to compare per-game to be sure what seems to produce the best result. (and i do not have nor plan to have, this game)
I'll be fair myself and note that there is no such thing as an advanced upscaler, and if there are any, it's DLSS, FSR, XESS and their derivatives, not just DLSS and XESS.
Great video, as usual! I have a video idea for you. Depending on the original game engine you are testing, you could recreate a similar scene in Unreal or Unity or flip it around to add a challenge. You can just implement all your ideas and then compare the results.
Yeah, unfortunately I don't really think UE TAA is.... salvageable. There's a bit you can do, but sharp motion clarity without severe jittering & aliasing isn't one of them 😬 And believe me, the community has tried with all sorts of tweaks, but you need to choose either of those 2 sides.
Every time bad optimization comes in conversation, I think about this game. Every time I think about this game, I'm reminded by Digital Foundry findings of jumping animations through camera traversal.
Amazing video as always. Your content perfectly fits in this gap between beginner content and scientific papers. I always learn a lot from rendering workflow analysis.
It really feels like I am updating my hardware to help lazy developers worry less about optimizations instead of getting better graphics. Now, instead of one game every 5 years they can churn out one every 2.
Quake III Arena had special LOD system for curves 25 years ago - specially designed for things like arches and pipes. It's a shame that many modern games can't do something like this.
Great vid ! Always fun listening what you have to say on game optimization even though I sometimes don't get it but I'm slowly getting there haha, can't wait for the channel to blow up :D
Wouldn't decreasing resolution in the depth pre-pass cause false-positive z-culling at edges? I think only using large objects (relative to camera) for the pre-pass makes the most sense for optimization in the depth pre-pass.
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PLEASE READ FOR UPDATES & RESPONSES:
1. Watch this video in 4K (as in streaming settings) as any lower compression will hide the visual details discussed.
2. We would really appreciate it if viewers could share on giant game related subreddits. These prevent self promotion but *these can really push our channel's success by the thousands.*
3. Some clarification on what was mentioned at 1:46. Sometimes when starting the game, CPU issues cause the frame rate to stay around 35-38 FPS, even though the GPU has room to perform better regardless of V-Sync. Other times, after reopening the game, the CPU issue goes away, and we can use the full GPU to reach the V-Sync limit of 60 FPS. We’ve even hit 72 FPS with full GPU usage when V-Sync is off.
We have a few methods to avoid this CPU bug like making sure V-Sync is off in the save file, restarting the computer, and launching the game as the first application after booting up (other than Steam or related apps). Once the game is running in this better scenario, V-Sync can be toggled without problems, as long as it’s off before closing or saving.
However, when using Intel GPA, we can’t seem to get this "good" CPU performance, even with those tricks. This could be due to the complexity of Jedi Survivor, the profiling overhead or vendor application interference. Because of the 35-38 FPS limit caused by the CPU, we use the command r.MaxFPS 30 to make performance comparisons easier, especially when comparing with NFS 2015.
4. Here are the commands both UE4 developers and gamers can use with many UE4 titles.
r.TemporalAA.Algorithm 0
r.TemporalAA.HistoryScreenPercentage 200
r.TemporalAA.Upsampling 1
r.TemporalAACatmullRom 0
r.TemporalAAFilterSize 0.09
r.TemporalAASamples 2 (MSAA x2)
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight 0.6
5. Why is using them in UE5 a bad idea? Because r.TemporalAA.Upsampling 1 in UE5's source code forces a higher value than r.TemporalAASamples 2 which means a higher r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight will display lots more jitter. Now if you can V-sync around 120hz, you might be able to get away with it. You can try these commands in UE5 without r.TemporalAA.Upsampling 1 but the reason thats enabled in the first place is for higher quality pixel placement.
*6. At 6:51, while the depth buffer is the only render target that didn't have a render target clear, our software still shows us that it's being written to. Please take this into consideration when referencing the performance shown.
* 7. We see some people complain about shimmer in the modified TAA. But people saying this are also the ones who are okay with massive amounts of ghosting and blur in the stock TAA. This portion is not accounting for the neglected content underneath TAA. As we stated in out FIRST video, clear TAA cannot fix broken effects and shaders that rely on smear. DLAA is an absolute joke in motion and the unique footage we showed shook Nvidia so much that they released a "fact or fiction" or in other words *damage control video* in just 14 hours after we made this video to relive non-blur biased views this video will generate from consumers.
*8. Some good news regarding UE5.5, you can use our TAA commands as long as the newly introduced r.TemporalAAScaleSamples is set to 0!
*9.Stay Tuned.
I've tried r.TemporalAA.HistoryScreenPercentage 200 in Assetto Cosra Competizione and while it looked incredible, it absolutely destroyed my performance, if I understand correctly it's the equal of 200% supersampling, so you are rendering in 4K and downsampling to 1080p. Am I correct? But these are still very helpful, only r.TemporalAASamples 2 and r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight 0.6 alone does wonders to any UE4 TAA.
you sir are a blessing to everyone in teaching people just how bad modern optimization really has become
@@snesmochait's not just that, he actually actively teaches ways it can be better
What hardware were you running the game on?
Why do you recommend using Vsync and an FPS over 50 for the tweaked TAA to work best? I almost always rely on Freesync/VRR over Vsync nowadays, usually with an FPS cap which can reduce input lag if it’s ingame/engine.
over 5 ms for basically static lighting is insane. in an optimized game 5 ms are the entire CPU frame time.
