Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass window, projecting beautiful patterns. Soon after a deal was signed to use the engine throughout the entire studio. In retrospect that was a good decision and I have a lot of respect for Unreal Engine and Epic in general.<p>Edit: found the video of the demo levels that shipped with very early UE3 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI</a><p>However UE3-generation games that finally shipped had none of the visual effects from the early demos. The multicolored shadows could only be rendered with multiple passes, at least one per light, which proved to be too expensive for larger dynamic game scenes. It took years of work from the demo to shipped games, and an army of unnamed engineers to wrestle the technology into a product.<p>UE4 had a great early demo of dynamic global illumination using something like voxel cone tracing if I remember correctly. To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped.<p>Epic is famous for their demos, and I love them for it... at least now that I no longer work professionally in that field. If anything it charts a long term technical direction for interactive entertainment.
In the past, I have always looked at Demos from Games and thought this is very good and getting <i>close</i> to movie quality. But that "close to" remained "close to" for quite some time. Even though It is improving every year but you can still tell it is gaming graphics. Even if some of the shots are not real time and pre rendered, they are still gaming like.<p>That Unreal 5 Demo was the first time ever I thought this is Hollywood Movie quality GFX ..... ( Apart from the Character ). IT IS STUNNING! And this is done Real time on PS5!<p>Edit: I am sorry for the tone and block capitals.... I am seriously geeking out.
Wow. It seems like real-time lighting and detail are getting to the point where they're so indistinguishable from reality...<p>...that now it's the actual quality of the models themselves, and even more of character motion, that are going to have to be the next steps in better graphics.<p>I'm stunned by the lighting and detail, absolutely stunned.<p>But at the same time, especially when you get into the architectural rooms, everything's far too "perfect". No grime, no crumbling edges, the motion of the ceiling opening is far too smooth, no vibration or catching, etc.<p>Likewise, the character's ponytail isn't bobbing like real hair at all. Sometimes her movements seem to be anti-gravity and bizarrely robotic. The leather over her shoulder seems to float rather than rest, and twists as if it were made of gelatin rather than stiff cowskin.<p>Not that these are criticisms at all -- I'm well aware of how hard they are. It's just fascinating to me to see, once rendering is basically "good enough", how the flaws in modeling come to the fore.<p>And so where are those advances going to come in? Are there going to be procedural-generation advances in creating realistic grime and imperfections and irregularities? Or deep-learning advances for realistic bodily movement? And why is it so damn hard to get clothing to actually fall on the body right, instead of always looking like a stretchy foam skinsuit?
I am always skeptical of tech demos like this, but if Epic has truly created a way to show full quality assets at runtime without manual LOD / optimization, then this is going to be a huge process improvement for game development. Same goes for this lighting. Baking lights is such a burden, if they can simply do all of this at runtime then making beautiful games just became that much easier.<p>They also bought Quixel, which gives all of these photo realistic assets to any Unreal Engine developer (even if you're some kid building a game for free). Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.
While this is completely amazing, a caveat: graphics are way less important than we think it is. I still remember every nook and cranny from Tomb Raider 3's jungle level, and when I think about it I imagine being deep inside a real jungle. It didn't matter that everything looked jagged; my imagination could go wild.<p>This is probably a flawed opinion, but sometimes I think the more realistic games become, the less work for our imagination. I don't mean to say that we should stop upgrading graphics. What I do wish to say is this: if you have to choose between optimizing gameplay or graphics, choose gameplay. If you can do both, do both. Having access to a ridiculously powerful easy to use engine does not automatically mean you can do both by just jumbling high detailed props, foliage, terrain together and be done with it. It's counterintuitive, but it takes even more skill and a keen eye to create beautiful and immersive environments in a nearly photo realistic engine than those used 20 years ago. Why? We live in a perfect photorealistic real world, so we immediately spot things that just look weird and unnatural in game. Whereas in old engines our imagination corrected for all those things.
What a magical demo! That made my day. I had largely written off console gaming as a never-ending sequence of brain-dead first person shooters. I'm glad to see real innovation in the graphics space - coupled with advances in AI and NLP, I think we could see a crop of incredibly realistic and meaningful games in the next few years.<p>IMHO, a key innovation that still needs to occur is a shift away from flunky and unintuitive hand-held controllers to a more natural and vibrant method of input. I really liked the scene in the movie Her, for example, where the protagonist is playing a video game and uses hand gestures to control his avatar, all without a physical controller. Wii and Kinect were the first few steps in this direction - I'm not sure what the next steps are.<p>I think voice input and NLP is an incredibly fruitful space to explore - imagine what video games would be like if you could actually talk to the characters, instead of merely punching and shooting them.
buried lede, perhaps: retroactive to Jan. 1, "Unreal Engine royalties waived on first $1 million in game revenue"<p>> Unreal Engine End User License Agreement for Publishing: This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD.
It's great to see that graphics continue to improve, but I think the pipelining of reproducing physical space characteristics is most interesting to me. One of the things they mention in the video is using tools to measure how real spaces echo and then reproducing those echo characteristics in virtual spaces. Techniques like that have enormous potential for allowing us to use virtual space and actual space collaboratively. We'll always have games, but I'm excited to see how, in the next twenty or thirty years, technology that started in games starts to allow us to interact and socialize in new ways.
The real-time GI is amazing. Ray tracing is going to be a game changer, not only in terms of visual quality, but also because it's one of those rare times in computer graphics where the more advanced solution is actually making it easier on graphics programmers by replacing a bag of dirty tricks with a unified, physically based solution.<p>One interesting note: they say the GI is "instant" but you can actually see that they are using temporal stabilization to achieve this effect, and there's a slight lag between when the light changes and when the GI finds its resting point. I suspect removing this lag will be one of the things which makes graphics feel "next gen" when GPUs can handle enough rays per pixel to handle GI in one or two frames instead of a few dozen.
Does anyone have any theories as to how Nanite actually works? I've never heard of virtualized micropolygon geometry before and it sounds a bit buzzwordy. Do we think they are just loading the full model into GPU memory, or are they baking down various LODs and normal maps at compile time through some automatic process? Either way, it's a huge workflow improvement. It's just unclear what's actually happening...
Extremely impressive.<p>That said, I am struck by how the inaccuracies in physics modeling start sticking out like a sore thumb the closer the visuals get to realism. After gawking at the ground and falling rocks in the first scene, I kept getting stuck on the weird movement of her ponytail. Also the landing of the first jump across the chasm.<p>Picking nits for sure; incredible work here.
So I'm going to join the naysayers here and say while the graphics look absolutely phenomenal the game itself looks the the same game I've been playing for 20-25 years.<p>A 3rd person character who walks through caves, canyons, ruins, slides through tight places where the camera moves in close, can only climb on areas painted with the "you can climb here color" and then pushes or pulls a few knobs for "puzzles"<p>It could be the original Tomb Raider (1996) or God of War (2005) or any Uncharted or all the other similar games in between. I'm sure others can name the same game that's been skinned over and over and over.<p>I love pretty graphics but I'd really like to see the tech used to give me a new game, not just an old game with prettier images.
I've been wondering for a while Unreal doesn't just make the Unreal Browser.<p>You download and install it.<p>Then you give it a URL, and it streams down a map, and downloads DLLs containing behavior custom to that map. While you're in a map, you can walk through a portal to another map. Or you can just keep moving in a direction, which streams more and more map.<p>If you're in a multi-player environment, you connect to a server for that environment. If you're in a solo area, you're just running locally.<p>Isn't this what the Oasis (from "Ready Player One") is supposed to be like? What stops them from doing this?