The video analyzes GPU time, not CPU time.
5ms means nothing, "poorly optimized" games from a decade will run like that on modern hardware. If you shipped a game on a console, that outputs 4k 120FPS, and it runs its frames at 5ms, you still left 3.2ms on the table that could've been used to improve the visuals or image quality.
What matters is not some arbitrary frame time, it matters what the cost for the resulting visuals is, and yes, for many titles, that's underwhelming.
@@Aidiakapi Lol no
Game dev here. It totally depends on what type of game we're talking about and what graphical settings. A game like this couldn't possibly hope to get an entire CPU frame down to 5ms on modern hardware. Around 3-5ms CPU alone would likely have to be devoted to just rendering-related tasks such as culling, submission to the GPU, read-backs, UI updates, etc. And that's none of the gameplay itself, or any other underlying systems like scheduling, audio, etc., which you'd be looking at probably at least another 5ms+ for that. General optimization only gets you so far, especially when we're talking about something that's multi-platform and running on a bulky 3rd-party engine. Maybe, just maybe, they could've spent another year or two doing nothing but optimizing the hell out of it to get it running as perfectly as possible on all platforms, but that's rarely economically viable, and it still wouldn't hit 5ms, especially not if they're using UE Blueprints.
All this is to say, yes, the game is poorly optimized, and should be better, but saying a large game like this could have ever possibly hit 5ms CPU time on modern hardware is completely unrealistic. And even if it was, it wouldn't matter, because the GPU time would still easily eclipse that. In principle, yes, there's usually a way to get it done, but it's rarely feasible.
@@Frisbie147
RE: he doesnt even realise that the game already has the rtao that he recommended
It's not RTAO, it's GTAO and mentioning unreal's implementation isn't worth our viewers time because it's a slow and poor implementation.
@@Aidiakapi but the point is that it's 5ms that's almost entirely wasted/needless, in this case, a _third_ of the total render time
and anyways, ideally there is some headroom so particularly intensive scenes/moments don't stutter
This guy is basically confirming what we all suspected: as hardware gets better, devs get sloppier, and customers don't benefit.
Devs have less time and more pressure to make games faster. John Carmack wouldn't be able to deliver Doom and Quake today.
It's not the hardware's fault. It's rushed development causing issues
low level API's don't help, we've traded the security of a stable foundation made by a select group of experts for the vague promise of potentially higher performance if everything is made right everytime by an unrealistically competent dev
I would state it this way: tech influencers usually benchmark hardware, not software.
They always answer the question how well a GPU runs a given piece of software, and never do it vice versa.
Threatinteractive is finally someone who flips it, and benchmarks software on a given piece of hardware.
i like dijkstras view on this "when computers were small there were no problems when computers became big problems became gigantic it is indeed hard to make performant quality software nowadays
These devs did brag about how quickly they put this game together. And it shows.
Its a shame. It really is a massive upgrade over the last game gameplay wise, but the performance is so, so poor.
I was about to post a comment mocking Respawn devs for saying that but then I looked at the Jedi: FO release date, and they did very well with around 3 years of development time through covid (so not even a proper 3 years) even tho the game's performance is fucked. Shades of 7th gen era but they fell short. Sure bragging is out of touch but not sure what this comment is waffling about
LMAO, reading this right after saying that the devs were probably rushed is hilarious. Who brags about making a game in record time? Brag about how happy and comfortable the devs were while making the goddamn video game, it's hard mental work.
TAA is indeed being butchered - Hell Let Loose has multiple TAA presets, but none provide good AA. The community found a good preset that produce better results than the presets provided by the developer. Fortunately, the developer listened to the feedback and included the community preset along side the other presets (unfortunately not enabled by default). For a PvP shooter where every moving pixel is important, this is extremely valuable.
I luckily found the "Community TAA" option by chance. I was using the standard TAA and it looked... odd especially when aiming near windows. Searched around and found the Community TAA tried it and it did way better.
Anti-aliasing ghosting must be garbage when you're trying to determine the exact shape to aim at in a competitive shooting game. And I'm annoyed at it without playing shooters.
So most of the optimization techniques are things that already exist in many older engines, such as the legendary CryEngine tessellation? Engines and devs really are developing backwards...
First of all. The old toy is not as interesting as a new one.
Second. Modern development is artist driven, so basically engineers are trying shove in ridiculous models and gorillions of autogenerated shaders and choose the most bruteforce and foolproof methods.
@@SuperXzm Pretty on point. We used to talk a lot about TECHNOLOGY, nowadays it's just needlessly high-poly models shoved into everything, and everything else took a nosedive.
It's important to also be aware of that old tech which seemed good at that point actually had many limitations and didn't actually scale well. Tessellation is one such thing. It actually worked very poorly in most cases. There is a reason that a lot of terrain solutions does their own tessellation, and why we got the mesh shaders instead. But neither tessellation nor mesh shaders work well with ray tracing and they need speciall pre processed data. There are many things left to figure out. Modern rendering can do a lot of cool things, but it's also very complex to combine and use all of it together.
@@Girugivery well put analysis
They used Unreal Engine.
Which is to say, they used someone else's general purpose off-the-shelf engine.
Which is to say, they're not in the same league with the sorts of developers who have in-house engines.
Is this an oversimplification? Yes. But it's a youtube comment, so who cares.
The voice the industry needs to hear.
@@aicraglednay Thank You so much!!! We are honored.
men diginal foundry need to see this dude
They would disagree, they are pro-TAA :)
I doubt it's in DF's interest to expose how devs are getting sloppy or are colluding with hardware companies to make people have to upgrade more.
@@RADkate *videos
@@RADkate I mean, PC Gamer doesn't review PC port quality anymore and they only spit out an article about it when a game gets reviewbombed and they want to spin the "consoles good, pc gamers are pathetic gamergaters" crap.
@@HankBaxter Majority of money is made on the console side, but you can keep spewing this conspiracy.
This content is in a new level of quality, please keep pushing stuff like that! :D
Agree
It's problematic when the main character's actor knows more about game optimization than the developers.
😂😂😂😂
Need more of such content. UE5 being more widely adopted is a disaster. People are made to believe that snake oil solutions like upscaling and frame gen is the way forward and I'm glad there are at least a few of us who can see through this BS.
I remember in 2019 when 'Upscalling' is a premium feature that only the latest gpu (rtx 20 series back then) can only achieve.
But nowaday games looks absolutely dogshit in performance if we disable upscalling. The latency in Frame Generation is also laughable in the current state.
I don't know why nvidia & amd pushing these feature, as it is still premature in reaching the desirable graphical videlity... It even makes the whole debacle of Stagnation in current console generation.
@@nickochioneantony9288"only the latest gpu supports this"
Sees backlash.
Brings feature to backwards compatible gpus.
Yes its all for profit.
Why AMD and Nvidia does this?
Blackrock.
Tin foil hat as it seems, a narrative and motive is needed to be ambitious and influential.
@@nickochioneantony9288 AMD does it because nvidia did it, and people stopped buying AMD GPUs because they didn't have those features.
Also upscaling is a great way to get more fps without throwing more hardware at it, the problem is that game devs now assume that it will be used so they put even less effort into optimizations hoping that upscaling will pick up the slack.
@@dra6o0n lol what? amd did it because nvidia did it, thats literally for profit.
0:45 - LOL Redditors are bootlickers, they'll tell you the FOX engine looks terrible and only runs well because MGSV is a desert, while under the same breath giving Epic Games the glaze constantly. Two PS3 rhythm games (The Project DIVA F games) locked itself to 30FPS compared to the 60FPS in previous entries, and was one of the first games to be emulated on RPCS3 with high framerates, and it didn't use any of the SPU cores that the PS3 had. I don't buy the "Just because it's on consoles, that means it's magically optimized" narrative.
the most interesting parts of these vids is the breakdown of the pipeline and all the stuff that happens, just fun to learn about
Babe wake up
Threatinteractive just posted
This full depth pre-pass is illegal. There are so many established ways to cull most objects being rendered to the depth buffer: PVS, Hierarchical z-buffer occlusion culling, Coverage buffer, etc. For crying out loud there already generate a depth hierarchy; Hierarchical z-buffer culling would have been the most logical thing to implement.
They are doing full res depth pre-pass that we will never see, but the actual visible elements like SSAO are rendered in like 240p. fucking lol.
Well, you don't see what the CPU side pre-pass already decided not to send.
Ok mr youtbe commentator. All rendering engineers using depth prepasses for decades were just stupid, should've listened to you - a person who never created anything but watched a youtube video.
@Genebriss You wouldn't know this but I am working on my game engine so knowing things like this is important for me. Who said that a depth pre-pass is bad? Of course many games have used a depth pre-pass. But they don't draw everything like is done here but only objects that cover most of the screen space. That's how other games have done their depth pre-pass.
There has to be other reasons they didn't do that, like making the game seem impressive, just generating buzz, good or bad, over how hard it is to run, or creating an incentive to sell more hardware.
1700 drawcalls ,
That’s pretty well optimized!
Culling by layer and size is an option but with hundreds of people adding assets until the last moment , breaking optimization techniques is pretty common. Everybody project start with really good documentation until dead line 😢
Crunch tends to do that
how about 1 draw call 😂😂
@@botbeamer just bake all static 🤗
I have to point out a few things regarding the TAA.
- r.TemporalAA.Algorithm ; this setting controls whether the game uses TAA Gen4 (0) or Gen5(1). Gen 5 is a newer form of TAA that has better coverage, less pixel shimmering and better image clarity. But it costs more. Depending on the GPU, it can drop performance by around 10%.
- r.TemporalAA.HistoryScreenPercentage ; from my experience, this setting does nothing in most UE4 games. UE5 has a similar setting, that actually works and improves image quality. A value of 200 has become the default value since UE5.2
- r.TemporalAA.Upsampling 1 ; This is already the default value for UE4. But considering that you are using native resolution, it does nothing. Should be used with r.ScreenPercentage to define the percentage of base screen resolution.
- r.TemporalAASamples ; This is not MSAA. This is the number of jittered positions for TAA. Default is 8 in UE4. From my experience, higher values result in a sharper, more detailed image, but with more pixel shimmering. Lower values result in less pixel shimmering, but a blurrier image. I prefer a value of 4.
Best regards
r.TemporalAA.Algorithm is the TSR prototype and has significantly blurred motion.