Holy forking shirtballs, that looks amazing.<p>There's still some weirdness - I found the water movement (around 4:10) a bit odd, and the lightball in the cave seemed to be directional even though it was a ball. But my god, that's beautiful.<p>The end scene with the flying reminded me of the (fully rendered) Avatar ride at Disney World. I stood in line for two hours for that.
The lede seems somewhat buried here. The tech they spend most of their time talking about has more to do with development iteration than graphics. Not having to optimize LODs or light maps mean more time spent generating models and iterating on a scene. As with other kinds of software development, game dev quality is all about how quickly you can iterate. As for the rest, this demo says more about the PlayStation 5 than Unreal.<p>As a consumer, I'm expecting to see a graphics jump in the next generation of games (as you would expect) and some fun new lighting details (yo, RTX!), but not much beyond that. However, this will likely lower the cost of developing cinematic games like Uncharted or RDR.
Graphics tech has been good enough for a while. I wish developers would start giving more love to improving other areas like physics, AI, and speech synthesis, that can make a game actually <i>feel</i> and play more realistic than just eye candy would.<p>But I guess those other technologies depend more on the CPU/RAM etc. which consoles lack in, so they don't want to bother with that.<p>Here's an example of how games have actually been going backwards in almost all other areas except graphics:<p>Far Cry 2 vs. Far Cry 5: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeEvQ68jY8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeEvQ68jY8</a>
It mostly looks amazing but also very uncanny valley.<p>The development process improvements sound most promising.<p>I was amazed until the the character started climbing the rocks.<p>Seems like no one at Epic has ever climbed a rock in their life.. it sent the whole demo back to PS1 land. It doesn't even look like a super hero rock climbing, just looks totally wrong. Almost no part of the body ever looks angled correctly to reflect gravity being a thing, like the physics engine switches off.<p>That and her ankles are fused and never plantar flex so the walking looks bizarre. Again, it's all amazing but now it becomes uncanny valley cause you notice the weird remaining stuff.
This is stunning, but scary. Even if my descendants survive plagues, nuclear war, climate change and malevolent AI's, they might not have a chance against the allure of these simulated worlds.
Everyone should just keep in mind the first look at Unreal Engine 4 all those years ago before getting too too excited. Big step forward, absolutely, but it won't be as seen here.
I guess this might sound unreal, but I literally have not looked at AAA game graphics in over 10 years, so this looks absolutely stunning.<p>Back in 2009 my 360 died. I had been an avid console gamer before that, but I never replaced the Xbox and in 2010 went off to college, where I mainly played N64 with friends as well as games on my phone.<p>After I graduated I was busy with work and life and never got back into the gaming cutting edge. Sure I played StarCraft once in a while for old times' sake as well as different old Total War games cause they're awesome, but never the sort of major AAA release I used to play all the time as a kid.<p>I also never really looked at modern graphics since I didn't have friends who played modern games and never watched videos showcasing what games looked like.<p>So coming from 2009, this is absurdly good.
Wow, we'll soon be down to only one game engine.<p>Crytek has financial worries. Plus it's the most difficult to use, because it's almost all C++.<p>Unity is very accessible thanks to C# scripting, but has bug issues (and no source code).<p>Unreal Engine looks amazing, is cheap or free for indie studios, and has source code included.<p>If they can make UE slightly easier to develop for, they'll dominate the market.
Very late to the discussion but I might be missing something; a majority of you are bashing this by saying "it's just a demo"/"games never end up looking like that":<p>a) If this demo is runnable at real time fps on ps5 hardware ($400-500 WITH markup)...that's a technologically phenomenal feat in itself.<p>b) If the engine IS capable of running something like this...they are not lying. The responsibility for "good looking games" then falls on to game studios to deliver instead of halfassing something just to hit a deadline.<p>Where am I wrong?