HistoryScreenPercentage 200 and Upsampling 1 is why we end up with 4k buffer. It absolutely has impact on quality, it's even stated in the TAA paper by Brian Karis. These two benefit motion, not still camera scenes.
r.TemporalAA.Samples 2 and 4 uses the same sample positions as standard MSAAx4 or x2.
For instance Decima's TAA alternates between two sample positions like r.TemporalAA.Samples 2 but doesn't use the standard MSAAx2 sample positions.
@@ThreatInteractive I found that TAA Gen5 has much cleaner image and fewer ghosting artifacts. Mind you, I always disable motion blur. Always.
I have never seen a UE4 game benefiting in image quality from HistoryScreenPercentage 200. Of course, I have not tested all games.
MSAA samples the edges of polygons at a higher rate. TAA samples neighboring pixels.
This why MSAA has a significant cost to performance, while TAA is close to being free.
@@winj3ryou didn't understand what he was trying to say based on your MSAA comments. He's not saying the sample setting is MSAA.
Also history screen percentage makes motion clearer, I've tested it, it's an objective benefit. You need to do motion tests.
Keep on making these videos, man. All of this needs to be talked about and one cannot rely on nor expect certain other outlets to do them.
Some notes:
depth prepass cannot be a different resolution use different geometry, because this woild cause black artifacts. The prepass is also used for fragment culling afaik.
Gtao is on unreal, but has smearing issues and does not wprk well with dithering and depth blending - and depth blended materials would render as dark blobs. There is also a bug in ue4 that causes gtao to essentially not work, that the fix needs to be backported from ue5.
Temporal aa upsampling is unnecessary for most uses and imo is too expensive to be worth it, unless you are rendering to a lower resolution (which ue5 uses by default, thanks to its superior upsampler)
You can implement a technique similar to the face culling you described, it cam help with the reliability of hardware occlusion and precompited visibility, but because you cannot prioritize certain objects in the prepass over others. You could use unreal's software culling set to only use those objects, but really the cheapest solution is to use smartly llaced distance culling volumes calibrated based on the distance.
For some features, the full depth prepass cannot be disabled as it is used for other things.
GTAO is in UE, but it's pretty slow with reference.
You can even find mobile implementations but not in unreal.
Presumably doing a full depth pre pass allows them to render the material pass with the depth test set to equals, ensuring that every pixel only has expensive material logic applied once.
Could you elaborate on your presumption please?
I may not understand but you've piqued my interest.
@@jonathanlebon9705 look into visibility buffer rendering
@@jonathanlebon9705 the idea is that once you have a depth prepass you can draw your objects with depth testing set to equal. Only fragments that get rasterized at the exact depths as the fragments were during the depth prepass can be allowed to render by the rasterizer. This means that you negate all overdraw, you can skip doing fragment discards (because it can be done in depth prepass) (this saves you shader permutations and ensures that EarlyZ stays working on most hardware) and alleviates you from drawing objects strictly front-to-back (so you can batch them by PSOs and not switch them constantly).
I a web developer so I have little knowledge about these topics. But I research them after watching and more and more i Understand why games have been so heavy lately, especially UE games. Thank you!
Make badly optimize games.
Have big corporations sponsor your AAAA games.
Encourage consumers to buy the latest hardware.
Profit.
Money flows in a cycle, with big engine companies like Epic being in bed with many industry leaders, to gain wealth and power.
You can't gain power through humble interactions and niceties.
You are so underrated never stop doing what you do
Cal Kestis out here tearing down his own game
u guys are the heroes the gaming industry needs for real. im getting so sick and tired of these new games and their dogshit render quality
Shareholders and investors are only interested in artists, apparently engineers bore them.
Guess that's likely why modern stuff are getting worse quality, like apartments or condos that collapses on itself.
@@dra6o0n i mean, its not a mystery to me why epic is pushing this stuff. its easier to sell and market stuff like lumen and nanite than actual performance optimizations. its easier to show to investors, etc. theyre taking the safe route by updating the engine with flashy shit.
@@alexsoundstuff You should actually look into how lumen and nanite work rather than dismissing them as not real optimizations. Nanite is not super optimized for lower polygon counts, but rather to make performance relatively constant regardless of polygon count, and that means that despite tons of hardcore optimization work going into it, there is a nonzero baseline cost, which can be more than an optimized renderer for lower polygon counts. Lumen is similar, but I haven't read the paper in quite a while so I can't say much about it. It may seem dismissive to say this, but the fact that you just listened to these videos rather than reading the actual in-depth nanite paper shows you don't really have the skill or knowledge to make any kind of judgment on what is a "real optimization".
And requiring ridiculous amounts of gpu power for no gain in fidelity....just push people to more new expensive hardware...win-win for the industry
Jedi Survivor is actually a very good sequel....
It is such a shame that the performance sucks. As a person who enjoyed Fallen Order, I find Jedi Survivor content actually an improvement (like proper sequel should have), so the quality of the content is good.
But alas, overall score also require it to perform tolerably, it deserve the roasting.
It is strange that Survivor runs better on the PS4 and Xbox One than Fallen Order does on PS4 and Xbox One
@@crestofhonor2349that’s what console optimization can get you
@@jose131991 Game still isn't optimized on console very well, at least the PS5 and Xbox Series versions. That still has issues and the GPU related issues he discusses here are still present on the consoles
@@jose131991 Bullshit you don't know anything. On a console you're stuck with stutters unless the developer updates the game on PC there are ways around it mods can help fix performance issues. Jedi Survivor will run better on a PC given the right hardware.
I like the idea of an "occlusion potential" for determining whether meshes should be included in the depth pre-pass. The volume of the mesh might be useful (assuming all meshes are "airtight" without any missing faces - or a heuristic approach could be used to guesstimate virtual faces when calculating mesh volume) which would be stored in a table on the GPU. Then the omission of the occluder from the depth pre-pass would be dependent on the mesh's volume divided by the distance from the camera (and scaled by the tangent of half the camera FOV angle, etc). However, if there are a lot of open meshes used for things like wall pieces and whatnot, that are just a bunch of front-facing triangles and not a closed airtight surface manifold, perhaps the mesh's total surface area would be better instead? Surely there's a combination of mesh size, volume, and surface area that would be a good heuristic for which meshes should actually be used for calculating the occlusion potential. Just using the AABB of a mesh, or the spherical size of a mesh (i.e. center of min/max AABB and distance to farthest vertex) doesn't account for meshes with a lot of holes/cracks/gaps and would still include them in the depth pre-pass. This is something I'll be thinking about for a while.
For cylindrical object rendering it seems like some kind of "beam particle" representation could be used instead, where you're literally just passing points along the axis of the geometry to the GPU and it's generating a screenspace triangle strip that has the proper cylindrical worldspace coordinates and texture coordinates calculated for each fragment to create the illusion of a cylindrical object conformed along the polyline. This would require some maths to accommodate for perspective projection so that the illusion doesn't fall apart as the camera moves closer to such geometry, but I believe it's something worth looking at.
At the end of the day though, it's really the lighting compute that is the meat of this game's frame time and it would be a lot of fine-tuning all of the other phases of rendering a frame just to squeeze out a few more fractions of a millisecond per frame. These guys didn't write UE's renderer, they just made a game with it - and likely didn't respect hardware limitations and performance as much as they should've.
I also wanted to say that it's important to distinguish between frustum culling and occlusion culling. Coarse occlusion culling on the CPU can go a long way when there is a lot of individual geometry in a large scene, and it's something that a lot of modern engines completely forego - instead relying on the GPU just having thousands upon thousands of individual meshes thrown at it for it to contend with. The Godot game engine, for instance, had zero occlusion culling for a long time (after it had gained 3D rendering capability) and relied exclusively on frustum culling. Back in my day, you didn't have a game engine unless you had an occlusion culling algorithm. Heck, if all you had was an occlusion culling algorithm then you had the central core foundation of a game engine upon which the rest of its bells and whistles could be built. I couldn't believe Godot was a 3D game engine with zero occlusion culling whatsoever, and calling itself a "game engine". Anyway, I digress...
I think it would've been useful for the curious newbies out there if it had been made clear that the "depth mipmap" and "HZB" are one-and-the-same. HZB = Hierarchical Z-Buffer, where a max() miptree is generated from the depth buffer by taking the largest value (i.e. the closest Z value, because depth is stored inverted, as 1/Z) out of each 2x2-pixel area of one mip level to be used as the depth value for the next higher mip level's pixels, rather than averaging them together like a regular mipmap. I don't think you need to explain all the ins-and-outs of graphics rendering, but it's my opinion that people who are still learning would get more value out of your content if you pointed out the non-obvious. Instead of saying "HZB" just say "hierarchical Z-buffer", for instance. I think that this more informative content could be made more accessible, in terms of its informational content, to the audience that existing tech tubers have. I, for one, am tired of just seeing framerates, but then again I've been a graphics coder for 25+ years :P
I look forward to more videos like this :D
Wow your TAA tweak looks incredible.
Hello fellow synthcel
No it does not? The image is incredibly aliased, you cannot call it anti-aliasing and have no actual anti-aliasing visible. There is so much jagged edges and shimmering, it is a huge step down from DLSS's clarity. Even if the MOTION clarity is better with his tweak, who cares if it isn't anti-aliasing at all? Am I living in bizarro world why are people saying this anti-aliasing is good IT IS NOT ANTI-ALIASING.
@@Rukushin even if is not antialiasing, for me and other ppl looks bad I just can't stand TAA recently in every game is just a blurry mess in my eyes, there are so many many effects and graphics now days in general that it impacts motion clarity, and you say that "even if it is better in motion, who cares" dude you're always in motion in game or anything you're not standing there doing nothing (excuse fishing maybe)
I think unless you’re using a CRT, motion clarity is far less important for most people than clarity in stills. I honestly don’t understand how you people claim to be able to see these losses in clarity on as low as 30 FPS on a sample and hold monitor, because at that FPS, past a certain (not very high) speed, all I see is sample and hold blur and, if we have an “almost no AA” solution for AA as this one, shimmer.
Are you sure you don’t just like the detail aliasing incurs? That’s a perfectly fine thing to like. Have you seen a downsampled photo with nearest neighbor vs averaging, for instance? Averaging is more correct, but nearest neighbor will look the sharpest, as it will have the kind of aliasing games usually have.