So I don't care much for graphics quality, I started moving towards the terminal and CLI for most everything in my life about ten years ago, ultimately I feel that graphics falls under unnecessary fluff and eyecandy that distracts from "real" data, gameplay, etc.<p>But that flight scene at the end of the demo, how realistic it was, how it was seamless, how detailed it produced a physical reaction in me, a feeling of like "WOW" throughout my entire body as I watched it. That was amazing.
For all the advancements the demo is still essentially monochromatic.<p>As I recall this is done to avoid the difficulties of rendering how two adjacent differently colored objects bleed their colors onto each other. No color - no bleeding.<p>I'd prefer color over pixel accuracy.
I haven't looked into UE in quite some time as I use Unity for most of my stuff (not a game developer, just building quick prototypes for AI, simulations, dabbling in AR etc.) but the demo looks pretty stunning.<p>I tend to do a technology pass once a year or so to see if I might enjoy switching engines. From my last check my takeaway was that UE always seems more technically advanced but Unity is easier to work with/rapidly prototype. UE now seems to have a 1 million revenue barrier (I think for Unity it's 100k) which seems attractive for game devs. As a programmer the inclusion of ProBuilder/Grids in Unity is a godsent as I can quickly muddle together greyboxings and be done with graphics (combined with the recent Blender overhaul I almost feel like I'm semi-useful on the graphics/asset front now).<p>So quick question to the people who have used both (I'd also be interested in Godot feedback)...is that basic assessment still correct? Unity stronger for quicker prototyping, Unreal stronger high end? If I wasn't one person but a small team with an artist I'd probably pick UE as the artists will likely use their own tools and not build stuff in-engine.
Looks impressive, especially the reduced friction for artists. The demo hints at several shortcomings of the engine, though, especially the nanite componet. Stepping through the feature highlight (whatever the youtube compression lets through), during dense scenes geometry often gets washed out, looking less detailed then an authored model would probably look. Hard edges often appear fuzzy, and the fuzziness is not temporally stable.
The only things I can possibly criticize is the global illumination lagging behind environment changes (presumably because it's iterative) and the water simulation not being movie-quality.<p>Otherwise it's simply astonishing.
I just saw the tech demo on the ps5, really really impressive, the dynamic light, the zbrush import, the huge amount of polygons... I'm saying this with some experience as a 3d artist (zbrush) and a programmer.
All this for sure looks amazing. But I do not think it will bring anything new to gameplay. There is no big gameplay changes in past 15 years. All shooters, all MMORPG, all strategy games and etc are based on the ideas of 2003-2005 years. Graphics are improving but most games have similar gameplay. I think the biggest next impact to gameplay and game industry will be engine that will be able to have huge zoom ability + ability to handle more than 30 000 players on the same map (of course that also depend on server software and not only game engine). Like traveling from space on ship to planet and after landing and play as a regular 1st person game but all of this with lots of players on the same world (more than 30 000). I think that is next big thing that will change game industry.
Somewhat tangential - I was hoping I could download and run a demo to see how things look on my hardware. What are your favorite downloadable graphics demos?
What's going on behind the scenes to explain the jump in graphics quality? Hardware? Algorithmic?<p>Does this involve some breakthrough somewhere or is this incremental?
> Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and in full release late in 2021, supporting next-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.<p>I wonder if they consider the Switch a current-generation console.
The tech here is impressive but so is the content they have created or it. Even more so. It's kind of insane that game art isn't usually given the credit it deserves. Everyone seems to think that the engine just produces these images somehow. Look, the artists had to actually design all this architecture and statues etc. It's not an easier job than actually being an architect... Producing content at such level of detail is very expensive and time-consuming and it just doesn't come automatically with the engine.
As a newcomer to Unreal, I have a question. Is C++ really that verbose and difficult to use, or does it get better as you gain more experience?<p>I'm relatively new to gamedev, I've spent several months learning Godot, and now I'm trying out Unreal.
Unreal has many exciting things, but from what I can see so far, C++ looks like nightmare.