@@iurigrang TAA blur + sample and hold blur is a lot worse than just sample and hold blur
Sometimes it's hard to understand Epic engineers. Unity added APV(Adaptive Probe Volumes) for baked lighting and rightly so. Unreal is actively going to mobile, but does not offer the same technologies. All that remains are unfinished Volumetric Lightmaps, which are mainly for moving objects and cannot replace lightmaps for illuminating the entire scene. It's funny
but Unreal has Lumen and it works great and it already has spherical harmonics and information about the color and reflections of the scene, but for some reason Epic don’t want to add a static-baked mode for Lumen, especially since UE already has virtual texture technology. This would be a great replacement for Volumetric Lighttmaps for all the lighting in a scene.
You should watch the new UE5 demo thing they posted :D
@@aoqia Did you see something there similar to what I wrote about? Megaliths is mainly for video cards with DXR support. Also, if the game is corridor or you need several dozen lights, they are of no use, turning them on can even eat up more productivity than regular lights.
Because it will optimize lumen and make it cheaper to run. If its "too cheap" then people are less likely to need to upgrade.
Corporate CEOs and shareholders are interconnected in their network of wealth, they like to maintain that power and wealth, not to dilute it by making everything easier and better for consumers...
Elon Musk had his text message leak years ago, you could see how his ultra rich friends throwing money making ideas at a wall to see what stick, some of those ideas are essentially anti-competitive and unethical.
So do not assume CEOs and corporate business owners or the likes to be of the same mindset as consumers.
@@dra6o0nPeople with weaker recent cards will just throw upscaling and frame gen at the problem until the game becomes playable, not go out and buy a better GPU.
@@marcelosoares7148 Because the issue is that games that barely have higher fidelity than last gen doesn't need to be upgraded with newer hardware.
It's a lot of bad optimizations and computing thrown in to automate and speed up development.
19:41 Holy crap, I’ve wanted something like this the moment I turned on per-pixel lighting in Dolphin. It has always bothered me how we’ve basically solved the smoothness of a model’s surface but we have nothing when it comes to the paltry few edges, as usual this issue was solved in 2008 and nobody ever heard about it because of the chaos of information.
Tessellation is pretty well known, but good use cases are rare, it's difficult to configure well, and also difficult to avoid bottlenecks. Support is pretty patchy as well, likely due to lack of widespread use.
Performance Ozymandias is at it again. Long live
great observations and explanations , these are fantastic ! lots to think about . at 17:39 the idea of using blockers for early cheap culling reminds me of how "portals" were used in BSP engines , and other very controlled methods of occlusion optimization like precomputed "Potential Visibility Sets" . it does seem like there is potential to revisit these concepts from an automated approach like how Hierarchical LODs distance is calculated , a simulation of the gameplay and possible view angles could generate the PVS along with help from level artists placing "occluder" objects like the walls you mention .
the distaste for temporal AA is understandable , mainly because of how intertwined now it is with other systems and how every vfx / shader is tuned under those conditions , that to change away from the blurry softening temporal AA has to fix the look of the environment can often then make the vfx and shaders that were tuned UNDER TAA look incorrectly intense and deepfried as the artists were making adjustments to try and overcome the TAA blur .
The more I watch these videos, the more I respect people who work on graphics for AAA games. Each of the mechanisms you mention almost seem to have a world of complexity, and then there's devs that combine all (probably most) of them perfectly.
As someone looking at getting into game development these videos are INSANELY informative. Keep up the amazing work!
Please upload regularly brother. You are awesome.
No, he should not upload regularly. Let him cook.
Twice a month is ideal, once every 2 weeks. Once a month if he really needs the time
How many of the optimizations would work for this specific scene but would actually be worse for different scenes? Is it possible that these optimizations aren't present because in other parts of the game, the optimizations would actually lead to worse image quality/issues?Personally, I really don't like all of the shimmering and flickering present in your modified TAA scenes. I agree that the option to completely turn off TAA should always be an option. However, I'm not convinced that I would actually like the look of many games without TAA. Great video! I really enjoyed it.
I think this type of a video would be interesting for Doom Eternal given its insane optimisations.
Doom use ID tech in-house engine, which is why it passes the nature of blurry image of UE.
The RT feature of Doom Eternal is also smoke & mirror.... it literally only works on mirror reflection & metal based weapon, other aspect as lightning is not affected.
But other than that, it was well optimized, it was pre-2020 so I guess the proper devs were not laid-off yet at that moment.
Basically the devs of Doom are actual engineers who knows their stuff.
Some game studios and built in engines like Bethesda are mostly artists.
Epic, are more like... Consultants. They have engineers but technical know-how isn't needed to sell their product. Their engine is developed to be spread and garner profit, while Bethesda and ID tech doesn't sell license for the engine.
@@nickochioneantony9288 Id tech engines have always been the gold standard for optimization its how they were able to exist to make commander keen doom and quake and they keep that as a priority for their company epic does what they have since unreal in 1998 prioritize graphical fidelity above all else
@@dra6o0nWell, proprietary engines like id Tech are made for a select few games, and their entire rendering pipeline can be built just for the needs of that game. For engines like Unreal or Unity, they need to support ANYTHING; it can run anything and look good, but when it comes to absolute top-of-the-line work, it won’t be as good as an engine that can tailor its work just for specific games.
id Tech 7 is perfect for complex fps games like DOOM Eternal. But what if you tried to use it for GTA 6? Totally different format, different scope, different content scale, and different requirements.
This problem was famously encountered by teams trying to adapt the Frostbite engine for racing games at the request of EA.
I'm actually curious as to how these extra passes are extracted from the captured scene. The breakdown is amazing, by the way; same as the NFS one!
I am not sure what software they use but RenderDoc gets you basically the full breakdown of a frame. But I am assuming there are unreal specific tools that give more info.
@@redotix9952 I see! That's super cool. Thanks!
Each hardware vendor also has their own software that hooks into their hardware's performance metrics. AMD has Radeon GPU Profiler, NVIDIA has Nsight Graphics and Intel has the Graphics Performance Analyzers suite, which is what he used in the video.
TAA's no.1 opp
Kek
How to determine if you are qualified to judge if a game is optimized or not.
1 you must have eye
2 you must have game
3 you must have pc or any system that plays the game
4 you should be familiar with the settings menu and have a general understanding of what they do.
5 you can see fps (win+g, steam overlay, msi afterburner etc).
6 you can see if you reduce settings that degrade visual quality but made no difference to the framerate the game is running.
I wish I could apply your TAA settings for all my games 😅
DF, hire this guy. Oh wait... Respawn, HIRE THIS GUY! :P
DF is sellouts and ue fanboys
You look like Wesley Crusher
You WATCH yer mouth!
Proper implementations of TAA will typically employ a form of contrast adaptive sharpening (e.g. AMD has a quite good open source algorithm for this). Since TAA can soften the image somewhat doing this right can produce results that look closer to raw native but with much much better anti aliasing and all at a reasonable cost. UE4 games I’ve noticed don’t seem to do this out typically. DOOM Eternal is a title that actually does have great TAA and provides a sharpness slider as a separate example. TAA is an oddball because there really is a “correct” way to do it and an incorrect way and there is variance in implementation. Poor TAA solutions can be very rough but the good ones are far better and produce high quality anti aliasing with generally great coverage for a small fraction of the cost of older techniques.
CAS is so nice , doesnt fuck over text and ui elements with this weird artificial artifiacty look some other sharpening post processings have
This is the standard Nvidia "optimizations" new games get to force us to require DLSS and frame gen
i like your magic words, magic man
I'm still just waiting for games to look as good as the tanker mission in MGS2 did back in the day.
You got my sub by 15 mins, this is the content Digital Foundry is missing.
I look forward to more technical deep dives, get more and more deep on the subject!
Thank you! Share in popular discords and gaming subreddits!
You know you are up to see something when you see a single guy beating out the living crap out of entire company for their skill issue. Respect ++
Contains an ableist slur and misunderstands that the cause is most likely devs being rushed, not [ableist slur]. You wanna be harsh but fair? You could call the supervisors intellectually challenged for not letting their workers do their work, but that would be a stretch, because it's probably more accurately categorized as disregard for product (and thus life) quality and cannibalism in the shape of greed.
@@ShuckleII Maybe stop working for a company that sucks life out of you? But this is not really problem of the game, the guy described the problem pretty clearly. It is flaw in the engine heavily relying on antialiasing...
Incredibly informative! Thank you.
I'd love to see a tutorial style video for how you dissect theses games, the things you look for and how you interpret the results.
Thank you for your work. Your videos explain a lot. Can i suggest creating a course (or several) in unreal engine and/or unity optimization? Those two are among most popular engines not only in the big studio environment, but also for solo and indie developers. That is one of the least present topics on the tutorial sites and it shows by the state in which many games are released . More and more games are created by hobbyist and/or the hobby of creating games becomes a career path. Good habits from the start will be of benefit for the gaming scene.
At 14:33 it would be cool to see a vertical graph, with horizontal bars that appear at the same time as the text, their length proportionate to the listed milliseconds on each line.
TBH I personally find it weird when you say "we" all the time but it seems like mostly your personal effort and script.
Its "we" because the presenter is representing his team.
I don't understand everything but .. I like this content. It goes much deeper than any so called "tech channels" out there
Keep it up
Somehow 'Nanite Destroyer' Returned
Is this not the same guy that asked for $600,000 to develop an AI LOD generation tool? I'm not sure if I trust this guy to break down a frame.
What's wrong with an AI LOD generation tool?
We never asked for any funds for AI LOD generation.
We said Nvidia competitors should invest in this.
My biggest shock in this video was discovering I’m not yet subscribed
3:10 PREACH. "AI" is a scam
Man, I wanted a channel to do these kind of analysis for ages now, thank you bro for actually doing it, and explaining everything in detail.
Do you accept suggestions? I'd suggest Source Engine, for example, I always wanted to check their render pipeline, specially compared to the new source engine 2 (see cs2 compared to cs:go, for example, where the image quality 'doesn't seem' to be a lot better, but the hit in performance is big)
This game is so ugly and washed out that I couldn't even tell it had subsurface scattering. They made it so inefficient that they couldn't shade it properly, assuming they even had anyone on the team competent in lighting and shader aesthetics.
I'd love to see a breakdown of half life alyx and the technologies used to make it fit for VR
Frostbite has been said to be quite a pest in other regards, that the engine didn't mould well to the tasks in wider range of genres for a very long time, especially with games and genres with particularly complex gameplay systems, heavy on animation, dialogue, etc, and that either DICE wasn't perfectly equipped to assist the game developers and adapt the engine, or there had been some sort of communication breakdown between DICE and the studios leading to engine adaptation troubles and low quality of implementation of critical gameplay systems at some of the studios.