It seems like everything I'm trying to do takes me 5x lines of code and 10x the time compared to doing this in Godot.
Also the code looks far less readable and way more confusing.
Granted I'm new to Unreal and C++, but I didn't have the same problems with other programming languages I've been using.<p>So my question is - does this get better/faster/easier when you get used to it and gain more experience? Or is this something you struggle with every day?<p>I know that Unreal has Blueprints, but they also seem pretty slow and limiting. I've been watching a tutorial where a guy has spend 40 minutes explaining how to do a thing in Blueprints which would take me like 3 minutes and 15 lines of code to do in Godot.<p>I really want to use all the sexy exciting features unreal has, but C++/Blueprints are really holding me back.
Whatever the tech actually delivers, as braggadocios as the claims are (they would render hundreds of utilities and workflows obsolete), I am astounded by their licensing update.<p>I'd long migrated to Unreal for technical and workflow reasons as well as having an open engine, but this just seals the deal. A lot of indie studios could get their big break self-publishing this way.
This looks nice, but I'm not sure what the practical gameplay consequences for the new tech are. I sure as shit am not going to ship a terabyte of original-quality assets in my game.<p>It would help me produce cinematics more easily though, I suppose.<p>Real-time global illumination looks dope. No more overnight lighting builds :)
I've always been excited to see these demos over the years, from childhood until now. Although they may not be what is actually implemented in a real game, Unreal, id, Nvidia, etc. have always managed to spark that feeling of giddy euphoria, a glimpse into the future, with these demos.
No one seems to be talking about the announcement at the end of the page:<p>> Friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, leaderboards, and accounts: we built these services for Fortnite, we launched them across seven major platforms - PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Now we’re opening up Epic Online Services to all developers FOR FREE in a simple multiplatform SDK!<p>> Mix and match these services together with your own account services, platform accounts, or Epic Games accounts, which reach the world’s largest cross-platform social graph with over 350 million players and their 2.2 billion friend connections across half a billion devices.<p>Free SDK for online game services? That's an insane boon to any small studio / solo development of a multiplayer game.
Is it just me or does water still look terrible?<p>UE5 has better water than this, but not by much in my opinion (Halo 3, a 10 year old game): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4eFg-lnpDM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4eFg-lnpDM</a>
I think it is interesting that the first thing they talk about is LOD. UE4 is famous for its bad LOD implementation. Look at FFVII Remake [0]. It's an insanely high budget game made in UE4 with top-of-the-line assets, yet some textures never load in to their high resolution versions. UE4 has earned this stain. Since they're talking LOD first and foremost, maybe Epic actually fixed their UE LOD issues this time around.<p>0. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyGl5C3Uwak&t=10m40s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyGl5C3Uwak&t=10m40s</a>
The environment demo is very impressive - wonder why they didn't put a bit more effort in to the character, it would have been insanely impressive if the character detail was next-gen.
For someone with zero insight into these kinds of things. What happened with Id software delivering game engines? Do they have competing software or are they not doing that sort of thing?
Even with all the amazing lighting and polygon counts, they still have screenshake from a 2001 game, only now even more uncanny. "Is this a video game or real li.... never mind"
OK there are N=10^6 triangles and that shows the raw GPU power. True indirect lighting would be N^2: this is both impossible and not worth the cost in terms of realism. So maybe they do it on a low LOD geometry or even a dirtier trick. A low LOD is probably also used for collision detection. Keep in mind that these people's job is to trick you, to the letter. Maybe there is not much more than a larger GPU and an simplified creation process in this demo.
I wonder if the background in the flight scene is pre-rendered. If not, then PlayStation 5 (which the demo is running on) is going to be a beast of a console.
Multiple comments here agree that the water is not the engine’s strong suit, but the thing that bothers me the most these days is not the water, but the wetness (or lack thereof).
Why can’t nobody do wetness well? In most games you’ll play, you can dive deep into the water and when you go out your model will stay completely dry. If Naughty Dog managed to do it well on a PS3, so can the game engine as a feature on the PS5.
Any chance we can get a scalable network backend to go along with the render enhancements? Fan-out workers on actors and a KCP implementation would great!
Game Devs: Is Unreal Engine the premiere game engine at this point? UE has been a popular engine for a long time and with the recent <i>massive</i> success of Epic Games, I have a hard time imagining Unity or even in-house engines are able to match the engineering that goes into this. That said, I am not familiar with this at all — which is why I’m asking.
> you can download and use Unreal Engine to build games for free as you always have<p>That's a very stretched-out definition of always. Unreal used to be one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, game engines you could license. It's been only few years they adopted this free model.
I have to wonder how much of this requires ray tracing hardware. I've noticed for many, many years that the quality of models and textures has been 'good enough', but lighting, for the most part, still sucked. Ray tracing seems to solve a lot of lighting problems.
Interesting how these demos used to be about how awesome everything looks. That still matters, of course, but previous gen engines already achieved cinematic photorealism. Now it’s all about ease of use and workflow. No more need to worry about poly counts, normal maps etc.
Can someone help me articulate my issue with this? Looking at a lot objects, they seem unnaturally detailed. Like the bugs, or the statue at around 6 minutes. Something about it makes me really uncomfortable feeling physically.<p>Is this like a weird infinite depth of field kind of thing?
Just for fun, somewhat unrelated, here's what is possible on an 8 year old engine (if you want to melt your GPU/CPU a bit)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8kEIOBoRGk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8kEIOBoRGk</a>
Here it is on youtube, so that you can play it without it stalling: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw</a>
I really liked the fluid simulations. It's always been something hard to get right in games. Albeit, it did look pretty janky in the demo but I hope we can get some quality fluid simulations in games soon.
Was anyone else unimpressed by the water simulation (when she walks in it)?<p>Did it just look fake just because it was too clean / blue, or did the motion and its reaction look like something from Morrowind 18 years ago?
Demos are always beautiful but how about fixing some of the stuff that makes playing UE games unpleasant? The ridiculous load times, the random stutters and pop-ins, crazy high memory usage...
For people not working in video games in might seems super impresive but I can assure you that major publisher have similar rendering visual in there in-house engine. Super cool none the less!
<a href="https://youtu.be/00gAbgBu8R4" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/00gAbgBu8R4</a> - did Epic manage to pull off what Euclideon Holographics could not?
I hope they name the authors of the theses that they used to achieve this. It's inconceivable to me that some dude sat down and decided how everything should be coded.
I remember seeing Mario 64 and thinking "this is it, graphics can't get any better than this"<p>My tiny, 12 year old, N64-powered brain would explode watching this video
I guess we'll have to see if Unity will havea response on that.
Have to say thou, having billions of triangles without sacrificing FPS is exciting.
It's impressive, but personally the Far Cry 5 engine is more so. Why? Because it focuses on the Achilles heels of game engines: humans and forests.
people that make games n game engines are fucking incredible. with tools like these the future is bright for film-makers on a limited budget. which is beneficial for a diversified high quality movie industry. imagine something like game of thrones, instead of actual humans. just have it all entirely done via unreal 5. you'll still need good writers though.
Epic Online Services; this is the big take away for UE5, graphics will always improve, but user experience is key to long term success.<p>We can now all sit back and watch Epic eat Valve’s and Microsoft’s Lunch right in front of them, like some kind of sordid picnic.<p>I look forward to seeing the pricing details and revenue options based on player base and time.
It's a tech demo so I cannot expect more but it feels bland to me. More like a live interactive movie. I see no potential for gaming.. the visual and geometric complexity dwarfs the usual gameplay IMO.
That looks so good! I hope they add few VR related features.
I tried running the default VR scene with Unreal 4 and couldn't get it to work.<p>Unreal looks better than Unity but I found it difficult to get started.