It is that much more likely that an engine shared between hundreds of studios will be better documented and less reliant on institutional hidden knowledge, will have its distant corners better ironed out, more adaptable, and more adapted to creator pipeline and less engine dev centric in design.
I think it would be good to automatically mark a mesh at cook time for its occlusion quality by sampling test render coverage. AABB projection being relatively small alone doesn't account for kitbash level design where you attach say several interchangeable panels side to side which are individually nothing but together do form a quality occluder.
If wires are distant enough and cannot be interacted with, and cannot be seen from all sides, there was honestly no reason for them to be fully modelled, they could just be a card, similar to hair cards. Today they could be much enhanced with normal maps, displacement maps, etc.
Why would it, it's not like the engine was nurtured and used widely among the industry so that maturation could flourish through wide adoptation. The fact it managed anything at all in the face of Unreal is already an achievement, especially since it still looks better than most unreal shipped products even today.
hey, love ur videos so far, it would be cool if you did an analysis on starfield / creation engine draw pipeline
I would be interested to see you do a vid on hydroneer's issues such as the light collisions or something related that noticeably hits the fps
Don't ask questions, just consume.
Digital Foundry is shivering in their boots
Your videos are extremely informative, you are doing a crazy good job
This probably one the best educational channels on youtube when it comes to graphics rendering. You guys deserve at least 10 times the amount of subscribers you currently have.
Outside of the TAA part, which is subjective, and in my opinion, the modified TAA looks much worse, as it reintroduces pixel shimmering without significantly improving image clarity. That said, the video is great, and the technical details were well explained. Great job!
please keep talking about this, not only is it interesting to hear its validating to see so many unspoken concerns and thoughts ive had explained in such detail.
Wow I cannot wait for the anti-aliasing video.. keep up the good work!
I always felt that Destiny 2 was super optimzed game for my low spec hardware, would be cool a video about great optimazations in games or talk about if Destiny 2 is really optimized or not
THANK YOU! Excellent work! Bravo, we need more in depth attention to detail like this!
i must be a bit fair and note that on DLSS 3.7+, Preset E should offer the best image quality results for modes other than UP or 'DLAA'. however i have no personal stake for or against advanced Upscalers like DLSS/XeSS, just making a footnote.
anyways, cheers for the Frameview.
E is not the best, it's a rumor going around.
We've seen some third party test along with our own testing in this game that shows significant ghosting over C on both DLSS and DLAA. But thank you for your support!
true, some games could still prefer another Preset, we always have to compare per-game to be sure what seems to produce the best result.
(and i do not have nor plan to have, this game)
I'll be fair myself and note that there is no such thing as an advanced upscaler, and if there are any, it's DLSS, FSR, XESS and their derivatives, not just DLSS and XESS.
Right now we have enough hardware power to run twice bigger and better games IF they are optimised. Or twice as fast for those who prefer fps.
Thanky you for this very informative video!
Great video, as usual! I have a video idea for you. Depending on the original game engine you are testing, you could recreate a similar scene in Unreal or Unity or flip it around to add a challenge. You can just implement all your ideas and then compare the results.
I'm not convinced by your modified TAA - it seems to cause major aliasing issues?
Yeah, unfortunately I don't really think UE TAA is.... salvageable.
There's a bit you can do, but sharp motion clarity without severe jittering & aliasing isn't one of them 😬
And believe me, the community has tried with all sorts of tweaks, but you need to choose either of those 2 sides.
Ironically the area at 4:05 was exactly the point where I uninstalled and got a refund. 1080p with a 4060 was not quite enough..
Excellent video.
do you have an example of what texture jittering looks like when mixed with TAA? I've never heard of this before.
Who is this dude.. and why is his content so good.. fastest sub in my life..
Every time bad optimization comes in conversation, I think about this game. Every time I think about this game, I'm reminded by Digital Foundry findings of jumping animations through camera traversal.
Dude, you did a great job, BUT... Quit speaking too official. Everyone hates corporate and official, be yourself speak freely as yourself! Good luck!
This dude has a Patrick Bateman vibe.
Uhh based
Looking forward to an anti aliasing specific video!
Amazing video as always. Your content perfectly fits in this gap between beginner content and scientific papers. I always learn a lot from rendering workflow analysis.
incredible in-depth video, congratz!
Good vid as always man.
thanks Cal
It really feels like I am updating my hardware to help lazy developers worry less about optimizations instead of getting better graphics. Now, instead of one game every 5 years they can churn out one every 2.
Those cables are so far away, rhey should just have been a texture in my opinion
Can you do Abiotic factor and see what indie devs using UE5 might run into?
Some user complain of bad performance.
Quake III Arena had special LOD system for curves 25 years ago - specially designed for things like arches and pipes. It's a shame that many modern games can't do something like this.
That begs the question, what are some examples of recent games that do it right that we can support?
Watch our NFS2015 video.
@@ThreatInteractive Fair, i meant besides that game.
Thank you for this!!!
Great vid ! Always fun listening what you have to say on game optimization even though I sometimes don't get it but I'm slowly getting there haha, can't wait for the channel to blow up :D
I appreciate Cal having the courage to speak up about his in-game performance.
Wouldn't decreasing resolution in the depth pre-pass cause false-positive z-culling at edges? I think only using large objects (relative to camera) for the pre-pass makes the most sense for optimization in the depth pre-pass.
This is mind blown
Good Morning and I hate all these bad Unreal Engine 4 & 5 games made recently.